Wasps’ move to the Ricoh Arena has set the club on course to achieve the highest revenue stream in world rugby, according to deputy chairman Nick Eastwood.

After leaving Adams Park just under five months ago amid claims that it was ‘move or die’, the club have gone from having the second lowest revenue stream in the Premiership to having the second highest in Europe.

Attendances have tripled to 18,569, hospitality revenue is up by 500 per cent and money taken from shops, bars and food outlets is up by a factor of 20, helping to catapult the club into a new realm financially since their move to Coventry in December.

Eastwood told the Bucks Free Press: “We believe that Toulouse have the highest revenue [in European rugby] and, within a relatively short period of time, we hope to be able to overtake them and that would then put us in a position of being the highest turnover rugby club in the world."

“That would be a wonderful position to be in going forward, in terms of building the club and rugby side.”

For every £1 spent on a match day at Adams Park Wasps received just 15p and were reported to be making losses of £3million a year, whereas for a Premiership match at the Ricoh Arena Eastwood said that the club are taking four times as much.

The facilities at the 32,600 seater stadium, which include a casino, two restaurants, a hotel and a concert venue, have contributed to a major rise in hospitality sales which will be evident during the game against Leicester on May 9 – a match which over 31,000 tickets have already been sold for.

Eastwood said: “The Leicester Tigers game for example we did about 22 hospitality packages at Adams Park last season, we’re going to be over 2,000 for the game coming up in a week.

“The entire arena is going to be absolutely sold out. The one problem that we didn’t think we’d have in the first few years is that we would run out of space.

“We thought we’d have space for anything we wanted to do and then, hey presto, at the end of our first half season we’re out of space. It’s a fantastic problem to have but it shows the massive demand in the area.”

The deputy chairman didn’t want to use the word ‘vindicated’ when describing whether the club’s controversial decision – which sparked a petition signed by over 3,000 people who were against the move – had paid dividends, and instead insisted “the club would not have survived if it had stayed at Adams Park”.

Eastwood said the club’s databases indicate they have retained a high proportion of those supporters who watched them during their 12-year stay in Buckinghamshire, also stating that the existing fan base have been “brilliant” so far.

He said: “We’ve retained about three quarters of season ticket holders. We know from match day ticket purchasing that a significant number are coming up from there and we know some of the fans.

“We talk to people, we get out and about on match days and you recognise some of them because they’re wearing Wasps shirts from three or four years ago.

“There’s a very, very clear presence from the fans at Adams Park and I must admit they’ve been absolutely brilliant because they’ve wanted to act as ambassadors for the club and welcome new people from the area.”

The move polarised opinion among Wasps fans when news of it broke in October last year with many believing that the club was betraying its London roots by moving to the Midlands.

Eastwood acknowledges the opinions of those fans but says the club made the decision for the “long term benefit of the club” in order to take the burden off owner Derek Richardson, who has been swallowing the club’s losses since buying Wasps in 2013.

He said: “At one point, it wouldn’t have gone out of business next season or the season after that because of the support we’re getting from our shareholder, but at one point clubs do change hands and in my view we would have found it impossible to get another shareholder in, and at that point the club would have ceased to exist.

“The first step to take was about survival and the next step was about building a long term, sustainable business plan so that the club is independent of individual financing and is self sustainable.

“We always did what we did for the benefit of the club and we did what we knew we had to for the long term benefit of the club. We never really looked upon it as vindication or proving we were right.”