I think DaveO has hacked into nikos' account.

I want Karl Pryce back, he was a big loss for Wigan !

Sammut is a poor man's Dennis Moran.

We could have Sammut at 7 creating chances for a Karl Pryce/Patrick Ah Van wing/centre partnership - mouth watering prospect. Get rid of Goulding and Charnley, they're rubbish!

Why put a bid in for a player when he may well be available and OOC by July 11th. That's probably why no bids for players have been received.

I wouldnt say hes THAT bad

The fact something designed to prevent something occurring failed to do so doesn't mean it has nothing to do with the situation. The fact the FSA failed regulate the banks prior to 2008 doesn't stop people blaming the lack of regulation [ias well as[/i the banks themseleves for the situation. In fact the failure of regulation is seen as one of the major causes of the problem. It is the same here and the situation Bradford find themselves in is a result of board decisions [uand[/u a failure of the cap to live up to its stated purpose as outlined in section 1.1.3 of the operational rules. To suggest otherwise is absurd.

The only thing absurd is your continued belief that the aims an objectives of a particular policy can be seen in anyway contributing to the current situation at Bradford, especially so given the Bulls were spending below the previous 50% threshold on the cap. Just to put this particular absurd thinking to bed, seeing as Bradford are losing about £200k a month according to reports, the players would need to pay the club in order for the cap to meet to its objectives. Bilko's excellent match preview for the Bradford game shows just how the Bulls have got into the mess they have, not surprisingly it's about income generation not matching expenditure, not what some aims and objective say on a piece of paper.

As for the FSA analogy, the how you can even try to make some connection between how the money markets need to manage risk, with the knock-on effects to the rest of the economy and the RFL having a salary cap only you know.

As you obviously are desperate to blame the RFL as part of the problem, look at why the Bulls were given a license.

You are desperately to try and dig yourself out a hole but you keep digging. I picked the right word for your position in absurd. Your position that the salary cap has never had and does not have anything to do with clubs going bust is nonsense. Failure of regulations to designed to prevent such things occurring are complicit in the problem.

Your suggestion I am trying to "try to make some connection between how the money markets need to manage risk, with the knock-on effects to the rest of the economy and the RFL having a salary cap only you know" it a blatant misrepresentation of my point but then you would have to do that because you can't argue against the actual point I made. It is a fact that people blame the failure of regulation as a factor in the banking crisis and not just those running the banks. It is the same here. Failure of regulation is clearly a factor in RL clubs going bust [ias well as[/i the decisions of those running the clubs. The analogy is simple and sound. I am sure everyone can see this.

Correct !

I certainly find it absurd that anyone other than the board at the Bulls would try to blame anything other than their own mismanagement for the mess they're in.

One of the aims of the cap is to restrict spending on a particular areas of expenditure, that's all is it. Just because the Bulls management then went and made a load of awful decisions on other areas of financial management is not something that can be blamed on the cap, unless of course you have a particular agenda or hobbyhorse that defies logic and reason.

As I said in my previous post, the Bulls players would have to pay to play in order to break even, which shows the problems are elsewhere. Just because you choose to ignore them and desperately try to make out its the cap as well is what's really absurd.

No.

As has been demonstrated a 50% cap, properly managed, would, in all likelihood, have reduced the scope to overspend. It wouldn't have prevented it necessarily, but it would have likely reduced it. We can't say for certain until we have seen the financials of the club.

The Bulls were spending less than 50% of their turnover on the cap. I've obviously woken up in some parallel world were if people spend what they don't have then it can be blamed on something that says "you are allowed to spend up to £X on a particular thing". Just because you can spend up to a limit doesn't mean you have to if you can't afford it, nor is it in anyway responsible if you're stupid enough to spend way beyond your means.

One of the Bulls main problems in recent years was that, even when staying within the cap, we vastly overpaid for the quality of players we signed. Mediocre players being signed on inflated salaries. Hence the quality of the team declined, the gates declined and it became a case of ever decreasing circles.

The cap only works as a means of ensuring financial viability if clubs get good value from it, which unfortunately we didnt.

Pursuing the Harris case must have cost them a few quid, one of many poor decisions by poor management

I don't think it was just Bradford that made that particular mistake. We've had our fair shar if over inflated salaries.

Yes but we knew we had the funds to back it up even if it was dw bankrolling it.

How can you blame the Salary Cap for Bradford paying more money to their coaching staff, groundstaff and whoever else they are paying than they do their players? Surely if there was no cap then they'd pay even more money trying to get a better squad than they have?

Their outgoing a month is around £300k apparently. The most that can go on players is £137,500

The SC has as one of its objectives the prevention of clubs getting into financial difficulties.

To argue that the 50% rule wouldn't have stopped Bradford getting into financial difficulties simply invites the obvious response that further rule(s) must therefore be needed to enable the SC to meet its objective; the alternative being to admit that the SC cannot fulfill this objective and is therefore a failure.

Don't you mean we had Central Park to back it up...?

Regulation is required to prevent people doing stupid things otherwise we wouldn't need regulation. If despite having regulations that have a stated aim of
preventing Clubs (from) trading beyond their means and/or entering into damaging and unsustainable financial arrangements; clubs still trade beyond their means and/or enter into damaging and unsustainable financial arrangements the regulations have failed and are part of the problem.

Spot on. It's like saying that the banking crisis was the fault of the banks alone and that poor regulation was not part of the problem.

Your argument only works in the case of Bradford if the regulations control total spending. They don't, the cap might have an aim to help prevent clubs spending beyond their means but as has already been said numerous times but which you keep ignoring as it blows your argument out of the water, the actual reality at Bradford is they could spend nothing on the cap and still be losing money.

So in Bradford's case the cap could say you aren't allowed to spending anything and they would still be spending beyond their means, by your argument the cap would still be one of the reasons for the failure.

Which all goes back to my original point that the cap has sod all to do with Bradford's current situation, extremely bad financial management does.

The fact that the regulations don't control total spending is the point. The SC claims to have as an objective the prevention of financial problems, but contains ineffective measures to achieve this objective. If it was effective it would have prevented the bad financial management from doing the damage that it has.

So your suggestion would be that the RFL tell clubs how much they could spend on everything then, as that would be the only way they could control what the Bulls spent? At least that way BrettKenny might have a point about it being the communist cap.

As has been said numerous times but keeps being ignored (probably because it doesn't fit the cap is to blame argument), the cap is there only in regards to one particular area of spending which Bradford could be spending nothing on and still be living beyond their means. So zero to do with the cap and everything to do with the way the Bulls were mismanaged. I wonder how the scenario with the Bulls creditors plays out, "sorry about spending beyond our means but the cap made us do it". I'm sure HMRC will accept that and write off the debt.