Back to the OP there was an interesting article in the Sunday times this week and given that Derek Richardson is now chairman of the board of WASPS as pre the recent announcement I don't think he is likely to lose interest anytime soon some have floated as a possibility.
Sunday Time extract..
So happy they were sent to Coventry
Fans fumed when Wasps’ new owner moved north, but huge crowds and transformed finances soon won them over.
After Derek Richardson announced he would be moving Wasps rugby club from its home in High Wycombe, 30 miles west of London, all the way to Coventry, he had an important phone call to make.
Some of the club’s long-standing supporters had been protesting about the rumoured move. “One of them, a guy called Steve, was very angry. Once the news had gone out properly, I rang him and spent 45 minutes on the phone with him,” said Richardson.
By the end of the call, Steve was placated — as well as pleasantly surprised that the owner had bothered to get on the phone personally. “He understood where we were coming from,” said the Wasps chairman.
Upping sticks and shifting the club 75 miles up the M40 had been a controversial decision but one vital to the club’s survival, said Richardson, an Irish insurance tycoon worth £44m as calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List.
When he bought Wasps two years ago, the club was on the verge of going bust. Its former stars include Lawrence Dallaglio, Josh Lewsey and Kenny Logan, and the Heineken Cup (Europe’s top club competition) was won as recently as 2007, but it was losing £3m a year and faced being wound up.
Richardson wanted to move so the club could become master of its own destiny. He denied the intention had always been to switch to Coventry’s Ricoh Arena: “It did not come into the equation until very late in the process.” Richardson had been courted by numerous local authorities from inside and outside the M25 before striking a deal to move to the West Midlands.
It is rather reminiscent of moves more commonly seen in America, where sports franchises move with surprising regularity. In American football, teams might move because city councils offer incentives to lure them, or owners believe a change of location will prove more lucrative. The same phenomenon can be seen in basketball.
Los Angeles once boasted two National Football League outfits, called the Rams and the Raiders. The former now play in St Louis, Missouri, while the latter have at least remained in California, returning to their original home up the coast in Oakland.
On this side of the Atlantic, such moves are highly unusual. Perhaps the most famous recent example is Wimbledon football club. In 2003, it was transplanted from southwest London to Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. A year after the relocation, which required the blessing of football’s governing body, the club was renamed MK Dons. The change provoked such hostility among the Wimbledon faithful that they backed the formation of a new team, AFC Wimbledon, who have worked their way up the football pyramid and now play in League Two, the fourth tier.
American-owned Manchester United, the butt of jokes about the number of supporters they have in the home counties, opened a commercial office in central London in a bid to boost income from sponsorship deals. Not even the much- criticised Glazer family, who bought the Old Trafford club in 2005, would be likely to try to relocate it.
Richardson argues that comparing Wasps with what happens in America is unfair. “It’s not quite the same,” he said. “In America, you are talking about [teams moving] hundreds of miles. We are 60 or 70 miles away. It’s so small over here. It’s important to understand that.”
He also said moving Wasps has prompted nothing like the kind of outrage and angst the Milton Keynes switch caused for football fans. “There was an initial backlash. I believe I am right that 95% of people [behind] the backlash have done a full 360 degrees by virtue of us being able to explain why we were moving,” he said. The Wimbledon-Milton Keynes affair “was a totally different scenario”.
Attendance at Wasps’ new home appears to back his argument. When Wasps were sharing Adams Park with Wycombe Wanderers football club, the average crowd numbered 5,500. Since moving up the motorway, the side are drawing average attendances of triple that: about 17,700. Wasps’ biggest gate since moving last autumn was 28,254 for the match against London Irish, a Premiership record for a home ground fixture. The club has also hung on to about two-thirds of its season ticket holders.
Richardson argues that fans have a better deal under the new set-up because the transport links make it easier to get into and out of the new home than it was at Wycombe.
“At Adams Park, it was a monster job getting in and out of the ground. We are positive the vast majority of our supporters get to the Ricoh door-to-door quicker than they did to Adams Park. You are straight out of the ground and on to the motorway,” said Richardson.
He adds that transport links will be further boosted by the creation of a new railway station at the stadium that will provide a shuttle service to Coventry city centre.
Sports marketing experts sympathise with Richardson, claiming he had little choice but to move the club. “This was not about someone buying a franchise and moving it. This was about survival,” said Tim Crow, chief executive of Synergy, the sports sponsorship agency. “It was a desperate situation that required desperate measures.”
Wasps hold a 250-year lease on the stadium, having acquired Arena Coventry, the stadium management business, in a £20m deal from the local council and the Alan Edward Higgs charity, which had each owned half. The council continues to own the freehold of the stadium.
Although Richardson stands behind the club right now, his aim is for Wasps to become financially self-sufficient. “If we are not self-sustainable this year, we definitely will be next year,” he said, adding that “Wasps won’t be dependent on my money for very much longer”.
The rugby club, along with the stadium business (which includes a hotel, casino and conference centre), generates total revenues of about £20m. Richardson, who still has a foothold in the insurance industry through the online broker Hello.ie, talks regularly of the need to generate a year-round income rather than just on match days in the season. While Wasps were playing at Adams Park, they collected about £15 of every £100 that came through the gate. Now they collect the lot.
“We’ve gone from having the second-smallest turnover in the Premiership to the second-largest in Europe [behind Toulouse],” said Richardson. He expects to overtake the French club before long.
Income from match-day corporate hospitality has been significantly boosted, given the much larger facilities and greater number of boxes at the Ricoh. An added bonus has been the return to the ground last year of Coventry City football club, which had quit the stadium after getting into financial trouble. That was not in the original business plan, said Richardson.
Wasps, along with their fellow Premiership sides, may also benefit if a long-mooted plan to increase the number of clubs in the top flight, and to “ring-fence” them so there is no longer the risk of relegation, is approved. Richardson said “the jury is out” on the advantages of the latter scheme.
The club will not benefit directly from the rugby World Cup later this year as the Ricoh is not a tournament venue. Despite that, Richardson said the event will raise the profile of the game and draw in new fans. “It will be very positive for us,” he said.
And if that helps to keep fans like Steve happy in Wasps’ new home, so much the better.
