mens
club rugby
London Irish Chief executive Jamie Balls said the club could be playing in Champ Rugby as early as next season and has an ambitious plan to build its own stadium within five years.
Essex entrepreneur Steve Daniels, who made his fortune in the energy sector, bought the club’s name, brand and associated intellectual property from Kyle Jordan, son of the late former Formula 1 team owner Eddie Jordan and Daniel McKeown.
Daniels, 47, who played amateur rugby for Colchester, co-founded PE Solutions, which reportedly grew to £1.4 billion within seven years, and is a partner of the Rugby Football Union and hired former England scrum-half Kyran Bracken as director.
The Exiles, which go out of business in 2023, are owned by Daniels’ firm Gamechanger Investments and have been linked with a move to the United Rugby Championship, but Balls says the Championship and eventually the Gallagher PREM are their long-term goals.
“Look at what’s going on in Champion at the moment. I’m really excited. Look at Pirates down there with Nick Knowles and all that stuff; Champion’s got a buzz about it again, which is fantastic.”
“There is no entry into PREM until we get the details of what is happening in 2029-2030. If we go anywhere, it will be the championship, but we have to go through the process, as of today we have no place in the championship.
“Hopefully we can follow a similar model to Worcester. We would be very happy with the Championship as a destination and return to organic growth.”
“Let’s go there and then see what the future looks like. We’d like to be in the championship as soon as possible, and if there’s an opportunity next season and they let us, we’d like to go then. If not then, we’ll wait another year,” Balls said.
The club currently have no pitch or training ground and have been linked with a move to AFC Wimbledon’s Plow Lane home, and their former training base, the state-of-the-art Hazelwood Center in Sunbury-on-Thames.
Like Exiles PREM P shares, ownership is in the hands of the club’s administrators in bankruptcy, but Balls said the club would not be moving far from its south-west London base, and were in talks to buy the site.
“We have our eyes on moving to the stadium in the short term and there have been a number of people who have already approached us to say we would really like you to come here. But we are also looking at a newly built stadium.”
“But that’s three to five years, even if we have a pre-application now. But there are organizations that are currently struggling financially in stadiums that could be very ripe to become one of ours that we can build around that.
“We certainly want to learn the lessons we’ve learned from the past, which is that getting too far away from south-west London is not a good thing. We need to be in the area, and you can look at a number of sites in the area, the current rugby and football.
“Hazelwood, there’s 53 acres in south-west London that’s gone into administration. We’d love to get that back and we’re in talks there. It gives us not just a stadium for games, but a stadium for every day.
“And what people want now, they want to stay on site. You know, families want to show up somewhere, and they want not just one sport, they want other things. We’re going to look at commercializing around rugby. So that site has potential for us.
“But to be absolutely clear, we don’t currently own Hazelwood. That’s a process we have to go through, and we’re following a due process to do that,” he added.