Couldn't have summed you up better myself





If a club is spending full cap and making losses (let's call this club, say, "Wigan"icon_wink.gif, if they spent more they would make bigger losses. The cap IS protecting clubs financially. Perhaps not to the extent you seem to want it to, but it most certainly is.

You ignore the point about the need to bring in proper financial controls. Given the recent failures of Wakey and Crusaders this is needed regardless of the SC.

Clubs shouldn't be allowed to overspend. Whether or not they can afford the maximum SC isn't the point - they should only be able to spend what they can afford.

You also ignore the facts on RL's declining financial position and the dismal future that awaits the game if nothing changes.

You mean the declining financial position that has the RFL with record revenues and profits, some clubs (Hull, Leeds) making profits compared to their perilous financial position previously, an increased TV deal on the horizon, new stadia popping up across the league etc etc?

What are you comparing this "declining" financial position to? What was this golden age of prosperity you hark back to? Was it around the time that the biggest club in RL was selling their ground to stay afloat?

RL hasn't been in as healthy a state since I started watching it.

Deano G

Your 3% increase per annum may sound a reasonable figure, but on the basis of spending 50% of you income on salaries would require an increase in revenue of £100k per annum year-on-year, based on the current value of £1.65 million.

Easy to pass glib comments on how players should be allowed to have their earnings kept in line with inflation, I'm sure the £100k+ players could absorb a £3k increase. Further to this, we are hardly talking in line with/below the national average salaries, are we?

As Cruncher has alluded to, and myself on more than one occasion, the emphasis for the cap should be on making the current situation work at it's most effecient. It is my belief that a sliding scale percentage discount should be applied to Academy produced plalers. Starting at 75% in the first year, then 50% and so-on and so-forth. By the fourth year I think it is fair to say they would be an established first-teamer.

It is those at the bottom of the salary scale that need looking after, not the top.

At the end of the day, for all the intellectual argument - and some of it is intellectual, it's not just paranoid weirdness - that justifies maintaining the salary cap exactly as it is now, the far bigger danger to our game is the continued loss of bright young talents, or the ridiculous jacking up of their asking-price as RU continues to try to tempt them away.

Now ... we can pretend that this still isn't an issue if that makes us sleep better at night, but the reality is that Kyle Eastmond is about to leave. Saints fans will respond, as Wigan fans always did, with bravado about how he isn't that good anyway, how they won't miss him, how they can easily find another one ... but the reality is that he's one of the game's hottest properties, his RL club has put in massive work and cash developing him, and yet again he's leaving before they've seen anything like the best of him.

It boils down to one simple question: do we really want to become the seedbed for Rugby Union? (A Sale man of my acquaintance reckons the sole purpose of the Sale 'exhibition game' at Bolton is to make the club a household name in the Wigan/Leigh/St Helens area, as this is where they'll be doing most of their player-recruitment in the years to come).

And I say it again, we're not talking about ridiculous money that no-one can afford. Ian Lenagan may well argue that he hasn't got an extra £500 grand to throw at a greedy player, but, if that quote wasn't taken out of context, it's skewing the argument. We just need a bit more room to manouevure. I refuse to believe that, if he was allowed to do it, Eamon McManus would not be able to find sufficient extra cash to make RU think twice about throwing all their 2011 eggs into the Kyle Eastmond basket.

As you all know on here I have been advocating some form of dispensation/ reward for academy products for years now.

In Australia I believe that are looking at a points system, which will reward clubs for producing LOCAL players. Players brought in or bought in will incur a premium.

I'M sure Father Ted who posts on here will explain it far better than I can.

Sounds like a plan.

If it's happening in Australia, it will soon probably happen here.

But one thing is for certain - doing nothing at all, which is the RFL's current favoured position, is not an option.

I was under the impression that image rights are also covered by the cap.

If so, why? I'd have thought this would be a great way to increase the players salary whilst raising the profile of RL in the media.

IL is a very astute businessman and seems to understand a lot of the requirements of an RL club having been at Quins and Now Wigan.

Do you think he would make a very good replacement for Richard Lewis ?

