Wasps group chief executive Stephen Vaughan provides NEALE HARVEY with an insight into how his club have battled through the pandemic and are aiming for a brighter future.
You became CEO of Wasps in August 2019, is it fair to say this has been the most bizarre 14 months of your working life?
Yes! In a strategic role like mine you normally afford yourself some time to work out what can be improved in all areas of the club, but having made a few changes to the rugby side and started to see the benefit of that just as Covid kicked in, since then it’s been crazy. We were enjoying a record year in terms of conferencing, events and exhibitions at the Ricoh and by March we’d just won three Premiership games on the spin under Lee Blackett, so it felt like things were going in the right direction… then bang!
On the rugby side people say, ‘Wow, you’ve gone from relegation candidates to pushing Exeter close in the Premiership final‘, which is testament to the playing department, but behind the scenes it’s been very turbulent. Sadly, it’s been a year of cutbacks, salary cuts and redundancies, of having to review how we look at things and work to ensure we are in a strong place to come out of the other end of this lean, mean and ready for whatever the world throws at us.
When people talk about clubs under existential threat, the name Wasps is often mentioned. Bearing in mind you lost over £6m in 2019/20, what’s the truth?
It’s pretty much the same situation for every club and if you take any organisation and say you’re going to have zero income for three months, six months or now potentially a year, most businesses in the real world would probably not be around anymore. We’re seeing huge organisations going bump in retail, travel and leisure so we’ve had to act decisively to ensure that ourselves and other clubs can still be around to put a product on. We’ve had to look at our cost base but within that we’ve been able to keep the very high cost of our playing department going. Normally, part of that is offset by money coming in – TV money, central rights, season tickets, matchday revenue etc – but a lot of that has dried up and when you throw in the loss of conference and exhibition revenue, you have a genuine problem.
We’ve had well documented salary cuts across playing groups, non-playing groups, boards of directors and everyone else, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the revenues people have lost.
Sounds pretty grim, so what’s your plan for Wasps moving forward?
Wasps are very fortunate because we’re in a position where we are an extremely important asset to the West Midlands. We have the Commonwealth Games at the Ricoh in 2022; we have Coventry as City of Culture next year with lots of events here; we’ve got the Rugby League World Cup here next year; and we’ve been subjected to fantastic grants and funding from Government to upgrade our facilities.
Although it’s been a difficult year, on the flip-side we’re about to start work on a 150-bedroom apart-hotel, we’re upgrading all our conference and exhibition facilities and we’re building a new sports bar and restaurant – all with an eye on the future.
Being a multi-purpose venue, we’ve just signed a long-term deal with Matchroom Sports for world darts, snooker and pool at the Ricoh and we’ve just done a five-year deal for the lease of office space, so we’re making the most of our assets while, on the other side of it, we’re working with Premiership Rugby and the DCMS as part of a Government taskforce, which I’m on, on what package they can provide to ensure we can all survive and thrive, but also on how we can get people back inside our stadiums safely. We’re using this time to get ourselves fit for purpose so when we are back on line, we will be digitally enhanced to deal with crowds and ensure people feel safe coming, which is what we all want. I was at Twickenham for the final surrounded by 82,000 empty seats and it just felt wrong. With the lessons we’ve learned, we’ll be in a much better place to handle people now when we get the go-ahead.
How are the talks going with DCMS over that funding package?
We’ve provided the Government with reams of information about each club, our individual situations and what assistance we feel we need so we’re in a waiting game at the moment. We’re getting positive feedback and while nothing’s confirmed yet, I would certainly hope an answer is imminent. DCMS want to support us but at the moment we have no understanding of what that looks like.
The RFU are in strife as well, are you concerned that their money to Premiership clubs might dry up?
Whether you run a green-grocers or a multi-million-pound retail operation things are tight. The RFU‘s cash cow is the international game and Twickenham sell-outs, but it just doesn’t exist at the moment so they’re cutting their cloth accordingly. But they obviously understand the value of the relationship with Premiership Rugby and how they need that to work, so as long as the pandemic situation we’re in at the moment has a natural end, I would feel we can continue to work together as we do now.
On to the playing side, how pleased were you with the achievement of Lee Blackett in steering Wasps to a Premiership final?
Lee has done very well but he’ll be the first to admit it’s been a real team effort to get to where we did. Lee’s been excellent, he’s a no-nonsense Northerner and people respond to that and he’s really galvanised us there, but he’ll also say that since lockdown in March we’ve had a very different feel about us. We brought in Richard Blaze who’s done a fantastic job with the forwards unit. We brought in Pete Atkinson from the Italian Rugby Union as our head of performance and he’s had a real big influence on what’s gone on in that part of the organisation, where there’s been a lot more emphasis on nutrition and we brought in a sports psychologist. Martin Gleeson was our skills coach but stepped up to run our attack, so while to the lay person it looks like only the head coach changed after Lee took over from Dai Young, behind the scenes our structural change was quite significant.
With no director of rugby now as such, is there a danger Lee might be spread too thinly when it comes to recruitment and retention, academy etc?
