Now confirmed by Widnes staff won't be paid tomorrow.


Widnes Vikings would like to update members, supporters and partners on the club’s current financial situation.

Widnes Vikings have been facing a significant cash-flow gap, which must be resolved in the coming days.

Throughout the past three months, Widnes Vikings’ Board of Directors and senior staff members have made extensive efforts to engage business leaders and individuals to secure investment to stabilise the club and overcome the potential threat of administration. This has included the Board writing off more than £370,000 worth of loans that they had provided to the club throughout their tenure.

It had appeared likely that a consortium of investors would take ownership of the club today, providing the necessary investment to secure the club’s future stability. However, at a late stage, a key member of this consortium have withdrawn from this process. As a result, the club has, as yet, failed to secure the necessary investment and is unable to make its payroll commitments for all employees tomorrow.

Efforts to secure investment remain ongoing and we will continue to pursue all available avenues. The club continues to invite other expressions of interest from individuals or groups that may wish to support Widnes Vikings at this time.

The club is taking advice in response to this matter. Widnes Vikings continue to trade and, at this stage, our scheduled fixture against sheffield will go ahead

Because when any company makes redundancies, they do it based on a number of factors. Usually a scoring system. In reality, they usually weight that scoring system so the people they want rid of happen to come bottom of it. In some companies, they may weight things like being off sick, skills in certain areas etc. In Widnes' case, they could just put a high weighting on "injured or not" and "cost to the business". Then those who are high earners and injured will be the ones lowest in the scoring and made redundant. A crude way of putting it, but it'll be along those lines.
When companies make redundancies, they don't make absolutely everyone redundant, they cut a certain amount. That's what Widnes' administrators have effectively done.

amazing how quickly RFL managed to approve the takeover. Every time we went through we had weeks of RFL ooming and aahing over approving the bidders. In Widnes case seems to have just been a formality. Suspect in our case they were more bothered about securing a paying tenant for their lease than any rugby related reasons.

I'll admit I'm unclear on exactly how this takeover has worked in terms of new/existing companies. Widnes have had a twelve point deduction so you have to assume that the debts have not been paid. So is it a newco situation we're looking at?
If it is then surely all of the staff have either tuped across or they have all had to renegotiate new playing contracts under the new company?

From what I've read, I believe the redundancies came by the administrators before the takeover, in order to cut costs. Then the remaining staff will have been TUPEd across one assumes. It's either that or those three players didn't want to be TUPEd and decided to leave instead (ala Kopczak). I'm only taking a guestimate on what I've read though, I'm not privy to the workings of the club. I certainly don't believe they're negotiating new contracts though, the remaining players are on their previous ones by the looks of things.

Or these Widnes people are known to be fairly upstanding members of the community with no background of insolvency or being involved with questionable people. Unlike some of our previous takeovers. Allegedly.