Quote BrisbaneRhino="BrisbaneRhino"Is it just me or is anyone else getting a tad annoyed with players jumping ship early in their contracts? Burgess I can understand - going to the NRL was slightly different and he's a young man who was always going to give it a go at some stage.
But Eastwood at Leeds, Johnson at Cats and possibly Orford just seem to be saying 'I'm homesick, let me leave or I'll pout'. Players bleat about loyalty a lot. Some of them obviously believe its a one-way street.'"
I understand what you are saying, but at the same time I don't recall any of these players stating that they "won't come back / play".
OK - they might have the monk on, but Eastwood has still been one of your best players, even after all this came out about him wanting to go home.
Clubs aren't daft. It's rare that they can generate a transfer fee for a player, and by getting details into the open about a player not being 100% happy they lose a player 12 months earlier than planned, but at the same time receive a fee and move on.
I'm sure Burgess would have stayed at Bradford for that last year, but I can't see any way we'd have got him to stay beyond that. We needed the money to pay off other "debts" shall we say, but Leeds and Catalan probably don't have that problem.
It's all money into the coffers and an opportunity to refresh the squad or give healthy re-signing bonuses to ageing squad players

(ie at Leeds)