Thinking again about this topic of a £4M loss. To get there they must have forecast budgets of income and expenditure, along with expected savings in SG&A as well as player costs.

This “we don’t know what next years playing budget will be so cant make any decisions” doesn’t sit comfortably with “we estimate we will incur a £4M loss”.

You can’t know one without knowing the other...

The loss of corporate income and sponsorship will have hit the club really hard - business is not like ST holders - its brutal they will not be making a donation to the club they will be wanting their money back - the boxes alone are £30k each and there are 12 - that's before you add and food and drink

And all of that is one aspect of income, without either sticking to the same playing budget or knowing what it’s changed to, how can they rebuild the overall budget to know they would forecast a £4M loss?

I agree. Im not liking it one bit..

What are you not liking?

All business budget - the ones I work in three years with quarterly updates. You have to take a view of what you think commercial activity will be for the rest of the 2020 season i.e. none and the 2021 season - conservative estimate says 50% guys like Rob Oates have been round long enough to understand or have a feel for sponsorship activity. £4m is probably worst case and it could £3m this year and £1m next who knows.

On the squad the vast majority will already have been committed e.g. Gale, Hurrell, Martin etc. so 80% of the spend will be known. In the scheme of things this is a very small business it has 4 revenue streams: Sky, Spectators, Corporate/facilities and match day income. Outflows: Playing staff, admin support, infrastructure, match day, interest - this is not difficult to forecast.

It’s fair to say the £4m loss is a very rough estimate that could be way off the true figure. It was put out there before asking players to take wage cuts and season ticket holders to donate their refunds, it was made public to influence decisions. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, just that’s what’s happened.

It was put out there so ST holders wouldn't ask for refunds - I doubt corporate sponsors will have been quite so forthcoming!! The players even taking a 15% pay cut would only scratch the surface of a loss of this size c£300k. This is more about setting a benchmark for future negotiations. I saw Craig Harrison on a podcast with idiot Gledhill and I have seldom seen him so negative about the sport - it seems he knows what's coming. RL cannot be immune to what is happening in wider society. There are going to be significant reductions in full time playing staff. This will used to get players wages down i.e. you are lucky to have a job!!

The wage cut argument can only be a short term one, unless the NRL come online with something similar all you’ll see is our good kids going there.

SL will be a full on second tier competition.

Completely agree - the Aussies want our best kids before our coaching techniques ruin them

The toughest bit here could be non rugby staff losing their jobs in the coming year.

Yep, deffo.

The toughest bit will be the number of youngsters with potential that will miss out as clubs seek to reduce costs.

Smart clubs will cut the more expensive costs and keep the kids on, knowing that a sacrifice today can pay back multiple times by giving the kids a chance to develop properly. I think we will be one of the clubs that retain most of our younger talents.