No. Lee’s very comfortable coaching, he doesn’t want to be involved in some of the less glamorous stuff and the beauty of our structure now is that he doesn’t have to concern himself too much with those issues. He clearly has an opinion over who he wants us to retain and recruit and we’ll talk all those things through, but myself and Kevin Harman, our head of recruitment and academy, will cover off all the nitty-gritty stuff and have the difficult conversations with players and agents around contracts and salaries. We’ll do our level best to ensure that what Lee wants happens and then he can just get on and coach and manage that department.
Confident that new system will keep on working?
When we made the changes, we were very cogniscent of the fact that not having an experienced DoR in place meant we needed to change the way we operated – and off the back of that, everything’s clicked. I think we’ve got the best medical people in the country, the performance guys are top notch and our coaches are all happy. There are no egos involved at all and the link between myself and the coaching group is a lot clearer than it was previously. Another thing is that the leadership group among the players has really stepped up and we’re fortunate to have people like Joe Launchbury, Brad Shields, Jimmy Gopperth, Dan Robson, Thomas Young and a number of younger guys like Jacob Umaga and Jack Willis who’ve really taken responsibility as well. We’ve also got planning permission for a new training ground we hope will be ready for 2021/22 so that side of things is very positive.
After reaching the final Wasps will now have a target on their backs, so what are your plans recruitment-wise if finances allow?
We’re restarting a new season almost immediately so everyone’s already done their recruitment. With the salary cap reducing in 2021/22 everyone’s committed to what they’ll be spending so you won’t see much movement in the market and people will be working with that they’ve got. But we know that all the other teams will want to have better seasons so we can’t sit on our laurels, we’re going to do a lot of work on what we can refresh and renew and continue to add layers to what we do. That doesn’t mean just buying superstars and if you look at what Exeter have done in building season upon season, they have brought in the odd big name but by and large they’ve based it on homegrown players and improving the talent they’ve got.
There’s been talk for some time of an expanded 13 or 14-team Premiership and ring-fencing, what’s your view on that?
What we’ve got to remember before people get too upset and angry about positions is that this is now a new world we’re working in and a lot of this is going to be coloured by what’s happening with the RFU and the Championship and making sure that the Premiership product remains worthy of being the top league in the world – competitive, with some of the best players in the world in it.
I’ll be the first to say that the romance of a relegation battle is fantastic – you’re talking to an Aston Villa supporter here, so I know all about that! – and all things being equal, if we could maintain two healthy leagues with a bunch of clubs in the Championship who could genuinely add value to the Premiership every year if they came up, you’d all say keep things as they are. Unfortunately, we don’t see that, so therefore what do you do? With the position the Championship is in at the moment and their inability to play because of the cost of testing and lack of crowds, people are saying that if you’ve got 13 shareholder clubs that can tick all the boxes, why wouldn’t you have that situation?
Given the perilous financial situation, why would you not do that and then at least give people the confidence of having a moratorium on promotion and relegation or an expanded league which has an open-minded view on the future where if Ealing, Coventry, Moseley or anyone else can hit minimum criteria on being a stable club able to attract crowds and has an academy situation showing them worthy of being in the top-flight, why couldn’t we have an expanded league? In these turbulent times, I would be supportive of those discussions.
See any future in talk of an Anglo-Welsh League or European Super League?
Not in the short-term. There are way too many hurdles to get over, whether that’s TV deals, agreements with Unions or sponsorship deals. You never say never but with the Heineken Champions Cup and a thriving Premiership, I don’t understand why you’d want to do anything else anyway.
How do you think World Rugby talks over changing the season structure will go?
I think there’ll be a hiatus on any major changes because Covid has shifted the importance of so many things. I was personally very open to a conversation about summer rugby because I’d love to see more spectators in stadiums in the sunshine and faster flowing rugby, and I know a lot of our experienced players were saying they really enjoyed playing on firmer tracks in August. I think that would improve the product but the issue is it doesn’t suit other people’s calendars and you’ve got things like the British & Irish Lions and TV companies to think about, so with everything else going on it’s not near the top of our agenda.
Back to Wasps, how big a hit has your sponsorship portfolio taken?
Actually, that’s not been affected at all. Vodafone are our main partner and because they work in technology, 5G especially, they’ve been brilliant in allowing us to use that technology in player performance and reaching out to our supporters. A lot of people have been isolated during the Covid period and that’s been an invaluable asset there. We haven’t had any of our secondary sponsors drop out either, which has been fantastic, and we’ve actually got three or four other potential sponsors we’re talking to at the moment. All I’m hoping is that over the next few weeks we can secure assistance from the DCMS and then get a few thousand people back into the Ricoh, because it does not feel right having a 33,000-capacity stadium sitting empty.
Do you expect all Premiership clubs to survive and the new season to start on schedule?
Yes, I do, because we speak to all the other clubs through the owners and chief executive groups and although there’s not a club among us that isn’t taking pain, everybody is working hard to cut their cloth and fight through this. The clubs have made it this far and we’re all still battling and managing to pay people so, hopefully, once the support package comes along, it should allow clubs to get themselves back in order. I believe the new season will start on November 20 and the best practices we’ve refined from last season around Covid will stand us in good stead.
