More of a case of what each club can afford. Make no mistake EVERY club would be splashing cash like Warrington have and Leeds are beginning to do if they could. So basically any complaints about teams spending money is saying our more financially better clubs should be kept at the spending level of the weakest links in a division. Can you imagine Man City, Liverpool and Msn Utd being told they should only spend the same as Brighton, Burnley or Huddersfield?

Sports succeed when money is spent and for too long RL hasn’t. Interesting this week that Leeds apparently made an offer of £500k for Jake Connor and it was mostly shouted down as way too much money to spend on one player. 22 years ago Leeds spent £330k on a player, that over 2 decades later a club attempting to spend £500k is deemed silly money says a lot about our sport right now.

You do remember why the game switched from being a winter sport into being a summer sport dont you ?
RL was brought to it's knees by free spending clubs at the top of the old first division, when high transfer fees were the norm, especially when enticing players from Union and free spending Widnes and particularly Wigan brought the professional side of RL to within a whisker of going bust and Uncle Mo brokered a deal with sky which only became known halfway the season in 1994 ??
Wigan consequently moved in with their footballing namesakes and we all started to get used to summer rugby.
As part of the rules of the summer sport, a salary cap was introduced to prevent those very same clubs overspending and to bring some stability to a sport which was financially out of control.

So, why shouldn't clubs be able to spend whatever they want, why indeed.

If our sport was awash with the crazy money that exists in football, things could be different.
However, apart from 5/6 premier league sides, most of the cash in football is from TV revenue.

Although the salary cap hasn't worked 100% and there have still been casualties along the way and there should have been year on year increases, it has brought a level of stability to the game and it has also allowed for a more "even" competition, something which should be seen as a plus but, despite having a competition where almost any side can beat any other, "we" still cant sell the game as one of the most even, exciting and unpredictable professional sports on the planet.

That’s because the Salary Cap has been used to drag down the best clubs to lower clubs level.

If the likes of Man City and Liverpool were only allowed to spend as much as the likes of Burnley or Brighton do you think they’d be as huge an interest in the Premiership? Look at La Liga and the gap between Barca, the Madrid teams and others? In tennis, in the women’s game for years apart from Serena who couldn’t really call who would reach the last 4 of a Grand Slam. In the men’s game it was always usually Federer, Nadal, Murray and Djokovic. The next 100m final at the Olympics will probably be much tougher to call than the last 3 but I bet it doesn’t get the same hype and eyes watching it as when everybody tuned in to see Bolt win as expected.

Don’t confused a more even playing field with being better.

We’ve spent too long holding back the bigger clubs so the smaller ones could try and play catch-up and that’s hurt our sport as your best teams/players are what drive your sport forward. Did Tiger Woods dominating golf hurt it?

Really the salary cap in SL should have hit the £3m mark by now but we’re still stuck around £2m because some clubs can’t even manage that.

I'm not using a more even field as an example of "better quality" however, it certainly makes for a better competition.

However, what I did point out is that some of the bigger clubs of the 80's / 90's, although packed with "star" players, took the game to the cliff edge and a sustainable competition beats boom and bust every time.
You and your ilk bang on about the smaller clubs "dragging the game down" and "holding it back" but, it wasn't the smaller clubs that almost killed the sport, was it ?
It was THE biggest club in England that forced Uncle Mo to broker the deal with Sky. Not from a position of strength but, in desperation, to save his beloved Wigan.

Having said that, the professional era has seen the players become faster, fitter, stronger and quickened the game up, theoretically making it more attractive to watch.

As for the cap, with the addition of the marque player, we may well be close to the £3 million that you suggest but, as you rightly point out, it's immaterial, as we only have 4 ? clubs capable of spending this amount.

It's interesting how some clubs spend their money though and the solution is to throw even more money at overrated Aussies and this will continue for the next 10/20 years as no matter how many Toronto's or New York's we throw into the pot. RL in the UK will still languish behind both the Australian game and in this country, Union.

The expansion dream is, just a dream and regardless of how many N. American sides we throw into the mix, without a substantial addition to any TV deal, which looks way, way off happening, all that their inclusion will actually do, is to stoke wage inflation and reduce the "quality" in the UK.

*checks Wolfpack season ticket package* 10 games plus playoffs at their home ground.

Which 10 games are they ? are you including pre season games ?

No pre-season games here.

Starting this weekend:
Swinton
Bulls
Dewsbury
Toulouse
Fax
Fev
York
Rochdale
Barrow
Leigh

Plus playoffs

I agree entirely on the salary cap front. Though think there may be a better version of it that can be used.
It’s certainly spread the talent across the competition. This is no disrespect to Wakefield but the fact they’ve kept hold of Fifita and Johnstone are evidence of that and it gives them an opportunity to progress as a club if they can now keep hold of players such as them.
I think we’re getting to a stage, or will be soon, whereby the salary cap will have to be increased but that should be done steadily and with plenty of notice. There should be a 10 year plan showing the progression of the salary cap so that clubs can budget and plan accordingly.
We’ll also get to the stage where the salary cap and relegation don’t work together. If we’re at a stage where the cap has effectively spread playing talent across the league then you’ve got a league clubs who are all pretty close in terms of on-field ability. At that point relegation becomes even more of a negative to the league as you’re not relegating a club that clearly can’t hack it, you’re relegating a club that’s probably been a bit unlucky in it’s signings or it’s injuries. I don’t think that should be a basis for relegating a club.

