Worcester Warriors: Administrators rule out second appeal against relegation to focus on sale
- Published
Worcester Warriors first won promotion to the Premiership in 2004 and had been in the top flight since 2014
Worcester Warriors' administrators will not appeal against a decision to uphold their relegation from the Premiership.
The Rugby Football Union dismissed initial appeals by Worcester and Wasps, who are also in administration.
And although Begbies Traynor believes it may have grounds for a second challenge, it wants to focus on completing a deal to sell the club.
"We've now just got to accept that decision so we can press on with the sale," said administrator Julie Palmer.
"We put in an appeal against relegation, we thought we made a really strong case, but we weren't surprised at the outcome. We felt in a sense that the decision had probably already been made regardless of what case we made.
"We think we probably have grounds to appeal that decision again. The problem with that is it further delays the process and we just don't have the time to play with now."
It was revealed last month that Worcester's total debts amount to more than £30m.
Atlas Worcester Warriors Rugby Club Ltd, led by former chief executive Jim O'Toole and business partner James Sandford, are preferred bidders, and the RFU has set a 12 December deadline to agree the sale, which would enable the club to start next season in the Championship.
"The purchaser has built a very solid plan based on [Worcester being] a Championship club with a view to being ambitious and getting back in the Premiership in very short order," Palmer told BBC Radio Hereford & Worcester's Worcester Warriors podcast.
"We have strong grounds [to appeal again] but the time that would take would mean we couldn't get a deal done in time for next season.
"We're drawing a line under that in the interests of commerciality so we can try and get rugby played next season."
'The sooner we can move forward the better'
If the Atlas deal is given the go-ahead, the club would then face the challenge of trying to build a competitive playing squad from scratch.
Palmer said that it was not easy to put a squad together quickly, and although the standard of Championship rugby was a bit lower, the "physicality is even greater".
She continued: "I think that's why everybody now wants to get on with this and what we're asking for now is the RFU make a quick and sensible decision on the fit and proper person, suitability test, because the sooner we can move this forward the better."
Begbies Traynor does not expect that the RFU will rigidly adhere to the 12 December deadline if sufficient progress is made before that date.
"Initially in our meetings with the RFU they said that 12 December was a deadline they would like to work to and should be communicated as a hard deadline to get everybody on the same page as quickly as possible," Palmer explained.
"The RFU qualified their own deadline by saying what they didn't really want was everybody rushing around on Christmas Eve trying to get a deal done.
"They wanted to try and get it done earlier on the basis that if there was some slippage, the deal was moving progressively forward at that point in time and although it was a hard deadline, there would be flexibility if the deal was moving in the right direction."
Former London Irish chief executive O'Toole first came to Worcester in 2015 to work for then owners Sixways Holdings Limited, under Greg Allen, who had taken over two years earlier.
Since leaving Sixways in 2017, he has spent the past five years working as a sports consultant, with clients in the UK and overseas, but still based in Worcester.
Julie Palmer was speaking to BBC Hereford & Worcester's Andrew Easton