Salford Red Devils’ fall: Paul King reveals the pressure, promises and pain that drove the club to ruin

BY JOHN DAVIDSON

Exclusive: Former Salford Red Devils CEO Paul King has opened up about the events that led to the financial decline and liquidation of the Super League club.

Salford are being liquidated with debts totalling around £4 million after a nightmarish 12-month period that saw the club taken over in early February by a consortium fronted by New Zealanders Curtiz Brown and Sire Kailahi of Jacobsen Management Group.

The group came in before the start of the 2025 season, and once they had taken over, they immediately stated publicly that all of the club’s existing debts had been cleared. But that didn’t happen and the broken promises continued to add up, leading to the collapse of the 152-year-old institution in December and it becoming an ongoing black eye for English rugby league.

Salford have had players, coaches and staff leave with salaries paid late or unpaid for months, and the messy saga has run for 10 months with debts spiralling and fan anger at the owners increasing.

King was placed on gardening leave in February, when Jacobsons were first handed control of Salford, and replaced by Chris Irwin as CEO. But he returned to the club after Irwin departed in June, and is expected to face bankruptcy court in January after personal guarantees were made on his house to cover loans taken out for the club.

King claims he is personally in hock for £500,000.

Speaking about the ordeal and his involvement, King told rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads: “There are things that have happened that were out of my control, there are things that happened that were in my control and I’ve made some bad decisions along the way.

“You do it with your heart and not your head sometimes and I admit that. To be clear though, despite all the mudslinging, I’m adamant that nobody involved ever did anything to deliberately damage the club, certainly not in the beginning anyway.

“It’s worth stating from the off that I have been subjected to a sustained period of abuse and negative exposure for quite some time now. The last 12 months in particular have been horrific for me and my family.

“So I’m speaking out for my own mental health, to tell my story and give the fanbase my honest truth about what has actually happened and how we got here.

“I have nothing to hide, I am walking away to pick up some semblance of a life, whatever that looks like. I’m now a 60-year-old unemployed man who has just had his bankruptcy hearing pushed back to January.

“I’m genuinely frightened about what 2026 will bring for me. Frightened is the right word. I have sat and stared into that void a few times recently and a few weeks ago I figured maybe I’m worth more to my family dead than like this.

“So when I say I’m doing this for my mental health, that’s what I mean.

“It’s not a selfish act – I have a lovely family who don’t need more trauma – I’m talking about what happened from my perspective and then I’m gone, I’m not aligned to any consortium and I’ll never watch another game.

“There’s been too many things said that can’t be unsaid and too many heard that can’t be unheard, so I’m done.

“I gave it my everything, took my best shot, had an exceptional seven years in the main and now I want my life back.”

Brown and Kailahi have not responded to repeated requests for comment from rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads over the past week.

King, a lifelong Salford fan, had been running the club at the bequest of a fan ownership board since 2018, after previous owner Marwan Koukash walked away.

The club has been dealing with historic debt for at least 13 years, if not longer. One of the key problems Salford has always faced has been a lack of large fanbase and strong attendances, as well as being tied to a stadium deal that meant it made very little from its own home games.

Without a productive academy behind it, Salford have long been a buying and selling club, often with project or unwanted players joining the club, improving and then being sold on to another outfit at a profit.

The Red Devils have been hunting for a new owner for years, but serious financial issues emerged in November last year after a vital council grant the club expected to arrive never materialised.

“On average the club has had £4 million in costs and £3.2 million of income,” King explained.

“We’re always £600,000 to £800,000 short of break-even … that’s why you sell players. You don’t want to do it, you just have to do it. And we’d done it for years as a club.

“I should have sold Kallum Watkins, Tim Lafai and Marc Sneyd probably in July or August last year. I should have done it. But I didn’t. I wanted to support the coaching staff who believed we were on the cusp of winning something.

“I should have been stronger and sold them, but I thought I would lose Rowls [Salford coach Paul Rowley] too if I did and then it would all break up. In the end, it did anyway.

“It made sense to me then, as it does now: we made Wembley in the Covid final [in 2020] in front of nobody. If we had won that and had the open-top parade we had planned across the city, it could have changed everything. We just had to be ambitious and roll the dice.

“Ultimately, I had been here before with Tyler Dupree, Andy Ackers and Brodie Croft and got absolutely hammered for selling them [in mid to late 2023] even though it was the right thing to do, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t interfere with my judgement at that point.

