So you think that threatened with the very real prospect of relegation, clubs wont over spend in a vain attempt to stay up? Are you new to RL?

Leeds, who I suspect are the best run RL club in the country, if not the game, would struggle to keep pace with Salford if you let Marwan off the leash. He has insane amounts of money and he really does seem to scatter it about like confetti. He'd be on a plane to 'stralia and signing up most of the Kangaroo back line, even if it meant buying them european heritage to get them under the quota. Inglis would be on a million quid straight off, with thurston not far behind.
Imagine if the top few started paying over the odds, what would happen to HKR, or Widnes, the latter who have a very real history of spending to win and then imploding.
Soccer is fine.....they get telephone number size TV deals and 3nd tier clubs sell more replica shirts than us, but we need to keep a lid on spending.

What makes you think Wakefield and the less cash rich teams would spend anywhere near what the big clubs do? And come on surely they must have some financial sense, they'd know if they overspent weather they stayed up or not would put their future in doubt,you name me a team that's gone bust trying to stave off relegation?

In what way would London having put out a better squad and ended in the same position have been worse for the game?

Marwan can only buy so many players.

I think what Gutters is trying to say is that allowing clubs to spend whatever they like drags other clubs up to (or close to) the level of the highest spending clubs. They have to to compete. Either to remain in the hunt for trophies or to avoid relegation.

Football just about manages it. But they've got 90-odd full time clubs so if they lose 2 or 3 a season it's not that big a deal. RL has far fewer and can't afford clubs going under, it significantly holds back the sport. They've also got such massive clubs like Man Utd and Arsenal who can compete with the super-rich owner clubs through their own spending power. RL doesn't have that. As Gutters rightly points out, no club could come close to matching Koukash's spending. So 1 man can massively affect the sport, which isn't true of football.

Leeds is by far the best run RL club in financial terms, yet even a modest increase in the salary cap would severely stretch Leeds' resources. If there were no salary cap and Dr Koukash was spending at a level necessary to compete with Union, Leeds would be nowhere near able to compete without spending more than their income and hoping that either higher crowds or final appearances kept their heads above water.

It's not just the badly run clubs that would be in financial problems, it would drag in the well run clubs too. Just like it did prior to the salary cap.

I agree with you entirely that it won't prevent a badly run club from going under. But it gives the opportunity for reasonably well run clubs to remain solvent.

I actually think the opposite is true of what you say about no need for a salary cap now there's P&R back. I think there's even more need for it now, and there was less justification for it during licensing.

What him said ^^^^^

There are two, possibly three "we'll run" businesses (clubs) in SL, so basically it could throw SL into self destructive chaos.


Even though clubs were going to the wall during licensing, I think that's true.

Shall we just accept that RL will stay where it is then at the bottom of the pit miles behind all other sports.

Nope, but binning the cap will see us in the news for all the wrong reasons

Hopefully those that actually make decisions on this sort of thing won't retain a blinkered view. Rugby League has huge potential in the UK and globally if only the right things are done. Would Abu Dhabi have put their hundreds of millions into Man City if there had been a salary cap preventing them buying some quick success whilst their long term investments there start to bear fruit? The salary cap issue and its gradual removal is something that needs to happen to benefit the game over the next couple of generations - not a decision to be based on the likely whims of the current owners of a few current Super League clubs. The RFL as the game's governing body has a responsibility to the UK tax payer to do what it can to prevent loss of tax revenue via it's member clubs going bust and re-starting anew as a matter of course. Some sort of "tinkering" with the free market has to be accepted therefore. The salary cap is just the wrong mechanism. The tinkering should just involve the RFL requiring evidence that a player contract can be prudently afforded before it will register it. Pretty simple. If that means, for example, adequate share capital rather than loans that are repayable on demand, so be it. I suggest a club's player registrations would be automatically ok up to a total players' contract value equating to the amount of central funding provided to the club.

Then what do we do then? Because the game hasn't grown since 1998.

Then he would be wrong. It's a self serving circular argument that when all the invented justification is stripped away basically says we are run by idiots and the players are going to pay financially for that.

Your basic argument is that well run clubs are only well run because they collude to pay their players less than their free market value, and of they were to have to pay their players their free market value they would immediately become insolvent.

The obvious problem with that argument is that a business which only survives because it under pays it's employees is not a well run business.

As a point of order a modest increase in the SC would not stretch Leeds financial resources at all. Less than 20% of leeds outgoings are player wages.

It is immoral that players bare the responsibility for protecting owners from themselves, it is immoral that leeds can post profits in the hundreds of thousands but Ryan Hall is not allowed to negotiate his salary in a free market.

As for P+R needing an SC that's just nonsense. It does nothing but en tench the status quo. Why on earth should Club x languish in the lower leagues because club Y cannot afford to spend as much? Especially when the limit figure bears no relation to affordability for either.

There is one reason and one reason only the SC exists, to facilitate the exploitation of players by owners, if you cannot afford to pay the free market rate for your players you are operating at a level higher than your business can operate

As opposed to with the SC where it has been a veritable blizzard of good news and positive press.

Smokey had it bang on, it's all about the owner underpaying their players to gain profit, if you boss did that to you at work you'd be calling him all the names under the sun.