Quote: pie.warrior "One of the major problems was frittering away the near £5m handout from the council for the stadium upkeep on the coral stand a a very good set of players instead of actually keeping it for it's intended purpose'"
Actually the club needed the Coral Stand as it had no corporate facilities at Odsal at all in 2000. What they should have done was to get a loan to pay for it rather than use the handout to pay for it outright. Simply not having corporate facilities would have left them unable to entertain sponsors etc. The money would have frittered away even faster otherwise. The Coral Stand is probably the only profitable part of the business!
A lot of the handout did go on the stadium upkeep too. I remember Duffy telling me of £70k that was needed to sort out drains in one part of the stadium that had collapsed. Possibly spending some of it on Lesley Vainikolo and Co wasn’t arguably the best thing to do in hindsight but I would suggest that as soon as the Council came out of that agreement the writing was on the wall anyway.
That’s the issue. No club can survive at Odsal without a wealthy benefactor covering the costs of upkeep. The Council were that benefactor in some ways for a time but that money they handed out wasn’t going to cover things indefinitely.