but that's only internally within the NHS. You could go work for a private healthcare provider (if your skills are in demand) and negotiate your own pay with them. So its not the same. The analogue there is the NHS (1 club) and private healthcare providers (other clubs)

If leeds for instance want to have their own internal pay structure and players cannot earn more than that pay scale then that is absolutely fine. If Salford want to have a different one that better fits what they think is best for their business then that should also be fine. If a player has skills to sell, then he should be able to sell them to the highest bidder. The skils an RL player has to sell are, unsurprisingly, being an RL player and a man should be able to freely sell those skills for their value (which a market decides, but we don't have a free market, we have one in which the owners have colluded to deprive those people their market worth as RL players)

NHS = SL ,private healthcare = NRL/RU

Why? are they the same job in a different country or a different job?
Because that's what the NRL and RU are

Yes if a vehicle manufacturer goes out of business, the rest increase business and profit, not quite the same is it?

While the FFP isnt a salary cap, it has been introduced to prevent damage to the sport

are you saying if say Halifax go out of business Bradford wouldn't increase business?

Plenty of things which aren't a salary cap are in sports for the good of those sports. none of them justify a salary cap

If honda sell a million cars a year, and they stopped making them ,other manufacturers would collectively sell an extra million cars

If Halifax had 2,000 fans and dissapeared, collectively the other clubs would not increase their fan numbers by 2,000

I don't agree with your premise.

Quote ="roofaldo2"Perhaps replacing it with a financial fair play system similar to that which has been introduced in football. That would at least prevent sugar daddy run clubs running roughshod over the rest of the league and buying up every top player they can get a hold of.'" I welcome sugar daddies to the sport, provided they are spending their own money (i.e. not putting the club into outrageous debt or forward liabilities), and b) that, whilst they can pay what the heck they like for 13 superstars, they're not allowed to hoover up all the talent and use it to keep the bench warm and play in the reserves. If you insist that no more than 13 members of the squad are paid more than (say) £75k, let 'em pay up to 13 players whatever the heck they like. Besides ... www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/30547824

Quote ="roofaldo2"Perhaps replacing it with a financial fair play system similar to that which has been introduced in football. That would at least prevent sugar daddy run clubs running roughshod over the rest of the league and buying up every top player they can get a hold of.'" I welcome sugar daddies to the sport, provided they are spending their own money (i.e. not putting the club into outrageous debt or forward liabilities), and b) that, whilst they can pay what the heck they like for 13 superstars, they're not allowed to hoover up all the talent and use it to keep the bench warm and play in the reserves. If you insist that no more than 13 members of the squad are paid more than (say) £75k, let 'em pay up to 13 players whatever the heck they like. Besides ... www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/30547824

I do. I can't imagine that anyone would be so loyal to Honda that they would never buy a car again if they folded.

However people have an attachment to their club, and a lot of people would not start following another just because theirs has folded. Personally as a Hull fan I might go to Rovers or Cas occasionally to get my rugby fix. But I wouldn't go every week and wouldn't start supporting those teams.

Only because you never accept that you might be wrong.

It's about the best non-sporting example of a similar situation to SL players. Like you say if, for example, you're a nurse in the NHS you have a set pay structure, like the salary cap. You can move between trusts like you can clubs and if you're not happy with that you can work in the private healthcare sector.

Whether the cap goes up or not the days of us been able to compete on wages with the NRL and Premiership RU are long gone and not coming back. m.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/30547824

Whether the cap goes up or not the days of us been able to compete on wages with the NRL and Premiership RU are long gone and not coming back. m.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/30547824

If a top player can be persuaded to stay or come to rugby league who can play for England. I'm up for any rule change that allows that. Obviously there has to be someone who wants to and can afford to do it.

I.e. If kashcow wanted to pay for Sam burgess to go to Salford, his wage would be whatever fits the salary cap. And he is allowed to use his own money to pay him or whoever a fee for that to happen.

Agreed that it's not looking good as far as losing out to ru and nrl.