“I’ve had journos and TV pundits slam our lack of ambition when Brodie went, the same people now slam me for not selling.

“I just couldn’t win. The pressure to compete got the better of me, but so did the need to maximise IMG points.

“If I had sold them, we wouldn’t have made the play-offs in 2024 and attendances would fall as they did when Brodie went. There was a real risk of losing our Super League status due to the IMG drop if I had.

“Without a benefactor, that loss of £1.3 million makes us a part-time championship team in a stadium where we can’t afford the rent. It was a death spiral.

“Ultimately, that’s happened anyway, so it didn’t really make a difference in the end.”

Salford famously made the Super League grand final in 2019, their first-ever, and reached their first Challenge Cup final in decades in 2020. But that team was broken up, coach Ian Watson departed to join Huddersfield at the end of 2020 and a new roster was constructed under Paul Rowley from the end of 2021.

The Red Devils improved on the field and made the playoffs in 2022, finishing sixth. They just missed out with a seventh-place finish in 2023, and then got back to the semi-finals in 2024 with a fourth-place finish.

But financial issues were never far from the surface.

King made a personal guarantee on his house in mid-2024 to secure a loan, to stave off money strain. He insists he did that last year as he was confident that a £1.8 million grant from Salford City Council would arrive.

“I used personal guarantees to extend it to get to the point where the subsidy control grant from the Council was coming,” he said.

“I wasn’t doing it recklessly. Some people may disagree, but I had done it before.

“It was the council who suggested it. I’d never heard of it. The chief executive Tom Stannard was in post at Wakefield Council when they landed a £6 million rugby resilience fund that Wakefield Trinity, Castleford Tigers and Featherstone Rovers all split – £2 million each – so I figured it was achievable.

“They threw £175,000 at Swan Partners to help us put the plan together, so of course I thought it was definitely coming. But it’s the hope that kills you.”

King does not blame the council for not providing the club with the grant.

“You’ve got to say it’s a council, it’s a local authority, and you’ve got 250,000 citizens they’ve got to look after,” he said.

“It’s a rugby club, it means a lot to 3,500 people. That’s kind of like slightly over one percent of the population. The other 98.5 percent are indifferent. They have budget deficits all over the place, central government cuts etc. They aren’t duty-bound to bail us out, so please don’t think I’m blaming them.

“It just dragged on for about a year. I wish they had stopped the endless pontification and told me earlier so I could have acted differently, took alternate action… but that’s hindsight. We’re all geniuses with hindsight.”

Salford tried numerous ways to increase revenue and bring more money into the club.

“I invested in the commercial side of it [in the past] to try and sell more commercially, sell more tickets, do a bit of marketing. We did the digital screens deal, where we had big screens with our fixtures all over the city, we brought in Chris Irwin as the chief commercial
officer, provided him with the database etc.

“We had some success in terms of big events like Armed Forces Day. We broke our regular season record with that one. We had a great relationship with the forces and some of the local suppliers.

“We thought it was a winner, we promoted it and turned it into a fantastic event over a couple of seasons. People knew about it. It was a big attraction, we just couldn’t afford to replicate it 13 times a season. You can’t actually get the massive cannon or the Red Devils parachuting in with the match ball every week.

“We also started an elite academy. If we were to survive in the long term, we had to develop our own players, so that included a pathway with the additional associated costs from staff wages to coach travel and everything in between.

“So we were having a dig, we were trying to hit these different areas, but ultimately, when you fail, you don’t have any benefactor. We haven’t got a Mike Danson or an Eamon McManus or a Derek Beaumont or a Ken Davy.

“It’s just… every club needs one. And when you fail, as a fans club, when you fail, you’ve got limited choices. You sell players, someone else buys the club, you try to borrow your way out or you go under.

“We’d had lots of people ask about buying the club. But they were after the stadium and they couldn’t get it because it was a joint venture with the council.

“So we always went through the process. I must have gone through about 20 different people. You know there was American consortiums, Chinese consortiums, but as soon as they find out they can’t get the stadium, they disappear.

“So that’s where you find yourself in this tricky dichotomy – you’re constantly trying to build and then I’m going to have to break it up, build, break it up, build, break it up and that gets really challenging because you’re under pressure all the time.

“Paul Rowley knew it and he resisted a fair bit. He had played a significant part in building that team and didn’t want to break it up. He wanted to win, so that could be challenging.

