Give us a break. Either Wire are meant to develop good youth players or they are not. These players turn out in the Valvoline cup and it's in that setting that they grow and develop. Would it be better if Wire under 20s were bottom of that league? How else can they be judged?

Well Wire do have some very good U20s. Albeit some lured over there with big money.

Equally you could argue that we could and should be able to hang onto our best youngsters, the likes of Hellewell and Wardle would undoubtedly have figured for us this season so far. The club argument that they may not have made it is holding less and less water when you see they were far ahead of the other backs int he U20s.

I would be interested to know if the Warrington fans on here honestly, hand on heart believe they are spending the same as all the other clubs.
Do they?

I must confess I wondered how we did it in 2005 (and we didn't).

Wire manage to keep 14 full test players plus Brett Hodgson, Michael Monaghan all these promising youngsters (Evans, Blythe, Riley, Grix etc) and Paul Wood under the cap. It sounds a lot. I've just had a go at estimating how much they all get and trying to be fairly objective I found that I'd only gone about £150k over the £1.8m mark. So it seems fairly believable to me.

It also makes me wonder how much under the cap we are!

Its been quite openly stated that king alone is on 300k..solo was reportedly on 150k a season when with us..

saying that i just had a quick jot to say what i think they could be on..could be mind you as noone knows..even with monaghan/morley/westwood/atkins/bridge etc i estimate them to be 200k over..but thats with having riley on 45k. evans on 25k..dont know how much they would be on so reckon its about that..of course they could be on less..ie crossley only gets 15k off of us..tom b roughly same..so with all their stars and still only just over, if at all, then we should be well under.

Does anyone find it a bit depressing that we don't seem to able to compete with the likes of Wigan and Warrington for this guy?

I mean, he is hardly a world beater. He's a good player, with potential. Yet we seem to be resigned, at least on this forum, to assuming that he'll end up at a 'big club', whilst we end up with the scraps like Sibbit

How are we ever going to catch up to the top teams again unless we can use our (unused) cap space to attract the likes of Ratchford?

I don't think we are as much under the cap as people think we are. IMO we pay too much to our established players more than what they are worth.

Brillant - your first sentence has Matt King definitely on £300k and you follow it up by saying no-one knows what they are on. If you think that those other players you mention such as Chris Bridge are earning £200k+ you really are living in cloud cuckoo land. But if made up figures suit your argument then so what. Makes you wonder why any players leave for RU woth those salaries in SL!

And by the way, please show me evidence from Simon Moran, Andy Gatcliffe or Matt King which demonstrates his contract details if its been fairly openly stated.

'Fairly openly stated ' means that posters on RLFans.com have posted it regularly.

Riley on 45k?!

Just think about what you have put into the public domain.

I suspect the club argued that rather than acknowledge that Wire and Hudds, with seemingly unlimited non-SC resources at their disposal, were able to pay the guys far far more than we were able to? Where the lack of a rich owner really hits us is in paying for all NON-salary cap costs. The club remains strapped for resources for everything outside the first team, whereas certain other clubs seem to have no such constraints. No doubt the reason why the Bulls lost (and did not replace) so many experienced non-playing staff over recent years, as well as promising juniors.

Salary cap is £1.65m - does your £1.8m INCLUDE your deduced £150k "outside the cap" difference, or is the unexplained difference actually £300k?

And remember...all you have to do is recruit a player who, by strange coincidence, has stacked himself up with a lucrative image rights deal with an "unconnected" third party, maybe located overseas, - a player, indeed, who is such an exemplary chap that he then feels able to play for a club for love more than money, for much less than you would otherwise expect, because he is already earning enough through his (unconnected) image rights deal. And then you don't have to worry so much about salary caps any more.

Simples.

You just need to make sure that the business paying for the image rights is not in any way found to be connected with the club or its owner...

Thought the image rights thing was scrapped now..hence why an unnamed premier footballer had just paid 2m to the taxman to avoid charges.

I understand we're skint Adey but unfortunately if what you say is right then it rather makes me resigned to watching a mediocre/poor Bulls side for years to come. We can't afford quality signings and we can't afford to keep our best kids.

When did Hood say we'd be free of our "other financial commitments"?

from memory this years payment is the last one.