I still don’t like the “[insert club name] is just buying success”. Every club is doing or attempting to do that. With a salary cap it doesn’t overly distort the competition so it’s not an issue. The only thing that overly distorts the competition is clubs spending money they can’t afford to lose. Which is why the penalties for going into administration are there even though I still think they should be harsher especially with regard to the individuals involved in running clubs who end up in significant debt.

I'm a Wire fan but I'm in favour of the cap. Wigan did do a lot of damage to the game in the mid 80s-mid 90s when they bought any player who showed promise elsewhere whatever the cost. I was on record then and maintain now that only a solid level of competition across as many clubs as possible will sustain sucess for any team sport. I think the marquee rule has proven a useful 'safety valve' for the richer clubs to allow them, when they have the money as some like Wire do, to spend it but in a careful and controlled way. No club, no matter how rich, can simply keep acquiring all the talent at the expene of the game as a whole. I do agree, though, that the cap has to rise modestly each year if we are to hang onto talent.

And back then the profile of the game was massive. Now we are sandwiched between the 2nd division of women’s football and the tiddlywinks champions league.

And back then the world was very different.
The problem isn’t that RL went away from what it was doing well to start doing something wrong. It was always doing something wrong. It was spending far more money than it was bringing in and crucially was only spending it on short term benefit such as players. Clubs infrastructure was left to wither and die and is still the main reason as to why we’re in the position we’re in now.

The problem was the world changed. People stopped caring about how a small ex mining town fared. They wanted to see big clubs from places they could at least imagine they had an affinity to. Which is why Union massively increased its profile, not because of its domestic game, people generally don’t care who wins the Union Premiership, but because of its international game which you can immediately join a side and care about the result.
League was still too busy crowing over the fact we got over 10k to a relegation decider between 2 small towns.
Peoples time is too limited and their choice of how to spend that time too varied now to rely on drawing people in to most RL games at the moment. There’s something better or, crucially, easier to spend that time on.

I’m in favour of the cap, but like you say the cap to rise modestly each year. Problem we got into is that it didn’t raise from the £1.8m for a very long time. Like I said previously we should be touching £3m mark by now, now only just now creeping past £2m.

I disagree that we need to make sure it’s as even a competition throughout the league as possible. Only have to look at other sports to see how they’ve been successful when they’ve had teams/individuals dominate. RL fans seem to think the same people winning hurts the sport whereas other sports are built around their dominate teams/individuals such as Federer, Woods, Schumacher, Hamilton, Phil Taylor, Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry.....Man Utd in the Fergie era, Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan in the 90’s, the New York Yankees, Barcelona and Real Madrid, New England Patriots and Tom Brady, New Zealand in RU.

Other sports celebrate and build off the back of dominate successful teams/individuals...,,we feel the need to clip the wings of any teams who could threaten to do so and see it as a problem that the same teams keep winning the big prizes. Despite what fans of clubs who don’t ever win trophies say....the same teams winning isn’t what hurts our sport, it’s that we’ve been trying too hard to prevent it over the last decade.

When you boil the whole standing of RL in the overall sporting arena, it's "failure" has been against Union, a sport which for decades pretended that it was an amateur sport but now, is very much professional and if we are honest about the situation, there is rock all that League can do to genuinely compete with it, certainly not in the UK.
The jewel in the RU crown over here is the six nations and RL wont EVER have the profile of the other code.
There really should be a genuine conversation on where the sport is headed (sorry for the Americanism).

The argument about people having "something better" to do could be levelled at every sport and you could actually argue that RL scored an own goal by moving to the play off system and grand final, which has taken away all of the glamour and kudos of the sports once "protected" event.

The Challenge Cup and particularly the final, used to have massive kudos and was the one competition that received genuine national coverage, with the Wigan glory years probably being the peak of it's popularity.
However, the GF has now replaced the CC Final as the end of season celebration and of course, with Sky being the sports primary broadcasting partner, this situation is pretty much irreversible.

The one sure thing is that despite the tinkering and "innovation" with the sport, there really is no quick fix.

The World Club Challenge, particularly the extended version could gain some additional exposure but, having tried this for a whole 2 seasons and been thumped by the Aussie club sides, this has been shelved. Plus, there was no real appetite from our Aussie cousins.

However a "proper" series could help the sports profile but, this would have to be the top 3 from each hemisphere and not substituted clubs, which was embarrassing.

Ultimately, we suffer from having so few genuine RL playing nations and again, this isn't going to change in the foreseeable future.