Michelle Orange

When you imagine how negotiations to buy a rugby club would go, you might think of secretive boardroom meetings filled with suit-and-tie wearing executives. But in the case of the Sale Sharks takeover in 2016, it all started, at least the first inklings of it, in a New York apartment over a chicken chow mein. 

It was simple enough at first. Simon and Michelle Orange had moved across the pond from Manchester in 2009 in search of a change of scene. “We loved New York, we used to go all the time and just fancied living somewhere else,” says Michelle to Rugby Journal as we meet at the Sale Sharks training ground in Carrington. “We had the best lifestyle – Simon would be up at six in the morning and be done with work by two in the afternoon, so then we’d go to matinees on Broadway or to the cinema or go on a bike ride, it was a really fun time. But then bloody Steve Diamond came over.

“He was coaching Russia at the time, and they were playing the USA in a friendly, so he came around and we had a Chinese. It was around 2012, 2013; he started saying that Brian Kennedy [then Sale owner] had probably had enough, he’d severely reduced the money he was investing in the club. Steve, as he always did amazingly, was working to the bare minimum, and actually produced decent results.”

Decent, however, wasn’t enough for the man with over 350 appearances for Sale, hence his meeting with Simon, a long-time friend, to drum up interest. “I didn’t think Steve was serious, I didn’t think Simon was serious,” continues Michelle. “We were living in New York, and why on earth would you want to buy a rugby team? Then, around 2015/16 when we were back living here, Dimes was inviting us around every weekend to go to the rugby. I’d say to Simon, ‘no way you’re buying a rugby club, over my dead body’. 

“But I got my psychology wrong, I should have known better, as once Simon is told he can’t do something, he simply does it. I should have said, ‘that’s genius – what more can a girl want but to be surrounded by a load of athletic good-looking young men?’.” 

Sale-born Michelle’s concerns weren’t just business-related, they were also personal. In the late 1990s she had spent a year working at Sale in corporate hospitality and endured a horrible experience with a colleague that soured her view of the place. “For a good few years I didn’t go to the rugby. I hated it, I had such bad connections with it, I didn’t want to go.” 

However, in June 2016, after sixteen years of ownership under Brian Kennedy, Sale Sharks was acquired by Simon Orange. Ged Mason, CEO of Morson International, also became a co-owner. As it stands, Simon and Ged own a 75/25 share respectively.

Eight years on, it’s safe to say Michelle’s reticence towards their ownership of Sale has totally evaporated, in fact her view has taken a complete 360 – she’s probably the most passionate Shark in the building. “I got it wrong, and I’m glad I got it really wrong, because I absolutely love it.” 

Taking us on a tour around their training facility, the former base of Manchester City and Bury before it became theirs in 2020, the pride at what has been built over the past few years at Sale is clear. The place is a hive of activity from the canteen – “they’re the real heroes around here” – to the offices, the gym and playing pitches, where the men’s side are preparing for their upcoming semi-final against Bath.

Michelle checks in on all the goings-on as we pop our heads in each room, as interested in what’s going on in the kit room as the ticket office. “I don’t technically have a job here, I just come in and … meddle,” she jokes. “I’m like a minister without portfolio. I do a lot of work on the women’s team, but I’ll do whatever needs to be done. I just love being here, Carrington days are just the best days of the week.

“Originally, I didn’t come in very much,” she adds. “When we were at the old training base, Dimes was very much old school, and didn’t even particularly like Simon going into the club. But he made the decision that I become a trustee for what was then the Community Trust, now the Sale Sharks Foundation, and because the office was also at the training round, I’d go in. Then people started asking me questions about certain things, and I slowly got more and more involved. 

“I think it’s quite good for them to see us, that we really care,” she adds. “It was telling that at the Premiership Rugby awards the other day, there weren’t any other owners there from any of the other clubs. Why aren’t they there?”

