Suffer!

How is wining GF’s & CC’s suffering.

Every club being financially secure?

Give your head a shake, do you think the likes of Warrington, Huddersfield & London would be financially secure, without their incredibly wealthy benefactors?

As for him being sick of seeing the ‘little’ clubs being looked after, it wasn’t long since Warrington were one of those said ‘little’ clubs & now they’re have a successful spell, he’s advocating the Wigan philosophy.

The question you should be asking is what would abolishing the salary cap give us that would warrant the change?

The chance to compete for the very best rugby players in the world improving the quality of player and improving the quality of the league.

But surely its having a Salary Cap which needs to be justified rather than not having it.

So what you are saying is you would like to see a similar scenario as the Premiership,or Scottish Premiership where a few elite clubs battle it out amongst themselves,leaving the rest to pick up the crumbs?

Personally instead of abolishing the salary cap i'd just have a a 5 player exclusion.

5 players who you could pay whatever you want, so in theory we could attract players like Thurston and Marshall over but at the same time stop rich clubs filling their squads with the best players.

Plus certain players who don't get in to the pay bracket of one club may be paid more at another club.

Wigan fans really can't see the wood for the trees can they? Do you not realise the salary cap was brought in to protect you? Wigan's 'glory' years were a fraud and they spent themselves into bankruptcy buying their trophies and any player capable of breathing.

Now after a few years of failing to dominate, Wigan are getting uppety about the cap and their fans are claiming it's holding them back

The only time I would want the cap to go is if the clubs can only spend income generated by the club, no borrowing, no directors loans, If the owners want to put cash in it must be a gift not a loan secured against the ground. If any club goes into debt then all contracts with players should be null & void & the owners banned from the game. The only debt clubs may have would be against ground improvment & that debt should be approved by the RFL & other clubs. We have to get away from using debt to win trophies as Wigan did to the detrement of every other club.

Doing away with the salary cap would be a bad idea imo but it does need amending. I was in favour of removing club trained players from the cap, but you’d still need some mechanism to stop the wealthy clubs from stock piling all of the best juniors, so here’s my amended suggestionIncrease the cap limit to £2m, allow a maximum of £1m to be spent on non club trained players & scrap the quota limits.

This would represent a significant cap increase but restrict the ability to buy in players & offer an incentive for clubs to develop their own talent. If a club wished to spend more than £1m on club trained players they could do so, with any spend over £1m being removed from the non club trained allowance.

This would also remove the need for any quota restrictions imo (which aren’t really working & the cause of much animosity). The reduced budget available for non club trained players (along with higher earning potential in the NRL) will have a natural effect on overseas numbers.

This is all probably flawed in ways I haven’t thought of yet, but I think it would represent an improvement on the current situation.

And where is this money coming from to pay for us to compete for the very best players in the world?



We have it and it works so why does it need to be justified? Surely to even challenge the salary cap you need to have an alternative that survives close scrutiny first or else you change to something that might not work which would be suicidal.

What do you mean? The game is awash with surplus money.

Wherever it wants to. If it comes from outside investment great, if it comes from inward investment great. If it doesnt come from anywhere clubs dont bring in those players and we are no worse off.

The salary cap stands or falls on its own. It has to justify its existence like every restriction we have has to justify its existence. It is wrong for us to apply restrictions to clubs just for the sake of having them. The SC doesnt work, it clearly doesnt work, every single criteria it is sold to us on it fails to meet. It doesnt stop clubs going bust as the myriad of clubs who have gone bust under the SC era will testify, it doesnt 'even out' the competition, Leeds have won 5 of the last 8 grand finals, only 5 clubs in the history of SL have contest a GF, and one of them only once, the clubs who have made the jump from 'smaller' to 'bigger' clubs havent done so on the back of the SC, they have done so on the back of massive investment from their owners. The SC right now, is achieving nothing.

Costs of abolishing it altogether outweigh the benefits, IMO.

The league would become very lopsided. We had a lot of blowouts as it was last year - and they'd become more common. Rugby isn't a sport that lends itself to giant-killing acts. And sport needs competition. I'm far from convinced that there is a lot of unspent revenue to either. Supposedly super-wealthy Hull have rarely made a 6-figure profit, iirc.

The problem the sport has, isn't the cap, it is money.

But if you're going to raise it, just do it. The opaque, sliding scale thing they just brought in is a joke.

Finally - why should the rich clubs help the poor? So they have someone to play. I enjoyed HKR putting 70 on Wakefield last year, but as a novelty. It'd soon wear thin.

The levy system (eg paying £200 k above the cap, but having to put the same amount into a pot to subsidise the poorer clubs) would probably get support - otherwise, Turkeys don't vote for Christmas

I like the idea of for every £ you over spend you have to put in to a RL pot.

So do I, so long as it is £10 you put into the pot for every £1 overspend