CEO says West Tigers guilty of inflating membership numbers
The poor governance that plagues the Wests Tigers has reared its head again after a shock admission from the interim CEO.
NRL
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Interim Tigers CEO Shane Richardson has revealed the club has been inflating membership numbers, however he’s out to set the record straight.
Richardson was appointed to the role in December last year, taking over from the maligned Justin Pascoe, and he’s wasted no time calling out the shortcomings of the previous regime.
Speaking on the club’s Behind The Roar podcast, Richardson says the Tigers have been fudging membership numbers by declaring non-paying juniors.
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“It’s a bit like being a recovering alcoholic. You can’t get over it until you admit you have a problem. And we have a problem,” Richardson said.
“We’re the lowest paying membership club in the Sydney area.
“We’ve been including 9000 juniors who don’t pay at all, so there is no income to the club, and we’ve been declaring we have 20,000 members but we don’t have 20,000 members.
“Let’s be totally honest about what we have because we need you to become a member of this club, in whatever capacity that is. You need to become a member.”
Richardson’s new membership policy has taken nearly 10,000 members off the figures reported previously.
The well-respected Richardson was the CEO of the Rabbitohs between 2004-2014, winning a premiership in 2014.
While he knows it won’t be easy, his goal for the Tigers is to help make them the “number one sports club in Sydney”.
“They (the Tigers board) create the situation in the club as far as the purpose in what we need to do and my job is to carry it out,” he said.
“They’ve given me a really good rein to be able to carry out what we want to do quickly because one of the problems we have here is that there are a lot of people with good ideas here, but in many ways they’ve been stifled.
“We want to open our minds up to what we need to do going forward to make this club the number one sports club in Sydney. That’s our goal, nothing short of that.
“Are we going to be that in 12 months? Probably not. But my track record says we can create a club that our members and fans and stakeholders can be really proud of and we can do it quickly.
“But you only do it quickly if you act quickly and that’s what we are doing at the moment.”
Originally published as CEO says West Tigers guilty of inflating membership numbers
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