Simon and Michelle have made clear their devotion to Sale Sharks – it’s in their will – bringing stable, reliable and significant investment to the club. But more than just funding, the club has become such a part of their lives, they even take it home with them. 

“Simon and I now live in a house that we first lived in together when it was apartments. We were actually living there when we got married. It was a big old house, and I hatched a plan to see if we could buy some of the other apartments and knock through, and eventually we spent five years converting the whole thing back into one property.

“Now it’s become our Shark House. Dorian West stays overnight every week when we have back-to-back training days; Nav, our physio, lives in Sheffield, so he’ll stay over if the weather is bad and he can’t get home; WillGriff John was on injury cover for us, so wasn’t expecting to be here, so he’s been staying with us this week. And we’ve got one bunk room that sleeps eleven, so we’ve had four or five of the Sale Women stay over after a supper party.”

Money and investment goes a long way, but so does their personal touch, with Michelle leading the way on that front. “We just want to try and create that best atmosphere that you can, whether that’s putting on Shark Fest [their end of season party], taking the boys to Marbella [their trip after the final last year], or simple things – choosing what we’re going to give someone at Christmas, or just putting your arm around a player and seeing if they’re alright.”

Rugby Journal is visiting Michelle a few weeks later than planned after the sad passing of her father, the man who had first got her into rugby and, ultimately, the reason why she now owns a rugby club. “I’d always been into rugby because I watched the Five Nations with my dad on black and white in the 70s,” she says. “I remember watching the All Blacks doing the Haka at a very early age thinking, what are these men doing?

“Dad always loved his rugby, and I was always a daddy’s girl – he was a wing or full-back, not to any great level, but he played.”

Born about half a mile from Sale’s old ground at Heywood Road, where her dad would take her to games, she grew up as the youngest sibling of three, her sister six years older and her brother eighteen months older. “He hates rugby with a passion, he doesn’t even really follow our scores, it drives me mad. 

“My mum was German, she came over at the age of eighteen after the Second World War on a programme to train nurses. She was posted down in Tunbridge Wells where my dad lived. They got married in 1961, they lived in India at the time because my dad worked there. 

“Mum sadly passed away in 2017; that was why we came home from New York, she got diagnosed with cancer in 2014. My dad was due to have knee replacements, which were scheduled to happen during covid, but they got postponed. His mobility completely dried up, and by the time he was ready to go have surgery his heart wasn’t strong enough, because he hadn’t really done any movement for about eighteen months.”

While Michelle had been a rugby fan since childhood, the same couldn’t be said for Simon. “Simon and I have been together for 35 years, I met him one week after I turned eighteen,” she says. “He grew up in Wythenshawe, a really deprived, rough area of Manchester. He was into his football, he was actually quite good, if he had the right opportunities, I’m sure he could have made it at some level.

“When I met him, he had no interest in rugby. But about five years after we’d got together, he joined a golf club, and he got introduced to Steve Smith [former England captain and Sale player]. I knew Steve Smith, because he used to live about two doors down from us when I was growing up, while he was in his proper heyday,” she reveals. “We lived in a row of townhouses in Sale, and I think the week he moved in was the first weekend he captained England.

“Rugby was a little different in those days – he used to train at Sale on a Thursday night and then come home at quarter past eleven when The Little B, the pub by Heywood Road, would shut. He’d bring the whole team back and start having parties, so our noisy neighbour became the bane of my dad’s life, despite him being such a big rugby fan.” Endless nights of partying sometimes took their toll. “Once, when I was studying my O-levels, I had to go and flick his fuse box off in the middle of the night,” she reminisces with a smile. “I remember it really clearly – it was a 70s townhouse, all these huge windows, all open with them partying. I tried to knock, tried ringing, nothing. In the end I got really pissed off, and all our fuse boxes were in little utility cupboards outside, so I just went and knocked his off. Of course, Steve wouldn’t have had the ability at that point in his evening’s entertainment to put his fuses back on, so the party ended.

