Quote: back to back to back "Peacock wanted a better deal but the club said they didn't have neough money. Peacock was happy with that but then you went out and spent mega bucks on harris.
Peacock and many others felt let down by this and decided to leave.
That's from his autobiography.'"
Indeed. (Although I'd be interested in your definition of "many" given what the club said at the time about other leavers and the reasoning)
One little point that never really comes out though, that may have had more than a little bearing on things:
A sizeable chunk of Harris' income came from sale of and services provided by him in respect of his image rights to Publico. And seemingly he did a lot of work for them to justify the payment - two nights a week we heard, but make of that what you will. Same way as e.g. Scully and his substantial income from Gillette. The club viewed this as being outside the cap, same as Saints did with Scully's image rights income, although for reasons its clear the club were never happy with these payments were subsequently judged to be within the cap. I don't think such a situation ever arose at Saints, btw.
Now the implications of this for the salary cap breaches have been discussed on these forums any number of times, although for too many posters it remains an inconvenient truth (by the time the RFL decided it was a breach for year 1, we were already well through year 2 so we got hit with breaches for two years with no opportunity to mitigate).
But the other implication is that it seems clear that a source of income had been opened up for Harris that I suspect would not have been available for Peacock. It may have been because Harris was seen as being more marketable, eloquent and higher-profile...the reasons are not for here. But why this may be significant is that the "extra" money that Peacock complained was suddenly available to pay for Harris but not for him may well have been precisely that. Peacock clearly felt he had been lied to by Caisley, and if so you can understand his anger. I would have gone apoplectic in that situation. But it is not inconceivable that Caisley actually told him the truth?
Would anyone be surprised to find that Sam was able to receive income from outside for sale of HIS image rights too? We saw he was announced as the new face of Lexus Bradford the day before his new contract was announced, and we saw his face grinning at us promoting England shirts on this very forum, to point out two possible (although I am guessing) examples. If such sources of income were not available to (say) new players after Sam leaves, given that Sam (like Harris) may well have been viewed as pretty high-profile and unique by potential users of his image rights, then those players would presumably need higher packages than might otherwise have been the case? Or maybe Sam needed a lower package from the club than might otherwise have been the case? Speculation, but I'd suggest it might be a tad naive to assume that the club is necessarily able to get a player worth the same as Sam to replace him, within the cap?
I do keep making the point anyway on here that the bang you can get for your bucks within the salary cap depends very much on how much of your players' total income comes from bog-standard salary and benefits, and how much comes from "escalator" devices such as payment for image rights, payments by "unconnected" third parties, payments into Employee Benefits Trusts, use of offshore vehicles and personal service companies, payment devices like the Singapore Sling, payments to pension schemes and the ubiquitous brown paper bag. And how much of all this is actually within the rules - RFL, tax or moral.
