Quote ="woolie"Wembley 71: Dont think there is a point to be missed. You're either an Amateur Club or a Professional one. Clubs that pay wages to players are companies & the players employees whereas Amateur Clubs have no employees just in the main members of the club. For either Underbank or Wizards to pay wages they would have to form a Company & become a business. Very different structure.
PS dont tell the residents of Warrington they are paying for another stadium at Wilderspool (which is due to be demolished for houses).'"
Mm. Your delineation between a club and a company is not as clear as you think - clubs can pay contractors for services provided (coach hire, pitch hire, buying kit), and can equally pay players for services delivered on the field without necessarily being a company...
... but without going into the legal niceties, RL is one of the few sports that has a formal distinction between amateur and professional, and that's going to change. We'll be much more like soccer or rugby union, where clubs can come to local arrangements to pay players at whatever level they can afford.
My local (tier 9!) union club pays its coach £4k a year, and pays some of its players to play, and pays travel expenses for others. It turns over around £30k a year running two open age teams only.
At tier 5 and 6 (that's South West 1 and South West 2), where many RLC players come from, players regularly get winning money at least, of £50 up, and some are on match contracts of up to £250 per game. Coaches at that level are getting £15k for two sessions a week and a game.
Union, incidentally, has 5h1t-loads more money that we do... but the point is, clubs will pay what they can afford in league, too, and my bet is by 2015 players will be being paid down five or six divisions, even if not much.