“I get it, he’s a good coach and he wants to control his environment; he wants to control the room and he loves his boys. That dynamic is why we had the on-field success we did, it’s about the togetherness of the group. So to break it up would destroy the whole thing.

“That’s what makes him what he is: he’s a winner and he’s ambitious.”

King faced criticism from some fans and the media after the club ran a community share offer in June 2023, where fans could buy shares in Salford. The initiative raised £363,770, according to the Crowdfunder website.

“The whole point of it was to apply for £2 million to create assets the club could benefit from, same as with the subsidy control if we had got it,” he said.

“It was never supposed to be about paying players, it was to create income streams because we only had ticketing and commercial incomes from sponsorships.

“To get the match funding the council had to wipe the £1.5 million debt from the John Wilkinson days. It was 13 years earlier, so it could never be collected anyway. They agreed to wipe it, had legal advice to do so, but never actually got around to it and then a change of
government, a change of direction and the scheme was gone and again we’ve been unlucky.

“I guess at this point, I always get asked about where’s the crowdfunder money gone. After commissions, it was around £280,000 after year one. You do have to pay commissions; you
don’t get it all. Anybody who attended the first AGM or asked for the minutes will know the answer.

“In short, as it’s already stated: we invested it into trying to improve commercially by recruiting Chris Irwin, big events, digital screens across Greater Manchester etc, a pathway…and no doubt some of it went on plugging a payroll gap or two because we had to.

“It is worth noting that it was a loan from the Community Benefit Society (CBS), so the intention was always to pay it back if required until it liquidated.

“It definitely didn’t go on a villa in Spain, I’ve only been to Spain once in my life for an hour or two as we landed in Barcelona on route to Catalans. Nor did it go on a swimming pool in my back garden – as some people on social media suggested.”

King admits the Red Devils also found it difficult at times to recruit players.

“Being a selling club brings other challenges too: you have to work harder to get the good players to come,” he said.

“Players want to win, they don’t want the side breaking up every other season, so they’re reluctant to come here. Bleasey [Ian Blease, Salford’s former director of rugby] used to call it the Salford tax.

“We have to pay a little higher to some individuals to get them to come here. So the sale of players to balance the books becomes counterproductive.

“The alternative was not to chase it, to put a team out at £1.2 million to £1.5 million, but that would have seen us relegated years ago and I could never just find the time to stay steady on the field whilst building the brand off-field.

“I never could find the balance whereby we could build on and off the field. We never had that sort of money.”

King claims he first met the duo Brown and Kailahi of Jacobsen Management Group Limited in 2023, with the introduction coming from assistant coach Krisnan Inu.

Kailahi has been described as a music promoter in Australia and a Tongan rap star, and reportedly the cousin of rugby union great Jonah Lomu. While Brown has a background in project management and construction, having worked in Dubai, California and in Australia, according to his LinkedIn profile.

According to King: “I was told by Krisnan Inu ‘these boys have got more money than God’ and part of my role since 2018 has all been about finding the club a benefactor.

“And it was about finding someone in Salford with deep pockets. Everybody that I speak to wants to talk about the stadium, these included.

“Okay, so I met them, gave them a tour of the stadium etc. They had all these big ideas about putting a roof on it, concerts. They met with the council, but the stadium was a joint venture and they couldn’t get it. So they were out like everyone else and that’s the last I heard of them.”

In 2023 CorpAcq Stadium was jointly owned by the council and Peel Group. But in December 2024 the council bought the stadium from Peel.

King insists he had no dealings with Jacobsen’s after 2023 until they re-emerged on the scene as potential owners in December 2024 and January this year.

According to King: “What I know of now is that in June of 2024, Curtiz and Sire had meetings at 6 Cuts in Monton with Jack Youd [Salford council deputy mayor], Chris Irwin, Paul Rowley, and Krisnan Inu.

“I didn’t know about that at the time, but found out months and months later,” King claims.

“Jacobsons had big plans; they wanted to get the stadium, build a hotel, hold concerts there. They said they were going to buy Nathan Cleary. Cleary’s name was mentioned because his missus plays for Man City.”

According to several sources, Jacobsens also put in an offer to takeover and invest in Super League. A figure of £200 million offered to the RFL and Super League has been mentioned, but several sources rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads has spoken to describe the offer as unlikely to be realistic.

“They had held talks about significant equity investment in British rugby league. I even think they offered Rowley the position of commissioner of British rugby league,” King said.