:3tuk5qf8Its less that I don't think they would ever buy a car again, but more likely, and more analogous with how you would respond to hull going under, and they would buy fewer.

There is strong brand loyalty in cars, many people will simply be 'upgrading' if that upgrade isn't there, they not buy a car for another 2 or 3 years. Obviously that's not as strong as in sports but sports isn't unique. in fact people being wedded to it being unique and ignoring basic business rules is often why clubs go bust.

interesting quotes from RU today,
"If the salary cap is left to forbid the required investment, it will kill any hope of growth."

“It is time to seize that opportunity, to ensure a level playing field in Europe, to build the strongest league in world rugby and to let players earn market-related salaries. We must release the handbrake and step on the accelerator.

“We understand some clubs fear the removal of the salary cap will cause wage inflation, yet in reality salaries are already being driven by the French clubs. We can either sit back and become a ‘lowest common denominator’ league, or we can leap forward.”

Even Nigel Wood has said, "Our elite teams need to be cut loose to be internationally competitive." When asked whether that meant a relaxation of the salary cap, which has remained at around £1.7m per club for several seasons, he said has been promoting the introduction of a marquee player allowance for a couple of years now"

and Gary Hetherington "We proposed this a few years ago and didn't get the support of enough clubs. But it's been brought up again by Marwan, and there are people at other clubs like Simon Moran at Warrington and Ken Davy at Huddersfield who have the private income to spend more than they are currently allowed without jeopardising the stability of their clubs."

Tony Smith ""I'm keen on anything that's going to raise the quality of our competition, and maybe also give us a bit of a wow factor," said Smith. "If a marquee player at each club is the best way to do that, great."

Clubs have sold the 'poor card' for so long that even when large and important parts of our game are crying out for us to be allowed to pay our players more, they are ignored. When other sports are outright telling us the problems the SC is causing we ignore them

We are a lowest common denominator sport, we are losing touch, our best players don't play in our league, we don't attract the best from other leagues, some of our best players don't even play our sport, the best from those sports certainly aren't coming over to RL. As much as people complain that paying players their market worth isn't sustainable, exploiting them clearly isn't sustainable either. People within the game are telling us so.

We have seen people from Wigan, Salford, Leeds, Huddersfield and Warrington all come out and say we can pay more, all complain that we are hamstrung by the SC, even the RFL are stating that players can be paid more.

We are setting up our entire competition, in its structure and its rules to cater to the lowest common denominator, we are entrenching mediocrity and then wondering why we are struggling.

If you want to know why the games standing and visibility is falling, its simple. We aren't a top league and we don't present ourselves as such, and we are doing next to nothing to make ourselves a top league.

People on here moan at 'knock off Nigel' selling the game short with low ticket prices, but we are like any product, we can either sell ourselves as a premium product, but that costs more to make, or we can use the cheapest raw materials and stack em high and sell em low.

as Jacky Lorenzetti said when spending basically the SL SC on Dan Carter "Carter will be the best-paid player at Racing but also the least expensive because of the economic benefits,"

none of this however changes the fact that the market should set the players wages, the should be able to sell their skills as british RL players for what they are worth. It should not be set by the clubs colluding to keep them low.

I wouldn't be against a soft cap, which is for every £ or $ you spend over the cap, you have to give the same amount to the league who spreads the amount to every other team in the league. In principle I am in FAVOUR of a cap, as it obviously gives teams in the smaller markets a chance of winning the Grand Final. Where would Green Bay and Penrith be without a salary cap?

a few people on here have tried to explain the downfall of this view, so i wont try. i look forward to watching your vision of SL in 5 years time when salford have bought all the titles and everyone else is either bankrupt or on their way towards it. sounds like fun. cant wait to pay my money towards that....

Quote ="RLBandit"I welcome sugar daddies to the sport, provided they are spending their own money (i.e. not putting the club into outrageous debt or forward liabilities), and b) that, whilst they can pay what the heck they like for 13 superstars, they're not allowed to hoover up all the talent and use it to keep the bench warm and play in the reserves. If you insist that no more than 13 members of the squad are paid more than (say) £75k, let 'em pay up to 13 players whatever the heck they like. Besides ... www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/30547824'" Spot on!

