One familiar face around the club is former captain Ryan Brierley, who cut short his playing career to become their chief executive.<\/p>\n
Brierley departed midway through the 2025 season as part of a mass exodus of players as financial problems began to bite.<\/p>\n
The club he joined, Oldham, are who Salford will face on their Championship return.<\/p>\n
“It’s naturally the next step of my career. My retirement came a little sooner than expected but when an opportunity like this comes, I didn’t want to turn it down,” Brierley told BBC North West Tonight.<\/p>\n
“A Salford boy who supports and wants to help the club, when you get offered a chance to help and stay at Salford, you certainly don’t say no.”<\/p>\n
Although it is an immense achievement to get a squad together to contest the season, Brierley is under no illusions as to the situation the club are currently in as they find their feet after a 2025 to forget.<\/p>\n
“What I want to make the fans understand is that it won’t always be nice, either. People always want honesty until they don’t. But for us it’s about managing expectations,” he added.<\/p>\n
“We’re in a really vulnerable position but the realism from the fans has given me great confidence that I can be really open, honest, transparent and direct about how vulnerable we are right now.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got to protect my players. I don’t like the situation I’m putting them in but needs must.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One familiar face around the club is former captain Ryan Brierley, who cut short his playing career to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-372101","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}