Quote: Egg Banjo "1. There are a ridiculous amount of RU players that are valued at over 200k, and thats not even factoring in several years of player development costs
2. 400k is expensive for a league player but rather cheap for an international class union player
3. Cas buckled, they weren't convinced they would win so took the money and ran instead of defending the sport in court
4. The club may have lost more in legal fees, but had they won it would have created a legal precedent which stops it happening again
5. Sale have money to burn and would have set a target of probably around 500k before they were worried, they defended the claim in the hope that Cas would back down under the worry of not guaranteeing a win in court which is exactly what happened. It's quite a regular thing to happen, even car insurance companies play the same trick.
Castleford have done exactly the right thing in the short term interests of the club, but they have done the absolute wrong thing in the long term interests on the game. What happens if a RU comes and does the same thing to a championship club who aren't fortunate enough to have 100k to spend on legal fees? There's no legal precedent set, so that player would be able to walk away from the league club knowing he won't be chased'"
Why is it up to Cas to defend the sport? It's up to Cas to defend themselves, it's up to the RFL to defend the sport.
I can't imagine it would be too difficult to just start adding clauses into contracts from now on that explicitly protect clubs against this kind of thing so it's not really a case of open season on all RL players.