“I’m not sure if he ever took it seriously, but it definitely stopped him in his tracks a little. It sits in your mind.

“I think the disappointing thing for me is nobody tipped me off. I understand why Inu did it because it’s his mates.”

King speculates that Inu may have been promised some sort of stake in the club.

“Whatever it was, I hope it was worth it to him for all the pain it’s caused.

“Rowley was ambitious. He wanted to win things. He wanted to get the big players, he doesn’t want to coach forever, so he wanted to have a real crack at it.

“Yeah, you can understand that, I get it.

King continues: “With Jack Youd, I think the council were probably sick of propping us up or sick of being perceived to do that and it was creating issues with the officers.

“If you saved the club politically, it makes you look good, doesn’t it? I don’t know. But I get that, plus he’s a massive fan of the club.

“And from Chris’s perspective, he always wanted to be a CEO, he told me that the first day I met him. He wanted a serious role in the sport. He loves the game, so he wanted in at a senior level.

“I get it all, I don’t hate on the back of it. As a group, they probably all recognised that I was a constant ball of stress and may have decided to move me out behind my back. I kind of understand that too, although I don’t like it very much.

“What I would say is that I thought they were all my mates. But they watched me do personal guarantees after June [of 2024] to keep us afloat because I thought the subsidy control was coming and I thought the subsidy control was coming because they [the council] suggested it.

“Nobody tipped me off, I could have protected myself. That hurts.”

Youd, Rowley and Inu have all been approached for comment repeatedly by rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads over the past few days. None has responded to a series of questions put to them.

Irwin has denied that he was involved with bringing Jacobsens in to buy Salford.

He said: “I was introduced to them, not the other way round, and like everyone else involved in the process, was led to believe they had the suitable investment to save the club.

“Myself, the RFL, players, staff, fans, HRMC, various banks, have been lied to.”

Salford not receiving the council grant on November 4 last year was a staggering blow to the club’s finances.

“Ultimately, they decided not to submit the subsidy control as it was too much at £1.8 million,” King said.

“I’ll just never ever know if that’s the real reason. At the back of my mind, I’ll always imagine it’s because Jacobsons turned up and they thought we’ve got an escape route.

“And I get that too, genuinely, I get that because it is taxpayer money. But the whole point of it was like putting in an all-weather pitch, putting in a multi-use pitch. It was to get us assets, a better training facility that the public could use, so we could rent it out, a pitch we could rent.

“It was about finding income generators because we couldn’t get anything going at the stadium. The share of food and beverage, the promise of the stadium purchase, they all just disappeared and took forever.”

After the subsidy control grant did not land, King asked the RFL for a £500,000 advance of Salford’s own central distribution to alleviate its serious financial problems.

At this point, King claims that without that vital advance, the club would not have made the start of the 2025 Super League season.

“I remember it like yesterday. I met the mayor and Jack Youd, expecting to finalise a timeline for delivery on the subsidy control grant and they just said they weren’t doing it. He said ‘the ask was too big and it was politically too difficult now’.

“So I’m walking down the steps of the town hall and I phoned Rhodri Jones [RL Commercial managing director] up and said I need an advance of half a million quid, otherwise we won’t make it at the start of the season, and fixtures were set.

“The RFL called a Super League club’s meeting. I never agreed with that bit. It really exposed us as a club: everyone knew our business and the ability to command proper transfer fees like we always had was taken away from us.

“That said, beggars can’t be choosers at that stage. So I remain grateful that we gained the support of the majority in attendance.

“In December and January, I had all the other clubs coming in for Salford’s players. But by then I knew Jacobsens were coming and I was desperate not to break the team up still. The fanbase had seen the build and break scenario too many times, so I didn’t want to put them through it again.

“We had these multi-millionaires in the background [in Jacobsens]. I didn’t bring them in, but I made the conscious choice to hang on because I believed they had money.

“I was just hedging my bets that these boys were the real deal and everybody was to be fair. Well, it seems like the RFL was. I mean, obviously, the due diligence wasn’t done as well as one would hope. But I guess everyone was desperate for someone to come forward.

“Apparently, the council had seen the bank account with £200 million in it, as had the RFL… But I never saw it, I wasn’t part of the CBS board. So I never saw it.

“The CBS have always had the ability to remove me, as had the board before them, and to be fair, for the previous 18 months, I had just wanted to go.

“I knew I had ridden my luck for a couple of years. I’d put my house on the block before, but always with a plan of getting it back off again. Eventually, you roll the dice too often and it bites you on the arse.”

