Peter Deakin

Visionary administrator who transformed the marketing of rugby union and rugby league

Peter Deakin, rugby administrator, rugby player and policeman: born Oldham, Lancashire 18 October 1953; twice married (three sons); died Warrington, Cheshire 1 February 2003.

As a visionary administrator in both rugby union and rugby league, Peter Deakin was the man who most influenced the face that they now show to the world. Nobody has put his stamp on both codes of rugby in Britain at a time of great change in the same way as Deakin.

Peter Deakin was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1953. His roots were firmly in rugby league, particularly in the amateur club Oldham St Annes, for whom he and his four brothers all played, although Deakin's family spent two years living in Adelaide in his teens. On their return he made a number of appearances for Oldham's professional side as a second-row forward before a serious elbow injury forced his retirement.

He worked in a number of jobs, including as a policeman in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, before joining the influential magazine Open Rugby as marketing executive. It was there that his ideas of different, more dynamic ways of selling the game to a wider public began to take shape.

His Road to Damascus experience came in the United States, however, where Deakin was the driving force behind an exhibition game between Wigan and Warrington in Milwaukee in 1989 and where he later spent time absorbing the American approach to presenting sport as family entertainment. When he returned to Britain, he needed a stage upon which to put those principles into operation and he found it at what was then Bradford Northern.

He transformed what had been a stolid, traditional club, still firmly typecast in the days of flat caps and whippets, into an all-singing, all-dancing epitome of what the strange, new concept of summer rugby was all about. A team whose dour image was once summed up by its nickname of the Steam Pigs was rebranded as the Bradford Bulls and the match-day experience at Odsal was like no other in the game.

Not everyone approved, but the transformation was startling; from 1995-96, the last season of winter rugby league, to 1997, average attendances at Odsal more than trebled as the club established itself as the most vibrant in Super League, as the revamped summer competition was called. Bullmania, as it became generally known, could not rely entirely on glitzy pre-match entertainment and energetic promotion. The team had to be good enough to underpin it all and there again Deakin was instrumental in achieving that.

He brought his old friend, the Australian Brian Smith, to Odsal as coach; in fact, the two amounted to a package deal. Smith and his successor, Matthew Elliott, revitalised the team on the field, built around the charismatic New Zealander Robbie Paul, just as Deakin had done off it. It was that off-field revolution that was truly ground-breaking and it took only a small leap of faith to conclude that the game as a whole could benefit from the same philosophy.

There was general approval when Deakin was appointed marketing director of Super League (Europe) in 1997, with a brief to bring the same flair to bear on all the clubs in the competition, but it proved the most frustrating time of his career in rugby. During his short time at SLE, he felt marginalised, but he was about to make a more radical move.

Deakin's reputation had spread well beyond the confines of rugby league and, after just two months at SLE, he was head-hunted by rugby union. The Saracens' owner, Nigel Wray, was an admirer and took him to Vicarage Road to try to enliven the club the way he had Bradford. Union was trying to adapt to the changed world of professional rugby, with the attendant need to generate more revenue. Although the ground at Watford was a very different place from Odsal, Deakin had much of the same success in generating an exhilarating match-day atmosphere, even persuading a large proportion of the crowd to wear the fez which he made the club's trademark.

Where Saracens led, other clubs followed, but rugby league had always been Deakin's first love and he yearned for a club of his own in that code. That club, in 1999, was Warrington, where he became chief executive. Again, Deakin's promotional flair was in evidence, but despite high-profile signings like the Australian scrum-half Allan Langer, supporters' awakened expectations were not translated into success on the field.

Deakin also failed to engineer a ground-sharing scheme, under which Sale rugby union club would move in with Warrington at a new stadium in the town. After just one season, there was another twist in that saga when Deakin left Warrington to become chief executive at Sale. It was as though neither code of rugby could, on its own, offer sufficient scope for his restless energies.

Sale, with the league convert Jason Robinson as the keynote player Deakin had always believed a club needs, achieved great success with him at the helm, before he returned for a second stint with Saracens.

When he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, Deakin moved back to the north to be near his family. For all the breadth of his rugby experience, he once defined his perfect rugby day as watching Oldham St Anne's with his brothers. Through all his varied adventures in the two codes, he preferred to describe himself as "a grass-roots rugby league man".

Peter Deakin was also remembered on the other side of the world. When Smith heard of his death, he dedicated his Parramatta side's victory in the World Sevens in Sydney that weekend to his former colleague at Bradford. "I got a lot of credit for our success with the Bulls – but really it was down to Peter," he said, adding that Peter Deakin's perception and energy had changed the game. That could be said of both codes.

Dave Hadfield