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.

SL clubs cannot register new contracts with image rights, as I understand it - at least until the High Court test case is heard. But that is the CLUB paying part of the package as image rights (something Wire were allegedly big big proponents of) as a way of avoiding (or, according to HMRC, evading) tax and NIC and so getting much more bang for your salary cap bucks. Invariably by paying the player's offshore personal services company registered in a tax haven, so non-dom overseas players escaped UK tax on these earnings altogether.

Nothing to stop a player or his agent agreeing a totally unconnected deal to sell his image rights to a totally unconnected third party, though.

And if the player is a non-don - as virtually all overseas players are - then if that image rights income is "earned" overseas, and is not remitted to the UK, then the player is not subject to UK tax in any way. The HMRC actions are aimed at substitution of UK earnings for image rights paid by by the same club. Different issue.

Various other tax loopholes for UK earning substitution - like employee benefit trusts - have been closed, and HMRC are taking a hard (and IMO very unreasonable) similar line on pension contributions. But these are all club-related issues. In the example I quoted, neither the club nor the owner is involved...so all parties will swear to at least...

Have the club made a concious decision to avoid using this kind of wheeze for fear of it coming back to haunt them? If HRMRC decide certain ways of doing this are ok will we belatedly jump on the bandwagon? It seems we're losing out at the moment.

bit academic if we dont have any extra money available to make any payments outside salary cap anyway isnt it?

We did jump on the bandwagon though, if I understood it correctly - one we know of went by the name of Harris. And we all learnt about the meaning of "unconnected" there, did we not? Oddly enough, when (for example) Saints had a senior player whose image rights were presumably sold by him to Gillette, no such issues arose.

I suspect the problem is finding a player who has mysteriously stacked up an unconnected image rights deal and at the same time is minded to play for much less than market value? Maybe some other clubs have somehow...struck lucky, and found such players?

Or, maybe there are players out there who are genuinely prepared to play for a lower salary because they think so much of the club they are playing for?

It has to be something like that, surely?

Not academic, just not relevant - since the third party has to be "unconnected" anyway to avoid the payments being caught by the cap. The salary cap rules cover all payments made by the club or connected parties.

I've never been entirely clear on whether a club finding an "independent third party"
and putting him in touch with the player counts still as "unconnected"?