King concedes that the constant fight against the tide to keep the club afloat had a huge impact on him over time.

“In the end, it was driving me mad, I wasn’t myself at all,” he said.

“Have you ever had night sweats, anxiety so bad you cannot sleep? It’s awful. I was begging to get out and away from it, that’s how bad it had become for me. I couldn’t stand it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t win, so I began to question everything. My whole management style changed. I became incredibly insular.

“I tried to hide it, but people must have noticed I was carrying too much of a burden.

“It’s just politics of it. The bollocks of it. The abuse you get. Sell players and you’re an unambitious dickhead. Don’t sell them, you’re an overambitious dickhead.

“There’s no middle ground, it’s always extremes of everything, though in reality it’s mainly the same handful of people howling at the moon, regardless of what I do, but it doesn’t matter.

“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect my judgement. It wasn’t a world I was used to. I’m a resilient guy, but it was testing. Lord knows how the top guy at Manchester United copes with it with their fanbase.

“When your family are asking you about it … I have young nephews and nieces and there’s people saying, ‘oh, it’s Paul King’s fault’ and using foul language from behind their keyboards.

“The frustration is understandable, but the lies that people tell are ridiculous.

“There was one guy who always called me all the names under the sun on social media and his profile was ‘be kind, you don’t know what other people are going through’, – what a hypocrite.”

The motives of Brown and Kailahi, and of Jacobsens, remain a point of conjecture. It is believed they claim to be representing a wealthy American hedge fund with plans to buy the CorpAcq Stadium (also known as Salford Community Stadium) and the land around it from the council. However, those plans, and the money to fund them, have never materialised.

Several former players and staff have alleged instances of threats and intimidation during Jacobsen’s tenure.

In August this year the club’s chief operating officer Claire Bradbury quit her role, alleging in a social media statement that the owners “suggested she sleep with an individual from the RFL” to “smooth over” the club’s financial position.

Bradbury declined to comment when contacted by rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads.

“I was on garden leave at the time of the incident. I have no idea of the context behind it, but I can imagine,” King said.

“I recruited Claire when Chris was leaving for Exeter. She came in with so many great ideas, I was so excited to see what she could do. We had never had anyone with her level of marketing expertise before, but after only a few weeks it all blew up and she was in this horrible position.

“I really felt for her, she had so much promise, it’s great to see she’s managed to move on. I’m sure she will do good things in basketball now.”

Jacobsons returned in talks to buy Salford in late 2024, after the council had acquired the stadium and the club’s debt problems had gone from bad to worse.

In February, Brown and Kailhali were approved to take over the club by the RFL. The governing body has been criticised for the level of due diligence done on the others.

“So basically, Jacobsons are coming in,” King explained.

“The Microsoft Teams call with them is in January. We got the sales purchase agreement with the CBS and it’s looking good.

“I’ve done a lot of the legwork beforehand, providing the due diligence, because nobody else was in a position to really. Lots of contact with Sire and Curtiz. They were a bit arrogant and aggressive, but could also be quite charming.

“So there was a Teams call, a couple of CBS people on it, I think, Andy Rosler who was advising the CBS and me with Sire and Curtis and I’m hoping this is D-Day. It was part of the
sale purchase deal with the CBS was that all debts were cleared by March.

“So I’m thinking if this gets signed I’ve pulled it off, and I can get away after a period of transition. That’s when they said: ‘Yeah, just to let you know, the new CEO of the club will be Chris Irwin’.

“That was a surprise: he had been at Exeter a few months at this stage, how would they even know him?

“I was the CEO of the club. I know I wanted away, but to give someone my job on a Teams call with other people there was pretty cruel and I believe a deliberately cruel act.”

King said that this was the first time he noticed what was in his view ‘a complete disregard for employment law and very limited human empathy’.

“I said nothing at the time. I didn’t want to rock the deal, so I just took it. And it was just silence across the rest of the attendees too.

“It came across as nasty. They went on to say they hadn’t known Chris for long, that Jack Youd had recommended him, but I’m not so sure that’s true. They’d clearly known him for a while as they had met him at 6 Cuts in June 2024.

“Latterly, they told me Jack had told them that Chris was key to getting the stadium deal. But I know Jack; I wasn’t convinced he would put himself in that position.