“So, Simon joins Mere Golf Club, this is ten years later, and he says, ‘I’ve met Steve Smith’, and I was like, ‘he’s a bugger’, but we all became really good friends.”

It wasn’t long until Simon caught the rugby bug. “It was Simon’s golf partner Bob that first took him to a game at Heywood Road. He came back very sheepish on a Friday afternoon and said, ‘I’m playing golf in the morning and then I’m going to the rugby in the afternoon.’ I said, ‘where?’, and he tells me, ‘Sale, Heywood Road or something?’, and I said, ‘I’ll come’. That’s when he realised I actually really liked rugby and we started going.”

Adding to the loss of Michelle’s father, Simon’s friend Bob also passed away just a few days before. “The two men responsible for us owning a rugby club passed away within four days. Last week, manifesting the win [in their final league game against Saracens], I spoke to some of the players and said, ‘can we have two tries, one for Bob and one for my dad’, and we got two tries and we got the win, it all fell into place. They’re up there pulling strings.”

Michelle may thrive in her role as minister without portfolio, but when it came to Sale Sharks Women’s side, she has been the figurehead from the start.

“I became a trustee of the Sale Sharks Foundation in 2017, I’d go out to our community programmes and sit down with the amazing girls who work in our department, and obviously they all played rugby,” she says. “A lot of them were at Waterloo, we didn’t have a women’s team, and when the opportunity came up to bid for a place for what was then the Allianz Premier 15s, they just hounded me.”

‘They’ were Georgie Perris-Redding, her sister India, Vicky Irwin and Laura Perrin, who all worked for the foundation at the time. “You can’t really say no to Georgie or India, or Vicky, I mean, you definitely don’t say no to Vicky. And so, I thought, well why not?”

“We bid for our place, in fact our interview with the RFU was on Zoom because it was day two of lockdown. On the day, Mark Cueto [then commercial director] couldn’t do it because he had covid, so Simon and I and the rest of the bid team were all sat in our homes, it was bizarre, but obviously we luckily got our place. But then it got really tough – we couldn’t recruit like normal.”

At the time of the bid in 2020, Sale had Katy Daly-McLean on board as a player-coach, Darren Lamont in line to be DoR plus the likes of Georgie, India and Vicky. But that was it.

“We couldn’t recruit because we couldn’t even have training sessions,” she continues. “When we were allowed to start training, which I think was about August, September of that year, we couldn’t train here [at Carrington] because the men were then back in play and obviously covid policies were so strict. The girls could only train in groups of five, so we always knew that first season would be a struggle, but we actually did quite well.” 

With an inexperienced squad, Sale Sharks Women won four of their eighteen games to finish ninth in the table, with wins over Exeter Chiefs, Worcester Warriors and twice against DMP. In subsequent seasons, they remained in the bottom half of the table, and in the 2023/24 Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR) campaign, despite finishing the season on a massive high with wins away at Leicester and at home to playoff-bound Bristol, the Sharks still finished second-bottom of the table with thirteen points and three wins.

“It’s only been in the last twelve months I’ve realised there has been very little attention paid to the pathway for women and girls, and it’s certainly lagging behind in the north-west,” reflects Michelle. “Although we’ve got so many great local grassroots clubs that have all these amazing boys teams, I think in Trafford there’s just one girls team. That’s been a bit of a struggle. When you’re having to put your girls out against a Bristol squad that not only has eight Roses in it, but they’ve got most of the Welsh national team because of their proximity to Cardiff and Swansea, it’s difficult.

“I suppose I somewhat arrogantly thought that maybe the Roses would want to come back. But when actually you see that their contracts aren’t huge with the RFU, and you’ve got a salary cap of £190,000 this season, which has got to accommodate ideally 45 women, you can’t pay someone £50,000 to get them here. So why would you come play for Sale when we’re not performing, unless you’ve got a Morwenna Talling or Tysh Harper who are northern, who have the belief.

