Quote Roy Haggerty="Roy Haggerty"Exactly. The problem we have is money. We have enough to sustain a professional competition for 14 clubs, but only if they're supplemented by cash from sugar daddies. No drama there - that's the position of nearly every pro sports club. But we don't have enough cash to either (a) give money to the less well-supported clubs of the championship to go professional, (b) raise the salary cap for those clubs with cash, because to do so would make the current league-within-a-league divisions even more entrenched, or (c) to compete with the NRL or RU for top players.
There are two answers to this. The first is to focus hard on youth development systems so that we produce enough decent talent to replace the ones who get poached by richer competitions. To be fair to the cliubs and the RFL, that is certainly in a lot better state than it was. The second is to get more cash from TV, more cash from sponsorship and more cash from international tournaments.
The problem is that the RFL have, in the last decade, proved themselves to be utterly useless at raising cash. The Stobart free gift of the whole competition for 12 lorries was an utterly insane decision which has come back to bite us this year, because no sponsor is going to pay large bucks for something which the owners value so little that they gave it away. In addition, the negotiations with SKY over TV deals have been so poor by comparison to other sports commanding a similar audience. The canny international execs at SKY must watch Nigel wandering through their door with his begging bowl, and start laughing behind their hands.
As others have said, this is an attempt to address a problem we don't have. Our problem is not a lack of games between the top 12 clubs and the next 12, or a lack of fixtures. Our problem is a lack of money, and I'd rather the RFL actually used their time and energy employing someone who might actually be able to get some companies to part with some cash, and deliver a decent TV deal, than waste it on this nonsense.'"
I'm not a line-by-line defender of this over-complex proposal, but neither do I think looking at structure versus 'finding cash' is an either/or thing. All of this, is always, and always has been, a constant chicken-and-egg situation - we'll never get away from that. What's very challenging in RL, is the high disparity in earning power, and the fact that the sport itself is fairly brutal at exposing differences in strength, more so than any major UK sport - you can't 'park the bus', or kick for touch and collapse scrums all day, etc. if you're a weaker side.
The 'fix' ( salary cap ) causes at least as many problems as it solves, namely, the few clubs that could occasionally afford to pay stars are unable to do so. We can go on and on about 'improving marketing' and no doubt we could do dramatically better - I think the RFL and in particular are p*ss**r marketeers - BUT, nothing is better for marketing than big name, box office players. Like it or not, its also helpful if they're box-office off the field too, whether that's your housewives' favourite like a Johnny Wilkinson or someone naughty like Alex Higgins. Look how snooker suffered since it lost most of its 'characters'.
This is a much more insidious problem than people realize. We talk about 'improving youth development' but a lot of that depends on the amount of interest youth have in the game. If the sport doesn't look like a place that - should you turn out to be a world-beater - you can make a spectacular living, it is less attractive to a talented young athlete. Sure you could do well in the UK and move to the NRL or RU, but is that really the story we want to our kids to dream about? Now, if you're an Olympian purist, maybe you don't want people who think about fame and fortune, that's fine.
I'll drone on endlessly about how I think the cap tries to fix the wrong problem...it doesn't really matter if clubs spend silly money on a limited number of stars (provided they can afford it - though even then its a matter of debate as to whether a governing body should interfere in how a club runs its own finances)...the real problem with the kind of thing we saw in the past, with Wigan especially, is clubs with lots more (relatively) money, buying up talent *which mostly sits on the bench* that ought to be playing first team at other clubs. If we placed very tight limits on the number of players on big money (but that money can be as big as you can afford) then some clubs would be able to retain world-class talent, whilst also being *forced* to have a great youth structure (your squad limit is so small, you need excellent development players).