“So that was late January and they put me on gardening leave pretty much immediately. I think that was probably the right thing to do. It would have been confusing to all the staff if we were both in the office at that point. Ordinarily, a handover with Chris may have helped him.

“I don’t think he had the operational experience for what was coming his way at that point, but there wasn’t much he could do without the money landing anyway.

“To be fair, I was really happy about it at first. I was getting paid for six months, practiced my saxophone more and the personal guarantees were contractually to be sorted quite soon, so
I was in a decent space.

“The benefactors were in charge and I’d played my part in saving the club… or so I thought.”

However, from February, for the next four months huge losses at Salford mounted up, damaging media stories emerged weekly and financial problems grew and grew. The season started with a disastrous and embarrassing record-breaking 82-0 loss to St Helens.

The team was heavily beaten most weeks and players started to be sold, with the monthly payroll coming late.

Irwin exited on May 7 and his exit was announced publicly as a resignation. But rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads understands there was more behind the exit, as has been previously reported.

Just a week later, on May 14, Salford Council publicly ended all talks with Jacobsons over buying the stadium.

The council’s statement read: “Salford City Council has formally ended all negotiations with Jacobson Management regarding the future of Salford Community Stadium.

“Jacobsen Management were introduced to the stadium by representatives of Salford Red Devils RLFC – not by the council. It has not been possible for the council to progress negotiations and carry out a detailed due diligence exercise as required in a timely manner.

“We understand how difficult and uncertain this situation has been for supporters, staff, players and everyone connected to Salford Red Devils. We share your frustration and concern. Like you, we care deeply about the future of the club and the role rugby league plays in Salford’s sporting identity and community life.

“The council stepped in to acquire full ownership of the stadium to help secure that future. We remain committed to working with all our stadium tenants and partners to ensure the stadium delivers for the whole of our city – and to ensuring Salford Red Devils have a stable and sustainable home.”

In June, after Irwin had left, King was called in from garden leave to run the club as an advisor.

“I think I just had a decent relationship with the staff and playing group,” he said. “They trusted me to be honest, regardless of how bleak it looked.

“Again, with hindsight, I should have walked then.”

King felt that he was being used to buy time and appease staff and others. As the weeks rolled on, he says he was passing on to staff what he perceived to be “empty promises” from
Jacobsen Management at this stage.

“It started to creak in my mind when they announced the debts were cleared at the end of January. They clearly weren’t. And then they contacted me to extend my personal guarantees for February payroll because their money hadn’t transferred in time.

“Then in March, they blamed a faulty bank transfer code. April was because they were struggling to open a bank account as foreign nationals,” King claims.

“I can’t remember what May was, but it was another extension of my personal guarantee. I had basically covered every payroll whilst I was on garden leave.”

King says he made the personal guarantees, with his own house as surety, to secure loans to pay Salford club staff and players, and to pay debts, “because nobody else would”.

“I’ve done personal guarantees about three or four times over the last three or four years,” he claims.

“But I’ve always got it back. I know I’m getting it back. So I was always kind of comfortable with it. I was comfortable with this one until it went wrong.

“So the option was I knew I could do it, I knew I could get the facility.

“Then it didn’t pan out and Chris, he was getting a lot of resistance and he fell out with Rowls, I believe.

“Chris was desperately scrambling for money and that put him in direct conflict with the footy department. Plus, as I suggested earlier, other clubs knew what position we were in until the owners dropped the money in and there had been delays.

“I think Chris Atkin went to Castleford for £1,000. Brad Singleton went for £5,000 just to get his salary off the books. There was an error with the Deon Cross tribunal, so he went to St Helens for nothing.

“Chris was in a bad place because he was expecting the money to arrive. He had this vision of a C-suite bringing all these different people. So he thought he would be sat in the middle and having it all with a chief commercial officer, CFO, all this kind of stuff around him on this multi-million-pound budget.

“And he was starting to ask questions, I think.

“At the time everyone still believed the money was coming, so it was about buying time and was a no-win situation, really, especially when people are getting paid late, mainly because they weren’t asking me to extend the personal guarantees until the day before payday.

“Clearly, with hindsight, this was a deliberate ploy to make it impossible for me to say no at such short notice. To be fair, near the end Chris was saying ‘I don’t think you should do it Kingy’ [the increased personal guarantees].

“I think Chris started smelling a rat, so he asked questions, probably too many, and then he was gone.”

The club was completely falling apart and questions about how long it could survive constantly emerged.

