Wakefield Trinity reach maiden Super League Grand Final after swift revival
Wakefield Trinity will meet Warrington at Old Trafford on Saturday in the Super League Grand Final, appearing before more than 70,000 spectators; the club’s run to the title decider traces back 965 days. This is Wakefield’s first appearance in a Super League Grand Final.
The turnaround followed a late-2023 takeover by boyhood fan Matt Ellis, who invested £10m in the club, its playing squad and stadium works after Wakefield were relegated from Super League in 2023. At the time of the takeover Belle Vue had fallen into disrepair and the club’s prospects looked bleak; planning permission to redevelop the ground was granted in 2023 and the reworked side that began at Siddal in the Challenge Cup in February 2024 set a new course. Trinity won the Championship to secure an immediate return to Super League, reached the playoffs last year and have now advanced to the Grand Final for the first time.
On the field and in the town the impact has been marked: average home attendances were below 5,000 three years ago and have risen to over 9,000 this season, Grand Final merchandise sold out before it arrived at the club shop, and Ellis has warned Belle Vue may require further redevelopment to accommodate supporters after around 20,000 plan to travel to Old Trafford. The club’s rise has shifted local attention away from neighbouring teams towards Trinity.
Jay Pitts, who will retire after the Grand Final, discussed the long path back: “When I made my debut in 2008 they were talking about getting a new stadium back then, that’s how long it’s taken,” he said. Pitts returned to Wakefield in 2020 after a decade away, having rejoined during a period when the club was fighting for survival, and added: “It wasn’t a nice place to come,” he admits. “The stadium was broken, everything was leaking … it was hard to get people through the door to come here. We just didn’t have the finances to do anything. The club has had its issues, that’s for sure.”
Winger Tom Johnstone, who made his debut in 2015 and returned when Wakefield were promoted back to Super League last year, recalled the club’s earlier condition and the indifference that surrounded it: “It was a bit of a shambles,” he recalls of his early days. “In 2022, our pre-season camp was on an army base in Sheffield but the weather was bad … so it just ended up a bit of a piss-up. Nobody really seemed to care about Wakefield Trinity. Now I’m walking my son to school, I’ve got people leaning out of their cars wishing us good luck. The whole city has gone crazy. It’s unbelievable.” The article notes that before Ellis’s investment visiting players sometimes had to sit on plastic chairs on a makeshift bench and players trained on surfaces “barely fit for amateurs.”
Former owner Michael Carter, who sold the club to Ellis in 2023 after a decade of trying to keep Belle Vue afloat, will be in the stands on Saturday. The reporting also highlights the volunteers and long-serving supporters who kept the club going through repeated financial crises, and identifies a new core group of players — including Johnstone, Pitts, Caius Faatili and Caleb Hamlin-Uele, the latter two recruited from the Australian lower grades and already described as Wakefield favourites — poised to join the club’s pantheon.
Wakefield point to a lineage of past heroes when noting the scale of what is at stake, with Neil Fox, Harold Poynton and Ian Brooke cited as figures from the 1960s era that produced Wakefield’s last major trophy. A victory on Saturday would hand Wakefield their first major trophy since 1968 and close a 58-year gap; their immediate next step is the Super League Grand Final against Warrington at Old Trafford on Saturday.