“It’s amazing how much home-grown talent we are beginning to nurture. The potential of the likes of Lizzy Duffy and Niamh Swailes speak for itself, and they are already knocking on the door of the elite England squad. Our work in the centres of excellence is seeing local girls come through who not only will be great for the club but are already being selected for the under-18s and under-20s England squads. The potential and the talent in the north is huge, and I’m just proud we can offer them a local elite team where they can pursue their passion and fly the flag for both region and country.”

Despite her concerns, Michelle is totally against the proposal that Red Roses could be drafted across the PWR clubs. “I think it’s a terrible idea,” she asserts. “These girls don’t get paid enough money to be told where they’re going to go and play. Players are settled, they’re not going to move, I completely get that, that’s why I think we need to find some ways to get some more equity in the game for the short term.

“What they need to do is give us some concessions, whether that be on the EQP [English Qualified Players] rules or the salary cap, just so we can try and build a more competitive squad so we can compete. Getting beat 65-0 doesn’t do the club any good, it doesn’t do the girls any good and it doesn’t do the league any good in terms of getting sponsors and broadcast deals. That’s what we’ve got to try and get through, and they’re working on it.”

The league’s EQP rule, that matchday squads must have an average of thirteen England qualified players, carries a five points deduction if broken, a sanction that’s hit just two teams this season, Sale and Leicester, who finished eighth and ninth in the table respectively. It’s been a point of controversy this season, a rule that was decided by the RFU rather than the shareholders of the PWR. For Michelle, and for many others, including foreign talent should be seen as a means to an end of developing young English talent, as Sale have experienced in their men’s side.

“When we bought Sale Sharks, the men’s side were finishing tenth, eleventh, and nobody was interested in coming to play for us because we weren’t successful, we weren’t sexy, and we were northern. So, if we were going to get better, we needed to bring some talent in and the only way we could bring talent in was going shopping overseas, and it was an absolute masterstroke.”

Jono Ross and Faf de Klerk were among the first of a South African contingent that have made their presence felt at Sale, not just in the Premiership but internally too.

“Faf de Klerk, being the absolute prime example, he was our golden unicorn and did absolute wonders for the profile of the club, and he’s left us with Raffi Quirke, Gus Warr and Nye Thomas, all of whom will represent England at number nine [Raffi already has two caps]. Without having Faf around, we would have never been able to nurture that England talent.”

The same logic should apply to the women’s game, Michelle believes, particularly for regions like the north-west where the game isn’t as developed. “You need to bring someone in to help them progress, they need to have peers on the pitch. Beatrice Rigoni [50-plus cap Italy international] has decided to come and play for us. The impact she has made, the experience she brings, the rugby knowledge, that star power can only have a positive impact on her Sale team-mates. Why in the short term should we be penalised for it? Why not say Leicester, Ealing, Sale, you can have a slightly lower EQP so your talent can develop and the competitiveness of the all the teams in the PWR becomes a little more equitable?

“If you don’t have Leicester or Sale, you don’t have a league, you can’t have a national league without any northern teams in it.

“It’s funny, I met with Lucy Wray [former Saracens CEO] and she said it’s really interesting having stepped away, that if I said all these things a year ago, she would have thought I was just whinging, but said she now completely gets it for the long-term benefit of the league.”

Whether it’s the unique challenges they face or the successes they’ve had, Sale Sharks being somewhat overlooked isn’t something new to the people here at Carrington, a point that is driven home on the day we arrive when a graphic on social media advertising Premiership semi-final tickets included players from Northampton, Saracens and Bath, but not Sale. 

“It is frustrating, it’s galling but we’re kind of used to it,” admits Michelle. “I don’t think it bothers us. This year we haven’t got one player in the Premiership team of the season, which is odd when we finished third. Yes, we have our superstars, but there’s no egos. Maybe that brotherhood mentality works.”