King alleges he felt under strong pressure to extend personal guarantees due to the financial situation: “I was already in over my head, so I kept rolling, hoping they would land the money.

“They brought me back in from garden leave in June and when I was there I felt like a hostage.

“Every time I questioned about where the money was, it was threats to walk away and that will be your house gone,” King alleges.

“They had clearly failed the sale purchase agreement at this point. But the CBS had no money, so it couldn’t really pull it back without liquidating, and I had already committed to the RFL that I would make every endeavour to complete the season.

“I felt a strong emotional pressure to stay, even when I had concerns about the situation. I’d only been there for seven years because of the drive and the passion to make the club competitive. And to try and revisit those 1970s days of my childhood.

“That’s what it was about. It was about dead people, it was about my dad and my grandad.

“That’s what it was about. The club must survive and I must protect my personal guarantees and they knew it; they were very smart at spotting those weaknesses and manipulating them.

“Credit where it’s due, they could read people really well. Uncaring, but nonetheless it was a skill – and that’s what my trigger was. They got the passion, the personal guarantees, everything and I felt they used it against me.

“It wasn’t just about the footy either, the back office team suffered too. There are some really great people behind the scenes, people at the club like Marcelle and Tracey Costello [club secretary]. They’ve been incredibly loyal to the club, and they weren’t going to get paid.

“Players with families who travelled halfway around the world and they weren’t going to get paid either. I felt ashamed for the club and city that we would put them through that.

“So someone had to do something. So I did, I did the personal guarantees. I didn’t really want to.

“I did them probably a couple of months longer than I should have done. I did them for four or five months and was always £120,000 a month. So, effectively, I became part of the problem.”

Salford was liquidated as a company last week after King refused to approve the appointment of a barrister by Jacobsen to push for another adjournment of its winding up petition in the High Court. This petition, over a £1.3 million tax debt owed to HMRC, had already been adjourned four times.

“I was really shocked when they got the second adjournment. I assumed it would be liquidated and by this stage firmly believed this would be the best outcome,” King said.

“As sole director I wanted to force liquidation, but it would take a shareholder vote and there’s no way Jacobsons would do that, so I looked into it and decided I wouldn’t sign off on a barrister.

“I made a point of emailing formally to ensure they didn’t use my e-signature and when the time came for me to sign the forms, I refused, thus ensuring liquidation. Despite some further abuse about it from people wanting to know why I didn’t do it earlier.

“Well, it’s simple really. I assumed once we hit the end of the season, the RFL would intervene and remove membership. But then it’s the grand final and then an Ashes series and it’s a really bad look, I suppose, plus they are one of the world’s great fence-sitting organisations.

“Jacobsons were telling me they were still in negotiation with the RFL about investment, and to be fair, knowing some of the individuals involved, that may actually be one of the few true things they ever said.

“Alongside that, I didn’t really want the staff unpaid and unemployed this close to Christmas. But as it became clear they wanted another adjournment, I had to act to take it away from them and this was the only route I had available.”

The club has already been relegated and was expected to compete in the Championship in 2026. The vast majority of the Red Devils’ staff, including coaches and players, had long departed for other teams after the disastrous 2025 season.

Rowley is now coaching St Helens; his assistant coach Kurt Haggerty is the head coach at Bradford.

While the majority of players and staff had found new jobs, many are still allegedly owed thousands of pounds in wages and pension money. The damage to their mental health and to their families has been severe.

Several ex-players and their families have spoken to rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads detailing the terrible impact of what has gone down at Salford this year has had on them. In July, one described it as “soul-destroying”.

Jayden Nikorima, now with Bradford, has alleged that he is still owed at least £15,000. Two other former Salford players, who declined to be named, have alleged they are also still owed money.

Reflecting on the whole ordeal, King said: “Some awful things happened; colleagues I thought were friends, sold me down the river. One referred to me as collateral damage, which was shocking at the time. And within it all, we turn on each other and point the finger.

“People fall out and the ones most deserving of criticism seem to avoid it in the aftermath.

“Yes, we had issues, but it was recoverable if people had been honest and that’s where Jacobsons come in. That’s where people should look; they had the due diligence, they knew where we were at.”

According to King: “They thought they had a hedge fund but couldn’t execute it, in the interim they ruined lives, made threats and brought the club into shame.

“They turned it into a laughing stock and didn’t care one jot,” he alleges.

With the company Salford City Reds (2013) Limited dissolved, there are now three different consortia keen to take over Salford’s RFL membership and set up a new club in the city.