The problem with image rights is it's open to abuse. What would have stopped Whelan making Darren Lockyer, Andrew Johns, Gordan Tallis and Shane Webke the faces of JJB and giving them an extra £200K a year?

IL spoke again about the SC at last night's pre season dinner.

He repeated what is in the League Express and the need for clubs to spend within the SC. He is emphatic that the SC should not be increased.
It is obvious that IL has done a fantastic job since he bought the club. He said that if nothing untoward happened this year the club will make a profit. That is in just over three years and from the financial state things were in when DW sold the place.
To have silverware in the cabinet and make a profit is rare in sport and IL has acheived it in not a very long time.
He said the club was well run and had very good management. That is most certainly true.

As for the SC, I was against when it was first proposed and prior to its introduction. It was against a background of some clubs spending as much as 90% of their turnover on players wages. It was thought that by restricting those players wages clubs would stop going broke.
I never believed the SC alone would stop clubs going broke and it hasn't. Back then that was the primary purpose of the SC and nothing else.
Wellens comments about a better distribution of talent are nonsense. His club has brought in the best forward from Quins and the best player from Castleford. HullFC have bought the best forward from Cas and a talented young winger from Quins.
Quins and Cas are weaker from these transactions, Saints and HullFC are stronger. The gap between bottom and top has widened not narrowed.

There are so many various costs involved in running a club that although salaries are a major part of expenditure, it is the whole cost base that has to be brought under control. Not just the salaries of the highest paid 25 players. The SC has been complied with broadly this last few years yet club after club has gone into admin. Someone told me that this is the third time Wakefield have gone into Admin in the last five years. In those five years I'm sure they haven't breached the SC.
I have always hoped that the RFL/SL will bring a structure in that ensures clubs are controlling all costs and that their overall expenditure doesn't exceed turnover. Perhaps we need a "Costs Cap" rather than just a Salary Cap.

As has been mentioned the Aussie press have been saying the NRL are to dump the SC and are trialing a points system. What I do fear is that when they do introduce a new system to replace the cap the RFL/SL knee jerk and simply replicate it and we end up with an Aussie system and not one that suits British Rugby League.

There is no doubt that Ian Lenagan has done a superb job since he first bought the club.
Management is about making things happen.
IL has certainly made a lot of very good things happen at Wigan.

Beat me to it! I agree with every word you just said as I did with IL last night. The only way the salary cap could increase is if the revenue increased. I would love nothing more than for our sport to be on a massaive scale bringing in millions and millions and our players get the rewards for that. Unfortunatley as a minority sport in this country we just can't.

And still no solution offered as to how we keep our best players in the game.

I've supported Ian Lenagan through thick and thin since he arrived - I've been accused of being everything from a 'happy clapper' to his wife. But I disagree with him on this, or at least on parts of it.

Keep the Salary Cap by all means. But we need something to encourage our best young players to stay in the game. I'm sure Ian wouldn't have a problem with that.

Quote ="adi"Paul Wellen thinks it needs changing. www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... codes.html'" He talks a lot of sense. What I do find amusing is the RFL response. "The Rugby Football League said the salary cap — which stands at £1.65 million per club — was under constant review and that it already took into account home-grown talent. A spokesman for the game’s governing body said: “The rules were changed in June last year so that from 2011 every club is allowed to nominate one club-trained player for whom the first £50,000 of their salary cap does not count towards the salary cap.” 50k for one player? Talk about encouragement. The bottom line is that if something isn't done, clubs are going to be losing some of their biggest investments to another sport. The RFL are obviously okay with that, at least they are consistent with their incompetence .

Quote ="adi"Paul Wellen thinks it needs changing. www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... codes.html'" He talks a lot of sense. What I do find amusing is the RFL response. "The Rugby Football League said the salary cap — which stands at £1.65 million per club — was under constant review and that it already took into account home-grown talent. A spokesman for the game’s governing body said: “The rules were changed in June last year so that from 2011 every club is allowed to nominate one club-trained player for whom the first £50,000 of their salary cap does not count towards the salary cap.” 50k for one player? Talk about encouragement. The bottom line is that if something isn't done, clubs are going to be losing some of their biggest investments to another sport. The RFL are obviously okay with that, at least they are consistent with their incompetence .

