And made a loss of £27 million, before tax, last year. The death of the dream is taking a toll at a number of second tier PL clubs, as they have been relegated to the status of 'opponent'.
The existence of a virtually self-perpetuating Champions League elite has contributed to that as well, tbf.

Good for international game but not for the league that we watch week in week out. As soon as a youngster looks good off he goes for big bucks NRL

It's frankly embarrassing that after 10 years the SC hasnt risen once. Players are paid less today in real terms than they were 10 years ago. That is a terrible record and should shame all clubs.

If an equal competition means second rate players playing on low wages, then we would be better with an uneven league.

We are in a vicious cycle where we cant increase our revenue because we cant increase our visibility and we cant increase our visibility because we arent allowed to pay our visible assets enough to keep or attract the very best. They are all playing in other more visible competitions on higher wages. The SC entrenches this vicious cycle and something will need to be done to break it.

Quins could spend a million pounds advertising and marketing next year and it wouldnt be as big a boost as paying that mill to SBW.


There are better more obvious ways to stop a club from buying all the talent

Yes, he *could* do that, but that would make him a saint (no pun intended) - most people like him (and yes, Abramovich is a bit of a daft example, for the case of Rugby League, we only need think about a guy with a few millions to splash about), want to live the dream - i.e. they DO want to distort the competition. Actually most fail to acheive it. Abramovich suceeded for a season or two, but not forever.

What really distorts competition in football isn't really the standard of the top clubs' first XI, but the number of international superstars sitting on premier league benches (which the smaller clubs can't afford to do) .

No matter how rich Chelsea or City or whoever were, as long as they could only buy (say) the best 15 players in the world, and the rest had to be self-trained or vastly cheaper, then you'd allow the rich guys the pleasure of thinking they owned the 'best' players in the world, but also stop them dominating totally, because there just isn't *that* much difference between the 'best' 15 and the 'second best' 15, or the 10th best 15 for that matter.

I'm not advocating the removal of any form of salary control, rather suggesting that there's something wrong if we're literally blocking money out the game, even if that money was constrained by rules which made it 'safe' - i.e. couldn't bust a club.

Unfortunately it's unrealistic to expect RL to grow as a nice even competition - you'll always have breakaway leaders who 'set the pace', but you *can* structure things to try to extract the best out of that phenomena - for example 'taxing' the overspend for grassroots development - and you can structure things to prevent extreme distortion of competition and the sad phemonoma of healthy world-class internationals sitting out games.

I accept that distortion is a bigger risk in RL and needs more control (e.g. a *very* small 'high-paid' squad limit). Two reasons: firstly there's far less players to go around, so the 'best' 13 RL players are significantly better than say the 10th best 13 (even worldwide, not just in the UK). Also the nature of the game itself makes it harder to 'equalize', because small-ish gaps in standard generally lead to big gaps in results. In football, Man Utd *can* have a tough night away to a championship side, and indeed lose to them. But for Warrington RL to lose to a Championship RL side would be almost unthinkable. In football, almost any premiership team can pull off a result on their day, and whilst it's true that even in football the same sides get to the top - it's because there's a lot of games in a season to even out the anomalies.

Most attempts to control salaries, etc. have good points but also unintended consequences. Over-emphasizing the need to chase 'equality' can easily lead to the unintended effect of dragging down the overall standard.

I don't think 'cap or no cap?', or even 'what's the right cap?' is the right debate - rather 'can we design a system of salary control which accurately targets what we're trying to acheive?'

I'm not sure there's a clear consensus in the game about what exactly the cap is for? Is it for stopping clubs going bust, or is it to equalize competition? Even if you answer "Both those things!", one can still ask the question "OK, so what's the relative importance of the two?" It matters, because a system heavily emphasizing equality may have a different set of rules than one that was much more focused on finances.

Explained better than I managed. Spot on.

Has it not?

What two MASSIVE clubs who are known throughout the entire world?
God forbid we would have teams like that in our sport......

It says something when only 34 people know Wigan, the team with the biggest profile in the sport on Pointless

Salary cap was originally brought in to level up the league and make all clubs be even

Its not worked

Ask Bradford if it as helped them before the salary cap they where a top four team they spent big on good players and made profits, now they are struggling because its too even

Warrington are the club that have benefitted the most as they have played the salary cap the best by having a brilliant owner who knows how to work the cap by releasing players on loan.

Ask Harlequins or Wakefield if the Cap has helped them NO

It was set to £1.8m in 2001, and reduced to £1.65m a few years ago when tax and NI was deducted from the SC calculations.

That is mis-management and poor attendances, not the salary cap.

But that wasnt the question he asked was it. He asked if the Salary Cap had helped. Having an SC isnt neutral, it isnt the default position, it needs to have positive effects to be justified. It needs to be helping if it is to be kept.

This is just bizarre, you can't go claiming that the SC has levelled things down instead of up and then claim it hasn't helped the smaller clubs.

Of course it's helped the likes of Quins & Wakefield. It's helped them by keeping them more competitive than they otherwise would have been as evidenced by their league positions/playoff appearances over the years that wouldnt have happened without a salary cap.
Just as a few examples from my own club. The salary cap forced Leeds to release the likes of Ashley Gibson & Jodie Broughton to Salford who otherwise could probably have earned more being squad backup at Leeds and playing 10 or so first team games a year for Leeds. The cap forced Leeds to release them so Salford has benefitted from the cap. The cap also forced Leeds to send the likes of Luke Ambler, Kyle Amor & Ben Jones-Bishop out on loan, something which Quins & Wakefield benefitted from.

I'm receptive to the argument that the cap brings the top downwards and doesn't help us in the short term compete with Union or the NRL in terms of wages, but it most certainly does benefit the smaller clubs.

Doesn't that mean its actually gone up then if over 20% (in tax & NI) now isn't counted?

So you believe it self-evident that smaller clubs benefit from a decline in the standards of the league.

If there was no SC, leeds would still have released Broughton and Gibson because of the emergence of Hall and Watkins, they would have still loaned out Ambler, Amor and BJB because they wanted them to have first team games, thats why they werent recalled when we had injury problems.

The SC has left league where we cannot compete for the big names, we cant use the big names to attract those with nothing more than a passing interest and it has led to a decline in the quality of the league.

The SC did not stop Leeds taking Gareth Ellis, Hull taking Westerman, or Saints taking LMS.