I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to everyone who visits the Totalrl.com website.
I’m sure there will be some Rugby League presents filling up a few Christmas stockings – and I would suggest that the latest edition of the Rugby League Yearbook, edited by Tim Butcher and Danny Spencer, would be an ideal candidate. If you don’t have it already, you can still get a copy for the New Year.
The group of fans I feel happiest for are the Salford supporters, who have endured a horrendous 2025 but at last can see light at the end of the tunnel after the RFL announced this week that it had approved a phoenix club under the guidance of their former player Mason Caton-Brown and his two fellow directors Malcolm Crompton and Paul Hancock.
The new directors have moved quickly to appoint Ryan Brierley as the club’s new chief executive.
So after a year of having an ownership team that betrayed all its promises and certainly didn’t seem to care too much about the damage they inflicted on the club, the new ownership clearly has Salford at heart, as does the new CEO.
That doesn’t mean they will be able to conjure rabbits out of a hat, however.
They have just over three weeks to put a squad together that will face Oldham in the first game of the new season.
No doubt they will announce a new head coach shortly, and then they will begin to announce a playing squad, which I’m sure will include plenty of loan players from other clubs, all of whom will no doubt have plenty of goodwill towards the new owners of the club.
The good thing is that every announcement they make will be treated as a major story, generating them plenty of publicity, at least among Rugby League fans.
In some respects that will be the easy part, however.
I suspect their biggest problem will be putting together an administration for the club at such short notice to establish a ticketing, operational and social media organisation, among other things.
That problem will be amplified by the fact that the intellectual property of the club, including the Red Devils moniker, currently belongs to the company Salford City Reds (2013) Limited that is about to be liquidated, with the liquidator able to sell those elements to the highest bidder.
I don’t know whether the new directors will try to acquire those assets as opposed to creating new intellectual properties, but I would like to see the ‘Red Devils’ moniker continue, primarily because it has been associated with Salford RLFC for such a long time.
Mason Caton-Brown, who is still only 32 years old, spent three seasons with Salford from 2014 to 2016, before later spells with Wakefield and Toronto, before retiring in 2019 to pursue a business career when he was aged just 26.
Since then he has mainly spent his time building up a property portfolio.
He still retains a home in Salford and, when I spoke to him this week, he admitted that that three years with the club had made a big impression on him and had given him the motivation to step in to rescue the club when it needed a new owner.
“The Salford supporters were always great with me when I played for them,” he told me.
“And they continued to be good with me, even when I came back to Salford with Wakefield.
“I came to live in Salford and still have a home there and, when I saw what had happened to the club, I wanted to step in to help.
“When I played for the club, I was sponsored by Paul Hancock, and since then he and I have worked together in business, as I have with Malcolm Thornton, who now lives in Australia.
“We were able to present a convincing business plan to the Rugby Football League and I’m very pleased that they approved it and gave us the green light, as did Salford City Council with an agreement to use the stadium.
“When we play our first game on 16th January I’m hoping that we can make the game a celebration for the whole Salford community.
“We recognise that we have a major task to put a squad together in time, but we are confident we can do it.”
And in doing that, I’m sure they have installed a CEO with great potential in Ryan Brierley, who I am also hoping to speak to in the near future.
Ryan, who has developed a business career in parallel with his playing career, has Salford ingrained in his heart and I’m sure he will pull every string to ensure the club not only survives but thrives.
He will need to, because as a phoenix club Salford won’t get any distribution from the RFL for the forthcoming season.
Despite that, I wish Ryan, Mason and everyone connected with the club my best wishes for a very successful 2026 season.
Martyn Sadler is the editor of League Express