We let players go as part of the finance package.

And Wigan didn't?

You make some good points about the amount and quality of players playing the game in this country, but that statement is just daft.

Clubs that are limited to a strict salary cap are going bust. How much quicker do you think they would have gone before the cap came into play? Crowds are up on the pre-cap era and still clubs aren't profitable. Were it not for the cap we'd have lost a few of the big clubs and probably several more than have actually been threatened.

The cap isn't the saviour of RL though. It's like sticking a plaster on a guy who's been blown apart by a bomb. The sport is so minor in this country that no one of any athletic ability plays the game. This means there are no genuinely good players in Super League and no one to use to build the profile of the game. The administration of the game is shocking (Lewis is paid a lot and has done absolutely nothing to improve the sport) there aren't enough people playing the game, the English team is as far behind as it's ever been in the last 28 or so years and Super League is an absolute joke. There are about 4 or 5 clubs worthy of a place in SL, all playing to crowd levels way, way below their potential and the majority of the clubs in SL are a financial disaster.

I would say there are enormous question marks over the very future of the sport in this country, the salary cap is one small piece of a jigsaw that has many missing pieces.

My whole disbelief in the SC is based upon whatever the limit is the Club's BOD's will spend the money on something else if they don't spend (invest) in players.
The limit is £1.65m yet clubs with turnovers of £5m are losing money. So where is the money going?
We don't have enough quality players and we need them. If a club can afford them then they should be allowed to buy them or develop and keep them.
Leeds have a turnover of £10m, a cap of £1.65 and just managed to make a profit and actually made an operating loss. The SC had no bearing whatsoever on Leeds loss.
We need to ditch the SC and make sure clubs know they have look after their own financial affairs. I have suggested for a while that SL should perhaps have a rule whereby clubs have to make a profit. Should they make a loss then league points will be deducted. This is very simple and is laughed at as some use the loss as a method of avoiding tax. I just get the impression sometimes that many clubs say that yet it is bad management that beings about the financial loss rather than not paying tax. Sometimes I think just a simple rule like that would ensure the financial wellbeing of all RL clubs. To achieve that would be worth changing the rules.
Last Thursday Billy Boston's book was being discussed and following that we compared the 1962 Gb team backs and the fact that there was also another set of backs who were of great quality yet weren't in that "first" GB team.

The First Team was :- Gerry Round, Billy Boston, Eric Ashton, Neil Fox, Mick Sullivan, Dave Bolton, Alex Murphy.
The Second Team :- Eric Fraser, Ike Southward, Jim Challinor, Alan Davies, Frank Carlton, Harold Poynton, Jackie Edwards.

Two sets of backs who were absolute class. To buy or develop and keep players of that calibre would not be possible under the SC or anywhere near. Until we address the problem of quality players and the numbers we need we will not progress as a sport. When we do address it we will be successful then we will benifit and the game will grow as we all wish it to do.

We all want the game to progress and have differing views on how to achieve it. The best way I can see is to improve massively the number of quality players playing Rugby League. I believe the SC is taking us in the opposite direction hence I am so dead against it.

Youth development in SL is fine. If someone put a Greg Inglis into the system, a Greg Inglis would emerge from it and be a star. Problem is that if Greg Inglis grew up anywhere bar tiny pockets of the UK he'd be playing another sport.

Long, KC, Lyon and Scully were all very good indeed, the best going when they played together. Trouble is that if we are to have a top quality comp then the top teams have to have far more than four top class players.
Of the four three qualified for GB but KC hardly played Intls.
Whether it's current teams or those within the past number of years we have been short of quality players in numbers. That is the problem and you can't pay eight - ten quality players the salaries those four were on when they were at the top of their game. Not under the SC you can't.
Saints, Leeds, Wigan, Wire all need a massive number of GB qualifying players if we are to compete Internationally either at club or nation level.
We need bigger squads with the best youngsters we can find and bring them all through to play SL with a view to them all going to Intl level.
It can't be done with just £1.65m to spend.

There will always be players better than others. Some players will always be paid more than others, if all clubs had four top class players we'd have a lot closer a competition.

We could raise the cap to £4million tomorrow, all that would mean would be that average players would get paid more. It would not raise the standard of play whatsoever.

Whilst there is truth in that argument, our youth teams were regularly trounced by the Aus youth teams, now they compete and often win. Youth development [ihas[/i improved in RL over the last 5 or 6 years.

I'm not at all convinced by the suggestion that there is a clear link between the salary cap and restriction of youth development. There is nothing in the salary cap to prevent clubs investing in their youth setups (in fact, part of the original rationale behind it was to encourage clubs to spend less on mediocre Australians and more on youth development).

If it got to the point where clubs were having to let genuine top class British players go to rugby union because their salary cap was already choc full of top class British players then you'd have a point, but the reality is that none of our clubs are in this situation, and all of our clubs spend a considerable amount of their salary cap allowance on foreign players. This is something the RFL are trying to address with their adjustments to the quota system, and I think we're seeing some positive results from that already.

Removing the salary cap would IMO be disastrous for youth development, for the following reasons:
- Clubs would be more inclined to hold on to their fringe players, which would decrease first team opportunities for youngsters.
- Clubs would just chuck money at Australians.
- As Billinge Lump says, everybody's wage demands would go up, so you'd potentially end up with the same quality of player knocking about but taking more money from the clubs. Something has to give, and clubs would, I suspect, divert funds away from other areas of their organisation like marketing and youth development.
- The SC makes young players an integral part of every club's squad - they provide cheap alternatives to expensive fringe players. Remove the SC and you remove a significant incentive for clubs to invest in them.

The SC doesn't have an impact on how many kids play the game at the weekend, and that's what we need to work on improving if we're going to produce enough top class British players.

A couple very pertinent points worth commenting on there.

1) is simply not true. The cap is so low in comparison to most big clubs turnover as to have little bearing on their ability to successfully trade as businesses.

2) Is true and a direct result of the cap. It shouldn't have escaped any reasonable person's notice that we had many world class players in the game pre-cap and moreover, were able to attract the cream from Australia (something we are largely unable to do anymore) and Union (something we aren't able to do at all and, worse still, a trend that has now completely reversed). Given the game is still played in the same areas, with some good inroads into the South, Wales and France to boot, the only difference between then and now is the money available to spend on players.

I'm not saying the cap didn't have it's place, neccessarily. Just that it was, and is, badly implemented and kept in place in it's current form by self interest rather than in the interests of the greater good.

1) The cap expenditure is only a part of a club's turnover. If the cap is so low, where are clubs other expenditure that cause them to lose lose money every year?

2) Nostalgia is a wonderful thing. We had a handful of genuine world class players within the game, no more. As for the top Australians; short term deals when our season's didn't coincide was the reason for their appearance over here. Nothing else.

If the author of this thread is doing a piece on the SC - the first question you should address is this - is the salary cap legal under EU law- a case could be made by any player that it might constitute a restraint of trade .

theres plenty of pluses and minuses been debated on here but if someone did challenge i cant see how any sporting organisation can mount a robust enough defence- personally my view is that no one in any industry should be subject to such specific restrictitions - and lets face it theres no SC at Red Hall !!!!!

If we are asking has it improved the quality of rugby? Then no it has not at all!

How many painfully poor players do we see in super league now and how many overated imports?