Gary Reynolds, chief executive of ambitious Reading-based Rams, has launched a double-barrelled broadside at Premiership bosses over suggestions aspiring clubs will have to pay as much as £20m to join an expanded top-flight, writes Neale Harvey of The Rugby Paper.

With talks over scrapping relegation and increasing the number of Premiership clubs to 13 or 14 at an advanced stage, the existing 13 Premiership shareholders argue that as they have been the ones to create value in the league, new clubs such as Ealing should have to buy their way into the top-flight in order to become full members.

However, Reynolds, a wealth management executive whose Rams have long-term ambitions to fill the Thames Valley void left by London Irish, eventually becoming a Premiership club themselves, brands the notion as “outrageous.”

He told The Rugby Paper: “If they go down that route, shame on them. I don’t buy this rubbish about how they built the value of Premiership Rugby.

“Come on, they’ve taken money from the pockets of sponsors and the RFU and a lot of it has come out of the community game. It’s come out of the pockets of the average rugby supporter who pays for their ticket at Twickenham.

“They buy the RFU’s beer and burgers and then Twickenham feeds their profits to the Premiership clubs – then they turn around and say they want to charge £20m for an aspiring club to go into their league? They can bugger off.

“That’s complete rubbish and they should be ashamed. It’s just outrageous to think that they claim they’ve created value when the vast majority of that value has come out of the pockets of supporters and sponsors across the land.”

Reynolds added: “Premiership Rugby have no right to turn around now and demand £20m to get into their self-styled elite club and they need to be very careful that the rest of the game doesn’t disassociate itself from them now and simply tell them to get lost.

“We can restart the whole thing and the sooner community clubs from the Championship down get their act together, the better.”

Meanwhile, Rams have spent the lockdown period gearing themselves up for life at a higher level should the opportunity arise.

Last season’s National One runners-up have invested £250,000 into a new grandstand, new floodlights and on other improvements to their Old Bath Road ground and would be ready to take a place in the Championship if required.

Reynolds explained: “We’re keen to progress, we have ambition and we’ve done a load of work on improving the club. We’ve developed our academy, our women’s teams and if any opportunity comes to move up, we’d take it.

“London Irish have gone and we know we have a good product and a fantastic catchment area in Reading and the Thames Valley.

“Once people come to our games, they tend to come back and our aim is to get four-figures crowds regularly and move to 2,000.

“It's a big investment - £100,000 on the stand, £90,000 on lights, £30,000 on our training
ground, £20,000 on pitches, £12,000 on a disabled viewing area and £5,000 on a new refreshment café – but it shows how much we want to engage the community and how committed we are to giving people the chance of top-quality rugby.”

Were the Rams to make the Championship, Reynolds says recent proposals from former Saracens chief executive Ed Griffiths around its future are on the money.

He added: “Ed had a vision for 16 clubs split into two pools, with play-offs, that would have created a lot of excitement. It included aspirational pathways that would reignite divisional and county rugby and it’s the way I would go.”

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