I don't believe anybody is arguing with that. However, the points remains and has been a key part of my own argument around the salary cap that we need to grow the revenue into the game to pay out better salaries. That has never changed. How do we do that? I side with the increased level of competition argument i.e. an increasingly tighter and more competitive competition should increase interest, attendance and viewing figures. I know some argue that by having a more attractive game with 'superstar' line-ups will do the same. We can argue forever on which will work but given the lack of financial resources around the game the most cost effective option with least risk is the former and the risk is too great a burden on the game (as IL is effectively saying) for us to be attempting to grow the sport and its revenues that way.

A "Costs cap" would be a good idea, although should Clubs really need to be told to not spend more money than they earn? I suppose the problem of a "Costs cap" would be that it would put the likes of Leeds and Wigan miles ahead of Quins etc. You could argue that if they can't get the money in then that's their own problem but the gap between the top teams and the likes of Quins etc would be even greater than it is now. I do think there should be something to encourage teams to bring through their own talent. Perhaps the Salary Cap should only be applicable to players that haven't come through your academy. That way we'd have fewer imports and the richer clubs wouldn't be able to poach the better young British players from the "lesser" teams.

There's no real argument from me with the jist of this. But a key issue with Kyle Eastmond, for example, is not that Saints (or Warrington, or Wigan, or Leeds) can't afford to pay him a little bit extra to stay in the game. It's that they're not allowed to. I bet Eamon McManus wishes right now that he had just a little more leeway with which to negotiate for Eastmond.

It's too easy to say the Salary Cap must remain because there aren't the resources generally to raise it. That doesn't take into account the top tier of clubs, who probably could afford a little bit extra to try to entice their stars to stay (and at the end of the day, we need some stars - we can't keep churning them out for the benefit of Rugby Union). I'm not talking about IL's semi-mythical £500K or whatever he was supposed to have said. If players are asking that kind of silly money, they can indeed sod off. But most of them, I suspect, aren't.

That's too simplistic a view. If the cap was raised, it wouldn't be set aside to give to the likes of Kyle Eastmond. It would be spent across existing players in existing squads as agents queued up for a slice of the bigger pie.

There's nothing wrong with that, but the likelihood is that even if the cap was £150k higher, it would still have been spent (across the squad or on another player) and Saints still wouldn't have enough cap to re-sign Kyle. And the clubs would be sailing £150k closer to the wind.

It may also be that it doesn't matter how big the cap was, Kyle would want to play in the bigger sport (let's not be naive here) of Union.

Where are the clubs going to generate this extra revenue from ?

Wigan situation has been nothing short of a miracle off the back of some very hard work by IL to put in place good management team to turn around the club but when you look at other clubs who seem just to be doing enough to exist what can they do or have done to them say by the RFL to sanction them if they fall short of there own business plan in respect to revenue generated.

The only way to generate more revenue was to take the game out of the heartlands into untapped sources , but as it stands Both London and Wales have had nothing but problems financially and also the roots are not stable financially and Wakefield going under is a prime example of this.

So where do we turn now to generate the extra revenue?

On Eastmond has he said he wants to leave Saints or is this posturing by his agent ?

To be honest Kyle has been injured for considerable amounts of the season and has a lot to prove, so his negotiating stand point is somewhat weak also does he not have any faith in what Saints are doing unlike Sam Tomkins who does not want to go anywhere else because of the set up at Wigan ?

Even though from childhood he was a keen RL fan, and signed for an RL club as his first choice?

My view may be a tad simplistic, but that view is more than a tad defeatist and is trotted out far too often as if there's no alternative argument.

In the days when we paid more money than Union, the flow of players came our way. The 'much bigger 15-a-side game' didn't seem quite so attractive then. Let's not totally kid ourselves into believing that the future, all round, is much rosier in Rugby Union. Money is the main thing.

There is an alternative argument - it's along the lines of set the cap as high as the game can afford; if it reaches a level where it competes with union that's great. But let's not spend cash before we've generated it, as we've been there before and it isn't pretty.

