A bullish Steve Diamond is confident that Newcastle Falcons will exist next season, despite freezing squad recruitment until he is sure how the club will fund itself.
Having retained 28 senior players for the 2025-26 campaign, Diamond wants to add six or seven more. However, he remains uncertain whether Newcastle will find outside investment or need to lean on a loan of between £3-4m from rival Premiership clubs and CVC Capital Partners to get through next term.
While the situation may feel grimly reminiscent of 2022-23, which saw three top-flight clubs go bust, Diamond insists that the scenario is “completely different” to the demise of Worcester Warriors, where he was also director of rugby.
“At Worcester, it was never openly out there that we needed new investment,” Diamond said. “The previous owners had searched high and low to find it and I think everyone was kept in the dark. Not only did the staff and the players and the coaches not know what was going on, neither did Premiership Rugby nor the RFU.”
Diamond stressed that morale within his playing group is still high and devoid of “panic”. “I don’t think they’ll be any mystery illnesses or people crying off fearing they’re not going to get paid at the end of the month,” he said ahead of hosting Sale Sharks at Kingston Park on Friday evening. “That is not even in our vocabulary here. We’re in good fettle.”
The communication between Diamond and owner Semore Kurdi – as well as that between Newcastle and CVC Partners and Premiership Rugby – was said to be “very good”. Assembling a squad for next season, though, will require patience.
“We are retaining players as we speak,” Diamond explained. “I informed the squad yesterday that we will not be recruiting new players immediately until there is some clarification of investment or a loan coming in, or any other option that might be out there.
“It doesn’t hamstring it that much, to be perfectly honest It’s not an ideal situation. We’re up to about 28 players that I have retained already. There are three or four more who are waiting and will come and see me if they get another option. The people that I’ve been talking to about joining us are in the same bracket; I can’t make a decision until we get a little more clarity.”
“Finding players is not the problem,” he added. “Making sure we can pay them is the problem next year.”
Premiership Rugby’s financial monitoring panel, set up following the collapses of Worcester, Wasps and London Irish, require assurances from all of the league’s clubs by the end of April that they can financially fulfil the 2025-26 campaign, with decisions and rulings then finalised by the end of the season.
There are no concerns around Newcastle being able to complete the current campaign, but should Kurdi not be able to provide guarantees for beyond that, contingency plans such as the loan would be put into action until a new investor came in. Legitimate buyers are said to be interested.
The panel will be chaired by new independent Jonathan Bellamy, who is also vice-chair of the EFL Club Financial Review Panel. After beginning their search for a new owner last November, Newcastle appointed advisors who were recently involved in the sales of stakes in the eight franchises competing in The Hundred, with those sales raising approximately £554 million.
Newcastle sit bottom of the table, six points adrift of Exeter Chiefs, as Premiership action returns following a two-month break for the Six Nations. Diamond guided Falcons to the semi-final of the Premiership Cup during the league’s hiatus, but pointed out that the “ridiculous” scheduling now sees Newcastle with just three home games between now and May.
He did praise the Premiership for doing a “wonderful job” with promoting “the brutality of the sport” and “big hits” as it aims to “generate more money and enthusiasm”. As for the future of Newcastle, Diamond wants new investors to table a “10- or 15-year plan” that develops the stadium into a capacity of 15,000.
“The ideal for me is that if we get investment, we look on it on a grander scale than just surviving at the bottom of the league next year,” he said.
Diamond admitted it would be difficult for the Rugby Football Union to step in to help Newcastle, yet suggested that the loan has been offered because the Premiership “has to remain at 10 [teams] or go to 12”. And the prospect of a Championship club earning promotion through the mechanism of a play-off against the bottom-placed Premiership team is all but extinct.
“If a Championship club – and I worked with the RFU and the Championship clubs last year – and the benefactors are putting in half a million quid or a million quid in, and they can afford to do that, that competition is brilliant the way it sits,” said Diamond.
“I think it’s a good stepping-stone competition, and the Championship clubs don’t like people like me saying that, but if they come up to the Premiership and you are losing half a million quid because you are spending £1m on your team, you are going to lose 100-0 every week.
“If you go to spend £4m you’re going to end up with my team, which gets beat every week and are now losing £4-5m every year. If you want to go to where Sale are, you are going to have to spend £8m. So you are now going to lose eight, nine million quid in year one.
“Then you have got to do your stadium, then you’ve got to get your coaching staff, because in the Championship there’s no minimum standards or very few, and you need five physios for a 50-man squad, you need two doctors, you need another doctor, you need four strength and conditioners, you need an academy, it goes on and on and on. And you don’t want to come up for one year, so you come up for three years – you are now £30m out. That’s the reality of it.”
Diamond finished by saluting the owners around the top flight, outlining the level of financial commitment it has taken for them to keep Premiership sides afloat.
“People in my experience, like Simon Orange and Ged Mason at Sale, Semore Kurdi here, the other owners in the Premiership, never get the credit they deserve. Because those numbers, that quick maths I have just done for you, of how much it would cost to come up and stay up, they have already put it in.
“They’ve already had that pain over the last 25 years. And when I hear all the tittle-tattle from the Championship clubs saying it’s unfair, we’ve not had the same funding – you’ve not had the same pain, lads. You’ve not had the same pain.”