There is no doubt it’s working. Under Alex Sanderson, who came in as director of rugby in early 2021 after the departure of Steve Diamond, Sale have been to three semi-finals and a final, losing 35-25 to Saracens at Twickenham. This season and last season brought back-to-back playoff appearances – the last time Sale did that was in 2004/05 and 2005/06, which ended with a Premiership trophy.

“This season, just after Christmas we had eleven out of the first 23 properly battered,” says Michelle. “Even going into these last few games Johnny Hill was still out, Dan Du Preez, Nick Schonert, Sam Bedlow and Manu.” But Sale still made it to the play-offs, even if it was by the skin of their teeth, with an impressive 20-10 win away to Saracens on the final day of the regular season. With all the recent success, has Sale seen an increase in support?

“It’s a very tough environment,” admits Michelle – with Manchester United almost literally next door, and four-time consecutive Premiership winners Manchester City to compete with, she’s not wrong. 

“It’s a tough gig, but the commercial team does absolute wonders. Our attendances are up – yes, they are still the second lowest in the league, but for the environment we operate in, it’s pretty good going.” Last season Sale recorded an average gate of over 6,000 for the men, increasing to over 7,000 this season, and with a number of games sold out with over 10,000 supporters.

There is certainly momentum building here, and if they could add a second Premiership trophy to their cabinet next season, after losing in the semi-finals this term, it would have an immeasurable impact. “Hopefully it will put us back on the map and people will, for more than just one season, sit up and take notice,” says Michelle. “Who was it from Saracens with the photo of them sleeping with the trophy in their bed? Well, there will be photos of me sleeping with it. 

“Obviously, it would be great for the fans, hopefully it would be great for the region, but just for everyone here at Carrington who work so hard and give so much.”

With Simon and Michelle at the helm, they are going to keep fighting, even with the frustrations that come with owning a rugby club. “It gets harder at the higher level,” she says. “I went to an all-club meeting in January, there are so many different stakeholders with different views and ambitions it’s difficult to agree on a strategy.

“The reality of the environment is that the league is basically relying on the ownership of the ten clubs to keep club rugby at Premiership level alive. We’re going to be putting £30 million in between the ten clubs to support the game – that’s the total loss between the clubs – and there’s little understanding of the generosity of these ten owners. Without the ten clubs and their individual owners, you’ve not got a men’s league, you’ve not got a national team. 

“I get it; it’s sport, it’s business, everyone’s out for the best for the England team. It is getting better, the PGP [Professional Game Partnership] negotiations are getting closer, I just wish there was a bit more recognition for what the clubs do.”

The well-documented commitment of the Sale Sharks owners is no fad. That’s not to say it hasn’t been tough – at times they’ve worried if they could sustain their funding to the level of the salary cap, but there isn’t a moment they’ve wanted to be anywhere but leading Sale from the front.

“I don’t want to have to go into witness protection if we put the club down,” says Michelle. “It is my childhood club; I am so proud of what it has achieved in its long history. I think we’re very honest, good people would never do that to the club. 

“The aim is to get closer to break-even although that is difficult to imagine if we want to compete at the top. Crowds are up, we’ve got better sponsorship, but we’re in the fortunate position that we don’t have kids, or our own kids at least – we’ve got lots of baby Sharks. We don’t need to leave an inheritance to anyone, so we’re at that point where we’ll just spend what we’ve got.

“Ged and Simon both have very successful businesses. Both have done quite good deals this year. We’re hoping for Simon’s IPO to close in June [he sold his company CorpAcq for £1.2 billion earlier this year, with shares being sold on the New York Stock Exhange] and if that closes, then we will be able to put even more money into Sale Sharks. We will just carry on putting money into the club; we’ve never once thought about walking away.

“It’s a tough environment, it’s a tough business, you get all of these rumours about the financial hardship and stuff like that. It’s probably like a charitable donation. It’s like a very expensive, but very fun hobby, and it gives you this amazing family.

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Sarah Hewitt

This extract was taken from issue 26 of Rugby.
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