Interesting bunch you lot

Can you get done for not spending a minimum of a million like a minimum speed limit?

If you see a semi codger trying to console a wailing 6 year old boy because we’re playing crap, feel free to buy me a hot chocolate

I’m not going, can’t make it. Let’s hope we finish with some pride. Desperately needed but I can see Cas sneaking it

The NRL talked about a minimum cap spend a while ago. When David Middleton was with the NRL he visited England and said some teams were spending only 30-40% of the cap while others were maxed out. Leeds were one of the clubs who voted against increasing the cap for a long time, and its one of the reasons why even with marquee allowances SL clubs just cannot compete with the NRL. We have to use marquee for average NRL players now, and most clubs are picking up fringe players. I know the NRL cap has exploded, but SL didn't even keep pace with inflation for years.

It’s an interesting point. The idea of a cap works in theory to even out a system, but it assumes a closed system. In reality we are in competition with our core assets - players - with RU and NRL.

Whether many clubs could afford to increase the cap much I don’t know - aren’t all clubs pretty much posting losses as it is?

Most likely. If we increased the cap we'd see a big few open a more consistent gap on the rest, but just looking at most seasons it seems like some clubs just don't spend as much, and 'mid size' clubs tend to get lucky with players or they are unlucky (lucky and unlucky could equally mean badly managed) and don't tend to stay at the top for long. What Leeds are showing is that with the cap acting as a very hard limit, its really difficult to swap out a lot of players in one go. It will have taken us two off-seasons, and even then the squad for next season probably isn't exactly what Smith (or any other coach) would want.

I'm no expert on the cap but if you have homegrown exemptions, marquee etc doesn't that raise the cap significantly?

They have built loads of exemptions into it and over complicated it to the point where for me they should just raise the cap.

These policies must suit the whole game and not just Leeds of course, but there’s no point encouraging clubs to develop young talent if they just get cherry picked off by richer competitions all the time.

We could have spent hundreds of thousands invested in Newman and as soon as he strings some consistency together an NRL club offers to double his salary and poof.

In theory you could spend any amount on your marquee allowance, but that doesn't raise the wage of the average player. I would think Wire and Catalans probably outspend everybody else, but even they wouldn't be spending over 2.5 million.

Cas deserve to go down if they've broken the cap paying that lot!

Just being realistic Arthur.
The table doesn't lie.
And looking at how recruitment is going, I expect much the same next year.
Eseh will go to Saints. Why wouldn't he?

I'm not a season ticket holder, but I go to about 10 games a season.
Haven't really enjoyed any this year (apart from maybe Hudds at home)
So I probably won't go next year.
The club will survive without my money, but I doubt I'm alone with my sentiments.

Next season is different. It’s highly unlikely we’ll lose both starting half backs and starting full back, centre, prop and marquee forward all at the same time again.

We don’t know the relative quality of our 2024 squad compared to 2023 but we have clearly had huge disruption through injuries and weird departures and fall outs.

A few more smart signings and I think we should be reasonably confident of a top 6 finish next season. If we don’t get the next few signings right then yes we might struggle again.

I believe we have a clutch of future first team players coming through the system now: who knows which will make it but some will be knocking on the door even next year.

I think you're being overly pessimistic. Four, maybe more, signings of the right quality could make a huge difference. I wouldn’t get too hung up on Eseh. He's a good young prop but we are well stocked in that regard. I'd much rather have a proven senior prop, and as referenced at yesterday's presser announcements could be fairly immenent. I'll see what they come up with before writing them off as a bad job. Hopefully they do get it right, the team is competitive again, and you get tempted back to going to games again.