The irony is that money is what breaks the existing order and brings in some changing of the guard.

In the early 1990s Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle were scrapping around the old Second Division, by the mid 1990s Blackburn were champions and Newcastle nearly were. Chelsea were a mid table team till the late 1990s and a not-quite-there team till Abramovich took over and then they started winning trophies. Man City had been a yo-yo club either fighting relegation in the Premiership or fighting for promotion.

So when people say football is dominated by the existing old guard, not really, it's dominated by Man United. The old guard is United, Liverpool and Arsenal, and so when Liverpool and Arsenal get overtaken by new teams with money they deride them as 'buying the title'.

At the moment opposition fans are using the 'can't get to a Grand Final' line against Warrington, but if we win it this year, the vitriol will turn to 'you bought the title'.

Absolutely.

We wrote the bloody book on that one!

And?

Not sure anyone would [ireally[/i complain about Wire winning (maybe that lot over the Runcorn bridge?) - all that stuff is just banter, exactly the same sort of stuff we got all the time from St Helens about not beating them in a final - it's just harmless fluff and hot air. Anyway we had our time in the sun and now it's someone else's time, maybe yours.....if you get to that final and win it!

The difference between soccer and RL is that soccer is happy to have a victory to the richest competition, whereas the RL clubs [ivoted[/i for the salary cap. They decided that having the most money [ishouldn't[/i be used as a means to dominate the league championship. Fair enough the main reason may have been that they were all fed up of Wigan winning everything under the old free for all system......but that merely shows that letting money rule the roost was far from perfect, as it was clear that Wigan's one club domination was killing the game. At least now we have four or five who are in with a realistic chance, so the cap, flawed as it is, has worked to a fair extent.

My view though, is that a law that is abused to such an extent as the cap is an evidently bad, rule and I have to wonder that if it came up again would a majority of clubs still vote to keep it?

Incidentally, I feel you seem regard the Bulls as "one of the old guard", and I would dispute this strongly. The Bradford club has waxed and waned over the years, being strong in the late 1940s again in the early 80s and more recently between 1996 and 2006 but has had its fair share of mediocrity and general up and downs, not to mention going bust in 1963, inbetween. It hasn't been unalloyed wall to wall success, far from it. Fair enough, we've never been relegated from the first division after being promoted to it in 1973, and I guess that many would rightly say it shows some level of consistency, but it pales in comparison to the Wigans and St Helens teams over a much longer period. We're much more like Warrington than you might think.

I don't think Rugby League really [ihas[/i an "Old Guard" of clubs who have always been and will always be at the very top of the game. Even Wigan were relegated in I think either the late 70s or the very early 80s, right before the time Uncle Mo came in and starting making use of the cheque book (not that there's anything wrong with that, any other business on the planet has to spend money in order to improve itself so why should sporting clubs be any different?)

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[sizeHe's right though.[/size

I've lost track of how the salary cap rules work now, but I believe long-serving players get a certain amount of their wages not count on the cap (essentially giving clubs remit to spend over the cap by that amount in simple terms), and I believe Wire last season (not sure about this) registered Briers as falling under that rule.

But ... does the 50% of salary cap applicable income rule still exist? or has that been thrown away now? (the 50% of applicable income on salaries rule was the only part of it that made real business sense to me, as if you still find yourself unable to pay the Inland Revenue despite not spending almost all your income on players, you as a club have to ask some very serious questions about what you're doing with your cash).

IIRC they got rid of that 50% rule.

Fair enough.

The 50% rule went years ago.

You can get a maximum of an extra £50k for player/s > 10 years service. £50k aggregate not each.

Detailed rules rlhere.rl The salary cap rules are in the Appendices.

How about the mods pinning these or the link in a sticky?

And making everyone take a test on the rules before gaining posting rights on here...?

Nothing wrong with it [iper se[/i. The clubs that do it will always be perceived as being lazy and taking the easy way out. This sort of practice fosters inequalities between clubs and doesn't really help with international competitiveness, especially if the top clubs aren't investing in their own youth development adequately (something that I'm not suggesting is going on at Warrington - at least for the last few years).

My quibble is with the very notion of 'buying success' by poaching players from other clubs - does it actually work? When Wigan had a dispensation for going over the cap a few years back, how much did they win? Warrington's lack of success outside the two CC wins is frequently thrown back at them despite years of big money signings.

My perspective on this is definitely coloured by what happened at Leeds in recent decades. We tried to buy success to compete with Wigan in the 1990s, and it was a spectacular failure (although the team were good at demolishing other teams in regular league fixtures). We tried it again when Hetherington took over by paying big money for Harris (and a few other antipodeans) and we only managed a single CC win - not unlike Warrington in recent years. It was only when the homegrown players came through that Leeds really had a sustainable platform for success. A similar thing happened at Wigan in 2010 after the likes of Trent Barrett left and a raft of promising young players emerged, including the Tomkins brothers. Of course, both clubs still brought in marquee players to complement the kids (Lauitiiti, Webb, Ellis, Buderus and Peacock were the main ones for Leeds - obviously not all at once). With the NRL cap increasing, the ability to buy in talent from overseas is rapidly diminishing, so investing in local talent is going to be that much more important (perhaps why Warrington finally seem to be getting their act together in this area...).

I don't disagree with any of that in principle, but in order for a club to attract the top quality youngsters in to their academy setup the club as a whole has to be an attractive prospect for the junior players in question to sign on with. The service area rules are supposed to (I believe) restrict slightly the initial academies that junior players are supposed to sign on with, but I think we all know that that doesn't really happen. If a club has spent big money on players but has ended up slightly outside of the actual 'winners circle', then it would certainly be a more attractive prospect to a junior player than a club signing on with a club languishing at the bottom of the table, spending no money on players and getting nowhere.

Would Sinfield, from Oldham, have signed on with Wigan/Saints instead of Leeds had he seen Leeds as, dare I say it, equivalent to Warrington in terms of first-team prospects and long-term chances of being involved in a successful team? I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that he (and others) certainly might have thought longer and harder about which club to commit the development stages of their career to.

Another point worth making is that if a club concentrates entirely on it's youth setup with the hopes of developing a winning team, it's going to be a very difficult road. Those Leeds' junior players highlighted came in to what was already a very strong and competetive team (even if they were not winning trophies), the counter-argument is Warrington. Harris and Sculthorpe came out of the Wire academy in to the first team, and while they impressed, they didn't help the club kick on to the next level, and that's because the rest of the team wasn't up to standard, had Harris and Sculthorpe not had to be sold, and had they chosen to play out their careers at Warrington, I've got no doubts that they wouldn't have had half (or even all) the success in their careers that they had, and they would be regarded in the same light as Briers: talented, but ultimately not as good as others in their respective positions, with the lack of silverware as evidence to that effect.

Not even when there is a specific rule, voted in by the clubs themselves, against it?

Think you may be correct about the "old guard" though. I don't think any clubs in RL can compare to such as Arsenal or United (though even united did a spell in div2, IIRC). I think clubs go from rags to riches and back again much quicker in RL than soccer too. Of course, the differences in the levels of finance required to back a top division soccer team and an SL outfit are so far apart as to make them incomparable, so I guess that shouldn't come as any surprise.

I do of course mean within the rules. If, for example, Wakefield (no offence intended to reading Wakey fans, it's just an example) who I think are not currently spending up to the salary cap limit, suddenly get a windfall of income somehow, would there really be anything wrong with them going out and signing some higher quality players to improve their squad? And if they got a cup win from that, would people deride them for having bought a trophy?