Angry London Irish players and staff will continue to demand answers on how they find themselves unemployed, after the club was ejected from the Gallagher Premiership.
Employees were today coming to terms with the Exiles' demise, with a catalogue of questions for owner Mick Crossan and the US consortium at the centre of a failed takeover bid.
Irish were thrown out of the English league structure last night after failing to meet a final RFU deadline to prove financial robustness for the 2023-24 season.
Off-field staff spent yesterday at the Exiles' Hazelwood training centre, counting down the hours and minutes to that RFU deadline only to discover there would be no dramatic rescue.
Players and coaches logged in to a tea-time Zoom call, along with staff at the Sunbury training ground, to be delivered a curt explanation that the Exiles had failed to find a funding route for the new season.
Members of the playing squad especially were understood to have been left frustrated and upset by the lack of detail in explanation as to why the Exiles now face administration.
Chief executive Adrian Alli was among those tasked with delivering the news that a club with 124 years of history had gone to the wall.
Crossan did not step in to prove funding for the forthcoming season to the RFU, and that meant Irish joined Worcester and Wasps as the third Premiership club to fall this season.
Irish's 100 players and staff will now start job hunting in earnest, but will do so with nagging questions on quite how a takeover first floated in October dragged on for close to eight months and yielded scant progress.
The NUE Capital-led US consortium that had pledged to transform Irish's fortunes for the better instead wound up unwittingly helping to bring the club to its knees.
The ex-NFL and NBA stars attached to the project were never tasked with providing the funding, rather offering star power and investment connections. When it came to the absolute crunch, however, all promises from consortium representatives of "institutional funding" evaporated.
The consortium never furnished the RFU with any substantive detail on either the composition of takeover personnel or any source of funds.
Former Premiership Rugby chief executive Howard Thomas and California lawyer Alfred 'Chip' Sloan were facing a glut of questions on their failure to drag Irish's takeover across the line, having jumped on board with the US consortium.
Spokespeople for the NUE Capital enterprise had insisted for weeks that the deal to buy Irish was being worked on "around the clock". But mystery always surrounded the structure of the deal and the consortium.
"People are still in shock and cannot understand how so many people had so much hope for so long on a deal that now feels as though it was never really that close," said a source close to Irish's playing squad.
The Exiles sit more than £30million in the red, and without Crossan — who bought the club in 2013 — writing off the debt, they will now fold. Irish's players — still owed 50 per cent of May's wages — are now free agents.
Bath are expected to move for wing Henry Arundell and back-row forward Tom Pearson. Northampton have held interest in Exiles skipper Matt Rogerson, while prop Oliver Hoskins is thought to have scope to secure a new deal in England.
Crossan, Thomas and other representatives of the US consortium were all contacted for comment.