Quote ="RLBandit"I welcome sugar daddies to the sport, provided they are spending their own money (i.e. not putting the club into outrageous debt or forward liabilities), and b) that, whilst they can pay what the heck they like for 13 superstars, they're not allowed to hoover up all the talent and use it to keep the bench warm and play in the reserves. If you insist that no more than 13 members of the squad are paid more than (say) £75k, let 'em pay up to 13 players whatever the heck they like. Besides ... www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/30547824'" Spot on!

Agree. Let's go with that.

Alongside a clearly stated policy publicised in advance as to what happens if a club suffers an insolvency event. Suggest 10 points deduction for going into Administration and relegation if you actually go bust.

it's upto everyone else not to go bankrupt? If you haven't got the money don't spend it, it's just sport, I can imagine a lot of crystal palace fans and Stoke fans had the same view of city when a cash rich owner took them over? It's just sport you can't just take your ball home because someone else has something better than you have, it's life get on with it.

Leeds won 5 SL titles in 6 years. Nobody died because of it. Some poorly run clubs did even though we had a salary cap. This is a 'ukip' argument, one based on fear but not very many facts.

its one of a multitude of options we have instead of an SC> We could simply say that a club must have 7 academy products in a matchday 17. We could say that a 25 man squad has to be made up of no more than 5 NRL players and no more than 10 players who have played in SL for somebody else (loans discounted), we could look at the points based system suggested by the NRL. We could say that for every player earning over £200k in the 25 man squad, you must have an academy product under 23 In the squad.


There are an infinite amount of things we could do that isn't just relying on us thinking owners are stupid, the only thing that stops them running their clubs in to the ground is being able to exploit players.

Wigan have vastly improved their training facilities, academy and back room staff as a way of investing cash in other facets of the club as they cannot pay the players any more because of the cap.

My main issue with the cap is that we are losing players to RU and NRL who have a much higher cap. The reason for the higher caps in both these other sports is TV revenue. The poor deal with Sky that was agreed earlier this year will limit our cap until the end of the decade. The RFL/SL need to point out to Sky that unless they double, or preferably treble their payments to allow a cap that can compete with the other two competitions then they will be televising an increasingly poor product that will ultimately lose them viewers.

4 clubs want it because they've got rich backers. 8 clubs dont because they can see where it will lead to. For the first time next season we should have every SL club able to pay the full salary cap. Let's give it a couple of years to see if the level salary cap, cough, actually brings a more even playing field.

Something has to happen quicker than two more years.

Much as I think it would benefit RL in Europe just to scrap the salary cap at all levels (along with something like MC suggested) I'd be happy for 2015 to keep the salary cap but with each club's highest salary cap value player exempted - so long as the decision is made before the 2015 Super League season kicks-off.

That could well mean we get Sam Burgess back in Super League in time for the 2015 NZ tour here. (Burgess is a FORWARD. But it's looking like he won't be in the England RU team - they don't want skilled rugby players in their forwards - they just need people who are good at "specialised jobs"icon_wink.gif.

that's not true. 3 clubs want it because the businesses can afford it and they see the damage of not having it. 2 clubs want it because they have rich backers. 1 club doesn't want it because they have bought themselves a massive new asset and are happy to see the player paying for that, 2 clubs don't want it because they are a financial basket case operating at a level above what their finances can sustain and 4 clubs don't want it because they can't afford it and believe that rules should be put in place to keep them competitive.

We have had the same salary cap for 10 year and it is lower than it was 13 years, and wages themselves are far lower than they were 15 years ago, not just in real terms adjusted for inflation but in absolute terms.

The top clubs have been going backwards for 15 years in terms of wages, some clubs STILL haven't caught up and they have STILL spent themselves in to oblivion and the STILL got the facilities they need to compete. At what point do we accept that they aren't catching up? 20 years? 50 years?