Leeds Rhinos chief: Nobody in Yorkshire will pay £20m to be in Prem

A chat with Paul Caddick would be a shrewd starting point for anyone curious about setting up a rugby union franchise. It may put them off the idea, but we can come to that later.

The 75-year-old has stewarded immense success in rugby league as the chairman of Leeds Rhinos and was instrumental in keeping Test cricket at Headingley as the owner of the ground when Yorkshire CCC pondered a move away three decades ago. Last year Caddick was awarded an MBE for his services to rugby league and his local community via the Leeds Rhinos Foundation.

Thanks largely to his construction and property business, Caddick is worth about £366million. On the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List, the Caddick family were nestled somewhere between Ed Sheeran and Ellen DeGeneres.

“Keeping my head down and digging holes” is how Caddick modestly describes his big break. Prod a little more and Caddick will tell you an entertaining story about a job on a combined sewer after he had saved up £1,000 to begin it all in 1979. Since then, he has grown his business into one of the United Kingdom’s largest privately owned property and construction groups. Tough tasks have not deterred him, and his Rhinos organisation, which he bought and renamed in 1996, is flourishing as a result.

More than 15,000 fans watched the 40-22 victory over Wakefield Trinity on May 1, despite Leeds United hosting Burnley at Elland Road at exactly the same time. Ten rounds in, Rhinos are top of the Super League table. The major trophies since Caddick’s arrival with Gary Hetherington comprise eight Super League titles, four Challenge Cups and three World Club Challenges. Perhaps just as impressive has been the £45million redevelopment of the neighbouring rugby and cricket stadiums, which began in 2017 and was completed without any public funding.

Besides all this, Caddick is passionate about rugby union, having first played the sport for Castleford Grammar School in shoes instead of boots. A lock forward, he counted John Spencer, Richard “Froggy” France and Sir Ian McGeechan as team-mates at Headingley FC and encouraged John Winterbottom, father of the former England flanker Peter and secretary of that club, to contact Roundhay RUFC about the merger that eventually gave birth to Leeds RUFC in 1992.

Upon buying the city’s 13-a-side club, Caddick also assumed control of the 15-a-side organisation. They became known as the Tykes, among other monikers, and rose from the third tier to reach the top flight in 2001. What they encountered there, however, cannot be repeated if a franchised Gallagher Prem is to function.

“We won the Powergen Cup in 2005, but it was leaking money like there was no tomorrow and wasn’t going anywhere,” Caddick says. “They were putting the salary cap up every week and it felt like everyone was fiddling it. They [other owners] would laugh at you in meetings. It wasn’t a game I was prepared to get involved in.”

Receiving equal funding from central revenues was a constant battle for Leeds from their first steps in the Premiership, even before they yo-yoed up and down over four consecutive campaigns of relegation and promotion between 2005 and 2009. Caddick remembers a stage at which the total value of his P-share — or perpetual stake in the league — was slashed to 45/80ths of what was brought in by “founder members” of the top tier. At one ground, a club official asked him if he was there for the rugby league.

Leeds struggled to keep their academy products, could not attract consistent crowds and were relegated again in 2011. They tried to resist, but were forced to sell their P-share to Exeter Chiefs a year later for £5million — a sum supposedly determined by an independent valuation — having failed to rebound immediately from the Championship. By this point, Bristol had been out of the Premiership for a year longer than Leeds. This was the “final nail in the coffin” for Caddick’s direct involvement in rugby union, although he continued to contribute millions in sponsorship.

“I thought the guy at Exeter was a great guy,” Caddick says of Tony Rowe, the Exeter chairman. “He was so apologetic when he came to purchase our P-share. He almost cried in the meeting. He’s a top man. Apart from that … I thought there were a lot of men who had sold out of their own businesses and were playing with their money like confetti. There’s nothing wrong with that; football is driven by that, but you have to get your foundations right in sport.”

Caddick grins with a hint of mischief. He had suggested that Tony Collins’s compelling book on the formation of rugby league, 1895 & All That, would be essential preparation for this interview. “The prejudice continues,” Caddick says of how Leeds were treated in rugby union. “It started in 1895 and, to me, it’s still there. I felt it was clear we weren’t wanted and were never welcomed. If you want a headline, there it is — the prejudice continues.”

Prem Rugby, to its credit, has made significant administrative changes over recent years, launching a seven-person independent sporting commission, which has evolved into a more robust professional rugby board, and a financial monitoring panel. Salary-cap regulations have sharper teeth. Investment from Red Bull in Newcastle and Sir James Dyson in Bath, with Exeter on the verge of being taken over by the American billionaire Bill Foley, has endorsed those governance reforms, and there seems to be a mentality among club decision-makers that a rising tide will lift all boats.

