• Accuses officials of paying lip service to plans involving £1m of his own money • Lamb adds it felt ‘like they knew who they wanted all along’

One of the bidders who lost out in the race to launch a rugby league club in Bradford following the demise of Bradford Bulls has described the Rugby Football League’s handling of the affair as “amateurish”, saying he is yet to hear from the sport’s governing body as to why his bid failed.

Richard Lamb, the chief executive of the Championship rugby union side Rotherham, says he was prepared to invest a million pounds of his own money in a new rugby league club in the city following the liquidation of the four-times Super League champions this month.

The RFL instead opted for a bid believed to be led by the former New Zealand Rugby League chairman Andrew Chalmers, who will lay out his vision for the club this week.

Bradford Bulls’ fate was down to years of mismanagement of a trailblazing club | Aaron Bower Read more

In response Lamb has been highly critical of how the process was handled by those at the top of the sport. “The whole thing has been an absolute shambles,” he told the Guardian. “I was going to invest a million pounds of my own money into a rugby club and they haven’t even got the courtesy or decency to ring me until after it’s been leaked? They are morally bankrupt as an organisation.

“On Friday I had an experience of two different governing bodies; the RFU were ultra-professional in a meeting I had and seemed to genuinely care – but the other, who I’m about to spend a million pounds with, can’t even be bothered to ring me and talk to me. You wonder why participation is going through the floor in rugby league – it’s symptomatic of the problems the sport has.”

Lamb’s proposal, which involved a fans’ trust owning a majority stake in the new club, was overlooked in favour of Chalmers’ bid – but he says he was not asked once about how he planned to put a squad together to start the new season in just a matter of weeks. “We had coaches, staff and everything ready to go and we were sourcing players – we were going to bring Todd Carney in,” Lamb said.

“On reflection, it feels like they knew who they wanted all along – it was just lip service saying they were entertaining bids. I’ve never come across an organisation as amateurish in my entire life and this is a sad indictment of a governing body which is out of date and out of touch with how to run a sport. They should hang their heads in shame. They still won’t tell me why our bid wasn’t the winning one, I’ve just been palmed off with talk of how close we came. It doesn’t sit right.

“They asked for no paperwork whatsoever in regards to a fit and proper person’s test and the way fans and players have been kept in the dark is disgusting. I believed they were operating in an open manner but they clearly weren’t.”