our main hope should be that the NRL clubs start snapping up our players instead of them going to union....

I,m not too sure about the amount of takent coming through especialy when the overseas quota has effectively increased this means less home grown talent giving the chance to play superleague. We,ve not had a proper 6 or 7 for decades and its looking as though the future looks weak for having world class props.
The english game needs a crop of 5 or 6 coming through in one batch, not in dribs and drabs like Tomkins for instance.

I have lost all confidence in the RFL in marketing the English game, whats annoying is the amount of hard work being done at grass root level but the powers to be don,t project the game into an exciting sport that it is. Sometimes I think the RFL judge success by profit and not by sporting stature.

Yet your signature says "The new dynasty of super saints is coming to a ground near you." lol.

Its a pity we can,t say that for every club though instead of as already mentioned from just 3 or 4 clubs. We need to produce a minimum of 3 international standard players from every superleague club.

That is not true at all. Rugby Union relies on rich benefactors far more than Rugby League ever has and most of the Premiership clubs have a rich backer. Only Leicester and Northampton make a profit and the likes of Sale, Newcastle, Wasps, Bath, Saracens, Exeter, Worcester etc wouldn't exist in their present forms without rich sugar daddies. You only need to look at what happened to the likes of Richmond, Bedford, Bristol etc when they lost theirs. Even at that Northampton are only now sucessful and profitable after their sugar daddy ploughing in millions previously to build the club up.

These backers plough huge amounts into their clubs and subsidise huge losses. In 2009-2010 12 Premiership clubs lost over £20 million, with 9 losing well over £1 million. This year promises to be even worse with dismal attendances so far. This obviously does not point to a healthy financial state and without their backers these clubs would be screwed. Few clubs own their own grounds and some owners such as Hayes at Wasps already want out after years of losses. Kennedy at Sale too has indicated he is not prepared to fund them indefinately. To give an idea Saracens lost £6.9 million last year, and they have lost over £13 million over the last 3 years. In addition Sale lose at least £1.5 million a year. Wasps have just been put up for sale after losing £2.2 million last year and after their owner giving them over £10 million in loans since he owned it. The Worcester owner is believed to have spent £20 million getting them to where they are now. Exeter have too spent fortunes.

Rugby Union talks about its expansion successes but it has all been on the back of sugar daddies. If Rugby Union lost some of these sugar daddies we would see a major decline in Rugby Union and collapse after collapse of its clubs. If RL had similar backers could you imagine how much more successful the likes of London Broncos, Skolars, Crusaders etc would have been if they had owners prepared to lose £2 million a year to make them work? Or indeed how successfull London would be if they had a backer who went down the Sale route of just buying a football club so you own your own ground? Never mind how much stronger the game would be if there were backers for the weakest SL clubs that meant the salary cap could be considerably more, as has happened in Union?

....and you think those backers are only held back from buying RL clubs because player salaries have a fixed limit of expense? They're just waiting for the opportunity to lose £2m a year rather than investing in a sport where they can run a competitive club without getting into spiralling wage inflation.

BTW, the view here in Northampton is that it was move from imported players to investing in local talent that got them on the up again.

Of course not. However to make out that Union has no more investors throwing their money into Union than League, as you did, is completely false. I was merely putting across the reality, that most RU clubs have rich backers, that these clubs run at huge losses and that the Union salary cap is only at the level it is because of these backers. Without them the RU salary cap would have to be much less. Union is backed in much more of a similar way to Football than you are trying to make out, albeit on a smaller scale, and it certainly does not live within its means.

In League even if we have rich backers, such as Moran at Warrington and Lenegan at Wigan, then it is of little use anyway as they cant spend more than the low cap that we have at the moment. The leading clubs can generate this amount anyway without the need of additional money from backers.



Nothing to do with Barwell spending millions to build up the club to a point where they were sustainable then after losing between £500,000 to £750,000 a year. It is much easier to build a team when you have a millionaire benefactor putting the strong foundations first.

OK, it's got a few more investors. Are they as a result of the larger salary cap, or the greater profile of the sport?

There is plenty the likes of Moran, Lenegan and Cadding can spend their money on, other than player salaries.



Just a bit of local knowldege.

But 'sugar daddies' are not really investors - at least not in a financial sense. Simon Moran, I'm sure, knows that he would always make a better financial return on every pound spent on concert promotions than on the Wire. However, his spending on the Wire is to bring him another form of satisfaction, and he has the resources so to do. It's also fair to say that it looks like SM expects the Wire to more-or-less break even, so that the club never becomes ( as in your many Union examples ) nothing but a painful financial drain.

We arent producing the amount of players we were ten years ago, there are more overseas players playing in this league now than there was in 2001.

How are we supposed to catch up to the Australian intensity when our best players move to either RU or to the NRL and we import Aussie reserves to fill out our squads?

None of the best rugby players in the world play in our competition, we cannot compete for those players, our only hope is to produce them and enjoy the 5 years or so we get with them before they go on to bigger competitions and whilst the Salary Cap remains in place, in the format it is we will continue to be unable to compete for the best players and falling behind.

Not forgetting that the players we have in our league also affect the quality of player we can produce.

You also cannot behave as a silo - if you want to be successful you have to have to be proactive in your market place and that includes soccer and RU. It is in the interests of the owners to keep the salary cap down - Hetherington has stated he would like the cap reduced, then he never spends to it so maybe he has a point!!

On overseas players - the fact we have so many average players is a sad indictment of the coaching standards here - even very average overseas players have a better grasp of the basic skills than many of our so called "stars".

On growth - not sure how you measure this - but we have less activity at amateur level with less teams than we have ever had, less participation and outside of SL a professional game that is a complete shambles.

TBF the only time we were competitve in my time was the early 90's when we imported talent from RU. Maybe the answer is to have two GB eligible marquee players a club that sit outside the salary cap. Then those clubs with the means can sign the best players in the world but not to the extent that damages the competitiveness of SL.

revert back to GB and let clubs sign the best Enslish, Welsh and Scottish RU players again. At least we will have some success at Int level.

If the team had been GB the line up would have been the same - we could never compete financially regardless of how you manipulate the salary cap now that RU is a professional sport.

In RU there are only 2/3 positions where conversion to RL is plausible - non of the forwards nor the half backs so that leaves centres and wingers - hardly going to make the difference in standards that currently exist.

Better coaching and increased participation at junior level is where we should be investing not in very average RU players.

Yes we are.



That may be a reality we have to face. What do we do if that becomes a reality? Do we throw good business sense out of the window to chase a dragon? What purpose does it serve us to engage in high risk financial activity to pursue that particularly with the economy in the state that it is?



I don't think anybody is saying that the cap should be kept down. What the anti-cap brigade seem to do is jump to the conclusion that anybody who isn't for getting rid of it is automatically against raising it. That simply isn't true. What we are saying (and I think I speak on behalf of most of them with this view) is that we can only grow the cap according to what the game can afford. Why can't some people see this, especially those of you who work in business or finance? Any raise has to be balanced with the sports ability to pay. I don't know what that figure but those who are in favour of a unilateral raise in the cap must remember that.

Yes! Completely agree.