Newcastle Red Bulls table £1m-a-year offer to prise Pollock from Northampton Saints

Newcastle Red Bulls have tabled a three-year contract offer to Northampton Saints and England back-row Henry Pollock understood to meet agent Eddie Hearn’s £1 million-per-year valuation of the 23-year-old, dealing a significant blow to Saints just hours after their director of rugby insisted he expected Pollock to stay.

Pollock is in the final year of his Northampton contract and has been free to negotiate with rival clubs since 1 July. Newcastle, backed by Austrian energy drinks giant Red Bull following last summer’s takeover, are keen to bring him to the North-East ahead of next season. The deal is structured as a backloaded arrangement that would see Pollock’s salary rise incrementally until he becomes the club’s marquee player in 2029.

The offer lands at a particularly awkward moment for Northampton. At the launch of the Gallagher Premiership season on Wednesday, Saints director of rugby Phil Dowson said he was confident Pollock would remain at Franklin’s Gardens, while acknowledging the financial tightrope the club must walk under the Premiership’s £6.4 million salary cap — which can extend to £7.8 million through credits for homegrown talent and other factors.

“The appetite is for him to stay,” Dowson said. “Now we’ve got to find a happy medium. We really want to keep him. He really wants to stay, and that’s a great start. We still have to make decisions based on our budget and our financial situation.”

Pollock, who has earned 13 England caps and holds one of 25 enhanced central contracts worth £150,000 a year from the RFU, would also join Red Bull’s wider ambassador stable as part of the proposed move — an additional commercial incentive that a Premiership club operating within a salary cap cannot easily replicate.

Newcastle have been actively pursuing high-profile signings since their Red Bull-backed takeover and the Pollock pursuit represents their most ambitious move yet. Whether Northampton can construct a competitive counter-offer within their budgetary constraints now becomes the central question of one of English rugby’s most closely watched contract sagas.