The newly promoted Rotherham Titans will join Doncaster, who have announced their pivot to a part-time model, in the Champ next season. If a team from Yorkshire joins an expanded Prem in 2029, though, Caddick would be surprised. “They want £20million for a P-share to lose £8-9million a year,” he says. “Nobody in Yorkshire is that daft. Who’s going to do it, and where are they going to play? There are no answers.

“I think the boat sailed some time ago. I honestly think now that the young kids in Yorkshire are thinking, ‘I want to be a rugby league player.’ I think the sport is on the up and parents are seeing a cleaner, faster game as more attractive. The stigma of league being a muck-and-bullets sport has gone. That makes it more attractive to spectators and, in Yorkshire, it’s got a grip.”

Caddick regrets that there has not been more collaboration between league and union and believes the latter has struggled to adapt to a television audience. He is adamant union should tweak its scoring system to make penalties worth two points and reduce pick-and-go sequences somehow. To increase alignment, he would make tries worth five points in league as well.

AMT Headingley, the home of Leeds Rhinos, hosted 12,000 spectators last week for the union varsity match between the University of Leeds and Leeds Beckett. Caddick does not wish to front a side in that code again, yet his fondness for the sport remains. “Let me be absolutely clear: I have no interest in owning another Premiership club,” he insists. “But if someone wants to put one together and play here, great.” Helping Sale Sharks or Newcastle Red Bulls to formalise links with the Yorkshire production line and even host “four or five” fixtures per season at Headingley appeals to Caddick.

“We’re doing a new training ground and there will be opportunity there,” Caddick, a devoted family man who brought his daughter, Allie Hulme, on to the board of directors last year, continues. “There is room to do a union academy and a league academy as well as the Rhinos. While we’re doing that, I’d like to talk to Sale and Newcastle and show them what our plans are. If they want to be part of it, they can.

“I run a business here, and if I can get five Premiership games here in the winter to go with summer rugby [league] and Test-match cricket, it improves my plan. We’ve got permission to do concerts here now. With Premiership games here, I could leave a legacy for rugby union after all the effort we’ve put in.”

In the meantime, Rhinos are keeping Caddick occupied. Reminders of rugby league heritage are palpable at Headingley. Jamie Jones-Buchanan, a prominent part of the sport’s golden age, has succeeded Hetherington as chief executive and is an engaging spokesman. Jamie Peacock and Danny McGuire, who has recently returned to Rhinos in a backroom role, were two more modern greats that were in attendance for the win over Wakefield.

On the field, Ryan Hall and Kallum Watkins, who have a combined age of 73, are still trucking among younger stars like Jarrod O’Connor, Brodie Croft and Keenan Palasia. An imminent partnership between the National Rugby League (NRL) — rugby league’s top flight in Australia and New Zealand — and the Super League is intriguing. The latter’s salary cap is £2.1million at present, with exemptions that can boost spending on the squad to £4million. That is less than half what Prem sides can splurge, but could rise soon enough. The NRL salary cap is more than £6million, and Caddick is enthusiastic about an injection of some Aussie impetus.

“I will admit that the NRL have a softer market in Australia because football isn’t as big,” he says. “But they’re still really good at what they do and they have momentum with them. Since Red Bull have come into Newcastle [in the Prem], they’ve lost just about every game, but they’re getting much better crowds.

“What’s changed? It’s been sold-out because Red Bull have that expectation and, in sport, you need that to drive people. The NRL wants to narrow the gap between our competitions and they are not going to lower their salary cap.”

Caddick has contacted a senior figure at the RFU about the prospect of a Prem franchise in Yorkshire and is waiting on a reply. Would he like his pessimism to be proven unfounded?

“I am poor at failing,” Caddick admits. “Once I’ve set my goals out, I like to achieve something. We gave it a hell of a kick of the can [with a Leeds-based rugby union team] but, at the end of the day, I couldn’t justify it. I was spending my grandchildren’s inheritance.

“I wish them well and I hope it is done well, but if you set up a new union club in Yorkshire, you’re going to get journeymen who will want a lot more money. The only time you start being successful is when you have ten or 12 homegrown players come through, who want to play for each other. That takes time as well as money. Who is willing to do it? That is the question.”

A tricky question, no doubt. But surely one that is more likely to find an answer with Caddick as a sounding board at the very least.

Click here to read article