Even when players came across from union to league, union was a far bigger sport; it was just shamateur. Yes a few players crossed over, but lots didn't and those who didn't played in front of huge crowds in the international arena that league can only dream of.

The fact that we were only just competing with a sport that was (on the face of it) amateur says it all about the respective footings, as has been borne out since RU went pro.

I'm not being defeatist, I think RL has a huge amount to offer and a lot of room for growth. I also think we're in the best position to grow the sport for some time, with the RFL in profit and generating respectable revenues at last, plus a bigger Sky deal on the cards.

On the face of it? Rugby Union is one of the most well known sports to engage in shamiterism. Don't you remember Jonathan Davies in the Daily Mail describing the "brown envelopes" given out after games?

Rugby Union - bigger sport. I would agree at international level, and at a funding level. But in terms of numbers of people watching club level rugby via TV and Live I would be interested to see your viewing numbers to back up this statement. Actually I would love to see some facts to backup many of the things you say in this thread.

Some of the posts on here are quite amusing, however, one of the biggest things that amuses me is the lack of posts by the "You only hate the CC as Wigan aren't winning anything" brigade ................. Funny that... If nothing else then at least we now should hear no more of these muppets posting their nonsense.

Wigan are the champions, yet others and I are still criticising the CC, just as we said we would.


FT posted in support of IL and what he has done for the club. That was a tad off topic, as this wasn't the question, however, there is no denying that things off the field seem to be on the up, and credit must go to IL for at least some of that.

The real key here is that IL (and other chairmen) are about as likely to vote for an increase in the CC (at least in the short term) as turkeys are to vote for Xmas.

Why on earth would he seek to increase his financial outgoings? Now in the medium to long term he may realise that unless there is an increase in the CC then the value of his investment will fall. A drain of players away from RL (and worse still, talented young teenagers moving to RU as their first choice code), would reduce the quality on the pitch and the associated revenue streams that would go with this- Sky certainly won't hang around if the viewing figures take a hit even if some die hard fans will.

As DG says, the issue in RL is that the CC has ensured that players have taken a real terms pay cut over the years. One thing is certain- this certainly isn't going to act as an incentive for people to take up and stay in the game.

If there is to be any form of regulation in RL I would prefer it to be based on economic relevance rather than some misplaced political ideology. There is a case to say that a club should ensure that it's "core" expenditure (rent, utilities, fixed costs etc) would have to be met before it can pay it's players. Although this sounds complicated, and of course, would be open to interpretation (in much the same way as an audit of a companys accounts is), it could actually be a lot easier to implement than many would have you believe. In short it would ensure that clubs remain financially secure, but are not prevented from paying big money to attract and retain the star players that we all want to see.


Back on topic- would IL want this to happen? Of course not.

It's no different to the ultimately diametrically opposed positions of the owners of a company and it's customers.

Again today we can see that the salary cap is forcing the games top talent to move to rugby union to be properly rewarded for their talent.

How can RL survive when the likes of the talent that is Rikki Sheriffe is lost to the game.

All businesses need to keep their revenue rising at least in line with rising costs in the long term otherwise eventually they will go under.

The SC gives temporary immunity to RL clubs from the salary elements of this equation, but over a long period it will simply become uneconomic for the players to be full time pros and they will have to get jobs to get by (in reality many of them will go to RU, leave RL or not go into RL in the first place).

I think you are right to point out that those at the bottom have probably suffered far more than those at the top - simply because they have less disposable income to begin with before inflation erodes their salaries (I imagine the majority of people reading this thread will know what this has been like from their own experience of the last few years, with wage freezes or small rises and everything in the shops getting more expensive, heating bills and petrol getting dearer etc).

I do have sympathy though even with the higher earners - it's a short career and these are talented people. I'd like all pro-RL players to be on decent money and its fine by me if the stars make what to most people would be a very large amount of money.

I don't think its a sign of a healthy sport that RL can only afford to pay the same amount in absolute terms that it could pay 12 years ago. If it carries on then many players will be forced to become semi-pro before too long or will drift away from the game (or not even get involved in the first place - RU isn't the only danger).