your position rests on the goodwill of players, players who apparently should be happy to earn thousands of pounds under their market value so you dont have to pay a few more pounds for your season ticket?

do you think this goodwill will never run out? Do you think this goodwill is a solid building block for our game?

well then we get rid of those who cant control their ego's

I don't know. Why do you want him to spend more?

So we have enough prize money to enable several clubs to pay their players 50 % more than they currently earn , excellent

Then there'll be no Chairmen. Like Starbug has already said - people who run clubs are a different animal to those who run "normal" businesses.

i dont, i trust that in the course of building up a near billion pound construction business he picked up a few pointers on how he can run a business successfully and make a profit!

i trust he would know exactly how much he should be spending on salaries without just using a number which bears no relation to his business' financial position

again WTF?

I give you Sir Fred Goodwin & Robert Maxwell. It's never cut and dried..............

other than being the same people?

i.e most chairmen where/are succesful businessmen over and above being club chairmen

the salary cap isnt the only thing stopping Ian Lenegan paying Stuart Fielden £10million a season, its not the reason Simon Moran isnt paying Lee Briers in yachts and carribean islands,

and Paul Caddick's brickies arent going home to their country estates after a hard day building a wall

These are people who run business', they arent idiots, they didnt get to the position of being able to own an SL club by throwing money away

Im pretty sure both made plenty of money

No , I said sports businesses are totally diferent to proper businesses

Some of the most successful sports businesses are financial dissasters , you can however have the worst performing business in the world in a particular field and be very profitable

Not via sport they didn't

Cool. So as he is one of the people involved in the decisions regarding the salary cap maybe you should trust his judgement that it is in fact a good thing.
Maybe he understands that SL requires 14 strong competitive teams. That all the teams in SL are benefiting from the rising standards and increased competition. That this would be impossible without the salary cap. I expect his business experience means he knows the devastating effect removing the cap would have on the competition. He knows Leeds need competition on the field to be successful off it and the salary cap is key to that. He probably also knows that SL clubs are not in direct competition off the field.

Continues to amaze me how many people still assume the salary cap is black-and-white and a level playing field.

Hypothetical Example 1: you have a "marquee" player whose image rights might be deemed to be worth quite a bit. Your chairman has a wealthy pal who is not a sponsor or otherwise connected with the club who for whatever reason is happy to pay a lot for those image rights.. As in a LOT. Strangely enough, the player seems so happy with that deal (outside the cap) that he agrees to play for the club for a less than many would expect him to.

Hypothetical Example 2: as 1, but substitute big independent business who see serious value in having that player front for their marketing. Think Gillette or Tissot as historic examples, although this crops up time again in other, less major, situations. Like Harris and the third party who was paying his image rights, where the existence of this only became public seemingly because the club apparently accepted a advert worth hundreds of pounds only from the third party, in error we understand. And this brought the payment into the cap and contributed to a cap breach, seemingly. And again, where funnily enough you might find the player is then happy to play for less than he might have done otherwise, and maybe you find the club has "assisted" the player in finding the third party willing to pay? Dunno.

Hypothetical Example 3: image rights again, but this time paid to the player's Guernsey-registered personal service company, by the club as part of his package. Paying this way has been MUCH cheaper than getting the same net amount to the player through salary. No problems with the concept. But what happens where a club pays a far higher proportion of the package as image rights than most reasonable people (and HMRC) would expect? More bang for your bucks...except if the proportion is ruled as being excessive then there will likely be retrospective tax penallties. Which (for reasons I am happy to explain if I have to) would amount to retrospective salary cap breach.

Hypothetical Example 4: similar to 2, but read Pension Payments or payments to Employee Benefit Trusts. Lets assume perfectly legally and within the rules. But you avoid tax and NICs so the player gets the same net for a lower gross cost to the club. Open to all no doubt, but probable some clubs take advantage more than others for a variety of reasons.

Hypothetical Example 5: one no SL club or its owner would ever engage in, of course: money paid to player that does not go through the club. Be it the infamous "brown envelope" or (say) an owner or shareholder paying money into a bank account offshore somewhere from similar. But we don't need to worry about that one do we?

Hypothetical Example 6: money paid to an overseas player returning home, using devices like the Singapore Sling to enable (you hope...) the player to avoid tax in both the UK and in his home country (he is resident in neither when the payment is made) and so meaning less cost to the club in both salary and NICs.

Above all a bit simplistic, yes, and the extent to which clubs may choose to employ them will depend on things like the amount of risk the club is prepared to run, the financial acumen of the board and their contacts, and of course how smart a club is in recruiting a player who might be receptive to a (legal) deal structured in an especially tax-efficient way. And as I said, all hypothetical scenarios except where I expressly indicated otherwise.

Now I know that may all be very boring, but what it aims to illustrate is that fitting spend within cap is more of a dark art than science, and the way clubs choose to structure packages can have a significant impact on how much player value they can actually accommodate within the so-called cap. And apart from example 5, probably legally provided staying within the rules or within the bounds of what would be considered reasonable.

of course Paul Caddick loves the salary cap, i bet he wishes he could have one in the construction trade aswell



he would be an idiot not to love it, it keeps his workers wages down, it means he can blame something other than himself for not paying them their true market worth, whilst pocketing the profits.

Running a business would be a peice of in salary capped world, you just pay your workers less and less until you are profitable and then sit back and pretend you are a well run company!

the only people who benefit from a salary cap are the owners,

and how benefits from this salary cap voodoo? no one

why not simply allow owners to pay what they see fit, but put things in place to make sure clubs are still doing what we want them to do (developing young players and giving them a shot)

And the fans. And the sponsors. And Sky. Oh and the players because the fans, sponsors and Sky all bring more money into the game which is mainly spent on salaries.

Bollox.

No salary cap, and we end up with one or two very wealthy individuals buying a team of superstars, with no-one else getting a look-in. Sky would not pay for a competition totally dominated by a small handful of teams, and neither would the fans or sponsors. So soon all you would have would BE a competition comprising a small handful of teams. And then an owner calls it a draw or pops his clogs or gets divorced or gets the religio0n or whatever, and his team is immediately kaput...

Yup. What he said.

Seriously , has Lee Smith stated he is leaving Leeds because he wants more money off them to stay ?

yes, the players definately benefit from capping their wages, its so clear now, earning less is what players want, its why they play our game, to earn less money!

and sponsors, they love it, they cant get enough of being associated with a 2nd class game! being linked to mediocre wages really help them sell that dream! Just think, they flock to RL, they want their names to be synonymous with earning slightly more than the average person

and lets not forget sky, oh ive heard rupert murdoch is buzzing off his tits that Nick Scruton had to switch clubs to earn £500 a month more

.................yeah, there's no sponsorship whatsoever in the game is there?

super league is dominated by a small number of clubs, and that number has got smaller the longer we have had SL,

its quite embarrassing how emotionally scarred this game seems to be because wigan were successful for a little while

comparatively no!

we have very few blue chip sponsors and comparatively little money coming in from sponsorship