Worcester Warriors: the inside story of a rugby club’s demise

Another wall in the edifice of the Worcester Warriors has crumbled. The company responsible for paying the squad, WRFC Players Ltd, has been wound up. All employees are now officially out of work, while administrators, governing bodies and potential buyers pore over the state of the club’s main operating company, WRFC Trading Ltd, which has been placed into administration, and the constellation of companies that surround it.

What will the administrators find? There is a lot to unravel. Over the past 18 months, the Guardian has looked into the club’s management and financial arrangements since it was bought from the Allen familyby a consortium in September 2018. The tale that emerges around the erection of a bewildering network of companies and microcompanies helps to illustrate the mess the club finds itself in.

On 28 September 2018, a consortium led by Jed McCrory, a former director of Swindon Town and various other minor-league football clubs, agreed terms with the previous owners, when his company Militibus Quanco paid £1 for a majority shareholding in WRFC Trading. The club’s long-standing operating company came with Sixways Stadium and the 50 acres of land within which it sits, advertised for sale by Livingstone Partners at £28m less than a year earlier.

On the same day, another of McCrory’s companies, MQ Property, paid £6.25m for the freehold of the stadium and land. Immediately, a 999-year lease for the assets was sold to what MQ Property’s first set of accounts would later describe as a “connected party”, Link Corporate Trustees, acting on behalf of Alpha Real Capital. That company, again on the same day, extended a 175-year lease back to WRFC Trading.

On the face of it, those transactions amount to a sale and