Quote: Mr. Zucchini Head "I do. I can't imagine that anyone would be so loyal to Honda that they would never buy a car again if they folded.
However people have an attachment to their club, and a lot of people would not start following another just because theirs has folded. Personally as a Hull fan I might go to Rovers or Cas occasionally to get my rugby fix. But I wouldn't go every week and wouldn't start supporting those teams.'"
Its less that I don't think they would ever buy a car again, but more likely, and more analogous with how you would respond to hull going under, and they would buy fewer.
There is strong brand loyalty in cars, many people will simply be 'upgrading' if that upgrade isn't there, they not buy a car for another 2 or 3 years. Obviously that's not as strong as in sports but sports isn't unique. in fact people being wedded to it being unique and ignoring basic business rules is often why clubs go bust.
interesting quotes from RU today,
"If the salary cap is left to forbid the required investment, it will kill any hope of growth."
“It is time to seize that opportunity, to ensure a level playing field in Europe, to build the strongest league in world rugby and to let players earn market-related salaries. We must release the handbrake and step on the accelerator.
“We understand some clubs fear the removal of the salary cap will cause wage inflation, yet in reality salaries are already being driven by the French clubs. We can either sit back and become a ‘lowest common denominator’ league, or we can leap forward.”
Even Nigel Wood has said, "Our elite teams need to be cut loose to be internationally competitive." When asked whether that meant a relaxation of the salary cap, which has remained at around £1.7m per club for several seasons, he said has been promoting the introduction of a marquee player allowance for a couple of years now"
and Gary Hetherington "We proposed this a few years ago and didn't get the support of enough clubs. But it's been brought up again by Marwan, and there are people at other clubs like Simon Moran at Warrington and Ken Davy at Huddersfield who have the private income to spend more than they are currently allowed without jeopardising the stability of their clubs."
Tony Smith ""I'm keen on anything that's going to raise the quality of our competition, and maybe also give us a bit of a wow factor," said Smith. "If a marquee player at each club is the best way to do that, great."
Clubs have sold the 'poor card' for so long that even when large and important parts of our game are crying out for us to be allowed to pay our players more, they are ignored. When other sports are outright telling us the problems the SC is causing we ignore them
We are a lowest common denominator sport, we are losing touch, our best players don't play in our league, we don't attract the best from other leagues, some of our best players don't even play our sport, the best from those sports certainly aren't coming over to RL. As much as people complain that paying players their market worth isn't sustainable, exploiting them clearly isn't sustainable either. People within the game are telling us so.
We have seen people from Wigan, Salford, Leeds, Huddersfield and Warrington all come out and say we can pay more, all complain that we are hamstrung by the SC, even the RFL are stating that players can be paid more.
We are setting up our entire competition, in its structure and its rules to cater to the lowest common denominator, we are entrenching mediocrity and then wondering why we are struggling.
If you want to know why the games standing and visibility is falling, its simple. We aren't a top league and we don't present ourselves as such, and we are doing next to nothing to make ourselves a top league.
People on here moan at 'knock off Nigel' selling the game short with low ticket prices, but we are like any product, we can either sell ourselves as a premium product, but that costs more to make, or we can use the cheapest raw materials and stack em high and sell em low.
as Jacky Lorenzetti said when spending basically the SL SC on Dan Carter "Carter will be the best-paid player at Racing but also the least expensive because of the economic benefits,"
none of this however changes the fact that the market should set the players wages, the should be able to sell their skills as british RL players for what they are worth. It should not be set by the clubs colluding to keep them low.
