Staff let go via phone and players in tears: Newcastle Falcons’ year of turmoil

Special report: Twelve months of unrest over treatment of staff has culminated in Alex Codling’s team cut adrift at foot of the Premiership

At the start of 2023, Newcastle, under head coach Dave Walder, were building momentum. The Falcons had just won four of their last six Premiership matches with stability and cohesion growing. Around the corner, however, tumult was awaiting.
By the end of the season, Newcastle lost two of their three starting front-rowers – George McGuigan and Trevor Davison – as well as Walder. By the start of the ongoing campaign, the squad had experienced significant turnover. Under new head coach Alex Codling, the Falcons currently sit bottom of the league without a win to their name.
The winds of change had arrived at Newcastle. The gusts were necessary, the club said, in order to survive. This was a season, of course, in which three Premiership sides – Worcester, Wasps and London Irish – all went to the wall. Financial sustainability and the cutting of cloth in accordance to budget had become not just aims for the club, but vital.
Such swingeing measures would inevitably cause upset. Professional rugby is a cut-throat business where vast sums of money and contracts are involved, after all.
Eventually, however, the avenue of financial necessity intersects with treating those at the club with the respect they deserve, rather than as pieces of meat.
Telegraph Sport has spoken to several sources – some of whom do not wish to be identified – who accused the club of significant failings in this regard. One such is Carl Fearns, the abrasive back-rower who left Newcastle at the end of the previous campaign and who, after a stint in Carcassonne, announced his retirement from the sport last week.
Fearns, 34, felt the need to speak out owing to the explosive post-match interview Codling gave after the trouncing at Leicester earlier this month. The Falcons’ head coach, in his inaugural season in the North East, questioned the direction of the club in a very public manner after a run of tough results with a relatively underpowered squad.
‘I am emotional, I love what I do, I’ll protect these boys as long as I’m here… it’s a pretty tough night.’An emotional Alex Codling speaks after @FalconsRugby’s eighth straight loss of the season. #LEIvNEW | #GallagherPrem pic.twitter.com/Br7BNrWw5g
Fearns spent two seasons at Kingston Park, recruited by former director of rugby Dean Richards. Fearns explains that he was given a verbal contract offer from the club’s head of recruitment, former hooker Matt Thompson, over a coffee at the Twin Farms pub, close to the Falcons’ stadium. He says he was then kept in suspense over the course of two months with no clarity over his future – and no contract offer. 
Fearns says that he did not mind having to leave. He understood the budgetary changes that were taking place at the club but the indecision and mind-changing left him worrying about his livelihood and providing for his family. This account has been corroborated by another anonymous player at the club, and Telegraph Sport has seen the communication between Fearns and Thompson.
“Around January 6, I had a face-to-face meeting with Matt Thompson, over a coffee, and he told me he wanted to keep me at the club,” Fearns tells Telegraph Sport. “He said I was an experienced player and that next season it would be a younger squad, and that he wanted my experience around. He said he wanted to keep me and that he’d send a contract through next week. That’s how it ended.
“A week or two went by and I asked him if he had a contract for me. He said: ‘No, sorry, nothing at the moment.’ It continued, the next week after that I asked again. ‘Not at the moment, not yet, sorry,’ he said again.
“At the end of January, I messaged asking if the position had changed. I had a family, I needed to plan, I could be finishing my career, I needed to find a job, I had a mortgage. He didn’t reply until I messaged again in March.
“I’m not a stupid bloke. I’m an old pro. I knew what the craic was. After a third week of him saying ‘not yet’, I knew exactly what was going on.
“I think the man is a coward. You have to treat people the right way. I was pretty decent about it in the messages. I understood if the club was in a financial position whereby the situation surrounding me might have changed. It might have been a bad thing for me to hear, but I just needed to know whether it was yes or no.
“In March, I told him what I thought and he replied saying thanks for the message and that the club was looking for a new coach. That’s all I got, really. I never got a straight answer.
“I sensed something was wrong. If I was a young player, it could have been a case of me leaving at the 12th hour with no job, a family.”
Telegraph Sport has since met with both Thompson and Semore Kurdi, Newcastle’s owner, where the duo admitted failings in the communication around Fearns’s lack of contractual renewal, explaining that the club was in a transitional period, with sustainability and a long-term project – based around a core of youthful talent – the goal, but that the treatment received by their former back-rower should not have occurred.
“We were sad to hear last week that Carl will be retiring from playing professional rugby, but he can look back on a great career,” Newcastle told Telegraph Sport in a statement.
“With the benefit of hindsight, we acknowledge that the communication around his contractual situation could have been handled more clearly, but we thank Carl for his service and wish him all the best for his life after rugby.”
Line-out coach Scott MacLeod’s departure from the club, Fearns explains, is another example of poor treatment. With the arrival of Codling, whose specialism is the line-out, MacLeod was informed by Thompson over the phone at the end of last season that his services would not be required at the club for the following campaign. 
An hour later, unaware that the former line-out coach’s contract had not been renewed, Codling called MacLeod to ask what he would bring to the coaching team next season. Newcastle did not wish to respond to Fearns’s account of MacLeod’s departure, although it is understood the club have apologised privately.
“I do have sympathy for Alex because, like I said, I know what’s going on around the club,” Fearns adds. “But if he had done his due diligence before he arrived, he might have understood what was going on at the club. But, Thommo, as he did to me, maybe he promised him things that he was never going to get? Maybe that happened? All he had to do was do some due diligence – it was clear the way the club was going, getting rid of all the experienced forwards in the group.
“If they want to cut their cloth accordingly, that’s well within their rights, but you have to treat the players as human beings – and treat them well.
“We had one of the best line-outs for years under Scott MacLeod and he’s a great coach. Getting rid of him made no sense.”
The departures of McGuigan and Davison were high profile; not just because the duo were either England squad members or in the conversation regarding international call-ups, but because they came in the middle of the season, with immediate effect, within three months of each other – and both players left to Premiership rivals. One source who did not wish to be identified told Telegraph Sport that Davison was left in tears at the side of the training pitch.
“The way that George left the club… We came in on a Monday and George just stood up in a team meeting and said: ‘Lads, I’m going to Gloucester.’ Some of the coaches weren’t even aware,” Fearns says. “When things like that happen, the whole squad – which, with less funds, relied on being a close unit – started questioning why we were doing it, if people were being treated like that?
“Trevor was going to Northampton, then he wasn’t. I think he was told the deal was off, then he came in one day and Thommo told him he was going to Saints tomorrow. It seemed as if the moves had been imposed upon both George and Trevor.
“By the end, I felt for Dave and all the staff who were standing up in front of us and giving us messages about being the ‘true north’ and being tight as a group, but on a weekly basis something else would happen which would cut their legs from under them. I would have left if I were Dave.”
Newcastle did not wish to comment on the departures of either McGuigan or Davison when approached. Both players also declined to speak to Telegraph Sport. It is understood, however, that factors outside the club’s control and exterior contract negotiations were part of the reason for the immediacy of both players’ exits.