One is involving former CEO Irwin, player agent Graeme Taylor and Salford Council deputy mayor Youd. The second is being fronted by former Super League player Mason Caton-Brown and the third involves New Zealander Tracy Atiga.

Atiga is the CEO of the company Kanaloa Hawaii Sports Entertainment Limited, and has been linked to Brown and Kailahi.

King says he has no allegiance to any of the groups looking to relaunch Salford as a club.

“What I really want to see is a multi-millionaire who’s happy to underpin it, £1 million to £2 million a year, come in and take them where they need to be,” he said.

“I don’t care which consortium wins it, I have no preference. What I know is that neither one of them has millionaires behind them. So they’re either going to accept mid-table Championship mediocrity, or they’re going to overspend. But at least there will be a club.

“Ultimately, if a Salfordian bloke with deep pockets – not somebody who doesn’t care about the club, somebody who cares about the club – steps in and is happy to throw in £1 million a year, that’s what you have to do if you’re going to survive at Super League level.”

Regardless of the future of Salford as a club, King believes what has happened to the Red Devils should serve as a warning to the rest of the sport.

Cornwall RLFC went bust earlier this year, while Featherstone has faced its own winding up petition, filed by HMRC over a £120,000 tax debt, and is set to go into administration. Meanwhile, players at North Wales Crusaders have alleged they have not been paid wages for a two-month period.

“When I first came in, I think the broadcast money was at £40 million a season,” King said.

“It’s around £24 million now and it’s a distinct possibility it will reduce further too if they don’t get some traction for an alternate bidder.

“In respect of IMG, it’s about improving standards of your stadium, LEDS, big screen, hospitality spaces, marketing, ticket sales etc. But a lot of it is a box-sticking exercise really, I understand the rising tides lifts all boats philosophy, though I’m not a big fan of watching the smaller boats sink along the way as they try to keep up.

“We don’t own our stadium, so there’s a real limit to the areas we can improve and they all involve throwing money at it that we didn’t have.

“IMG has a huge reputation in the space and the TV deal is shrinking, so they had to do something.

“But the sport in this country is already predicated at the top level on the whim of a group of benefactors who appear willing to write off £1 million to £2 million per annum chasing the dream. Unfortunately, a number of them are sick of doing it now.

“Ironically, reputationally we have been the most efficiently run club in Super League for the last seven consecutive years, we’ve punched well above our weight. So it winds me up a little to suggest financial mismanagement, which comes from people who don’t understand the dynamics of the sport.

“The fact that you are signing players a year in advance, so you have to spend money before you actually know you have it.

“You have to take a risk, which is why the big boys tend to lose £1 million plus a year… but they have benefactors, though, so that’s ok.

“It’s easy to say financial mismanagement now, but in the last seven years we’ve had a grand final, a Challenge Cup final and several years of playoffs and nobody was moaning then. I guess we’re all awesome with hindsight, having never had to do it.”

King says the reality is that Salford has had financial issues for decades.

“Ask John Wilkinson; he did it for 31 years somehow and it was always on the brink,” he said.

“This isn’t new for Salford. The fact that we didn’t come through it is similar to 2013, but instead of Koukash, we have a couple of consortiums in the background.

“We dropped, we got caught up in the race and fell short financially because we couldn’t generate the big incomes and we didn’t have a benefactor. We won’t be the last.

“Finally, I’d like to thank the vast majority of fans who backed me 100 percent throughout my tenure. It’s a tremendous fanbase, I just wish there had been more of them.

“The backing we received from the Supporters Trust in underpinning some of the pathway costs was exceptional. I’d also urge people to support the Foundation too, it’s a tremendous charitable organisation doing some genuinely incredible things across the city. With greater support they can make a real difference.

“I have a great many regrets about how it ended. It was such an honour and a privilege to run the club. But it was also incredibly stressful.

“I’d been scrambling to balance the books for eight years and I finally ran out of luck, or the courage to do another fire sale in a timely fashion.

“I genuinely thought I had the solution, firstly with the Council and then with Jacobsen’s, but ultimately, I wish I had just sold the players and never heard of Sire and Curtiz. My life was better when I didn’t have them in it.”

This article includes statements and opinions provided by former staff and players associated with the Salford Red Devils. These reflect their own experiences, and some details remain disputed or unverified. Every effort has been made to seek comment from the individuals and organisations named.