It's not about being run by idiots. Do you really think if there were no salary cap that spending would stay the same? If the players are being under-paid and removing the SC means they can negotiate their full market value then surely you are admitting players wages will increase. So either the likes of Leeds, Wigan & Cas (clubs who've managed to run on what they bring in) increase their spending to compete or they accept they'll be mid-table indefinitely. How is that good for the game? If they increase their spending they're doing the old 80's & 90's trick of spending more than they've got and hoping for an increase in revenue from any success. We all know how well that worked. Wigan and Leeds have only just recovered from it.

That isn't my argument at all. My argument is that players are currently paid their market value. Because clubs can't afford any more. You are suggesting players market values should be inflated by 1 man who's willing to lose a lot of money. That doesn't happen in any other business, which is why sport is different from business and shouldn't be viewed that way.

The players aren't underpaid. They're paid what RL clubs in this country can afford without making huge losses. That isn't underpayment.

Your point of order is incorrect. Leeds make a profit of around £200k per year over the last few years. Even if you leave out the fact that that profit is used to invest in the stadium, an increase of the SC to just £2m would wipe out Leeds profits.

What are you on about with club x & y. The SL SC has no bearing on which team is promoted.
You keep saying it has no bearing on affordability, yet it clearly does. Leeds, Wigan & Cas etc are clubs for which the cap is affordable. For other clubs it's their aim to get to a point where it's affordable. How would increasing players wages help keep clubs afloat?

Ahh now you're getting it. Yes many clubs are operating at a level higher than they can operate. That's why they struggle to pay for everything they need to, including wages. Your solution to this is to increase wages because 1 club can currently pay it. That's madness.
You're conveniently ignoring the point that 1 rich man can massively and significantly affect the sport unlike in football. Man City's owners are the richest people in the world (or very close) and yet they still cannot guarantee victory in any football competition because there is the likes of Man Utd, Arsenal etc who can compete with them. When Man City were taken over they didn't start spending 4-5 times on wages than Man Utd, what their takeover did was take them to a position where they can compete regularly with Man Utd. (Though if you talk to sports finance people they'll tell you it's unhealthy for the sport that player wages are so inflated).
In RL the removal of the SC would mean that Salford would win virtually every competition every year. Because no other club can afford to lose millions per year. Great for Salford fans for a few years. But can you see a similar pattern to what happened not that long ago?

A SC is necessary to prevent 1 man artificially inflating players wages beyond what the sport can afford from its income.
If we had 90-odd clubs and a 20 club SL then I'd probably agree with no SC. But we don't. Any club that goes under is a blow to RL because it means another decade or so of a club that can't effectively compete and can't grow as much as it could've done.
As I said, the SC won't stop badly run clubs from spending more than they earn, but it does ensure well run clubs DONT HAVE TO spend more than they earn.

No but it's prevented plenty of bad news.

Bad news like losing Burgess? Eastmond? Graham? Tomkins? Ashton? Bad news like Bradford going bust? Wakefield? Crusaders?

1 man doesn't artificially do inflate anything. If he is prepared to pay to pay x amount to a player that's how much that player is worth. The only artificial part of it is the artificially low wages that players are being paid. If my boss decided to get together with our competitors to collude to pay me less the last thing he would hear from me would be an instruction to go fsck himself as I walked out the door. By the way. That happens in every market. In fact it's pretty much exactly how a market operates. The person willing to pay the best gets the best and a man is able to sell his labour for the market rate. Anything else is exploitation.

It isn't the players responsibility to allow themselves to be exploited so clubs can operate at that level.

You pretend that it is based on affordability then list three clubs with Wildly different turnovers and financial situations. It's a hell of a coincidence that a club with a turnover of 11m and a club with a turnover of less than 4m can only afford exactly the same amount isn't it. Every club in the country can afford exactly the same amount. It's an unbelievable coincidence.

Well run clubs don't have to spend more than they could afford without an SC. In fact if they did they wouldn't be well run clubs.

Thanks for bringing Union into it, you've just sunk your entire argument. The Union cap is going up to around £6m. Which SL clubs other than Salford could spend even half of that?

No because you're making the mistake of thinking sport, and specifically RL is like any other business. It's not. In business a single person doesn't come in and pay 3-4 times more than everyone else and in most businesses there isn't a finite amount of talent. And when it does happen it's only at the very top end with huge businesses who have shareholders that want a return on that investment, they will not continue losing money.
In sport rich owners are often content to continually lose money. It is not like business.

Your argument is assuming clubs can afford to pay more than currently. Considering some clubs cant pay the full cap currently (£1.8m) how many clubs do you think could afford to pay, say, £2.5m?
An additional £700k. There's Salford, maybe Leeds at an absolute push (but would destabilise the current investment in the stadium and youth/junior), maybe Warrington, Wigan & Huddersfield if their owners were willing to lose it though they've both been trying to reduce their financial input.
What about the rest? Catalans, Hull FC, Hull KR, Widnes, Wakefield, Castleford & Saints are left at least £700k short and probably more. So no chance of even making a final for any of them.

That extra £700k doesn't go anywhere close to competing with Union or the NRL. If they want a top SL player they still easily have the financial clout to sign them. So all you've done is inflate wages.

RL wages aren't like normal business wages, they're more like mortgages in that they're based on what clubs can afford. We've seen what happens when a housing market is artificially inflated, the same would happen in RL.

They don't allow themselves to be exploited. As Burgess, Tomkins, Ashton, Graham etc have proved. We can promise to pay them all £3m each if you like. But it's going to be of no use to them when there's no clubs to play for.

No it's not actually. When you factor in the different situations at each club such as the difference in stadiums/other areas of spending. No one said every club can afford exactly the same amount. So stop with the daftness Smokey. We know every club can't afford the same amount because we know Salford + Koukash can spend a lot more. Leeds, Wigan etc can probably spend a little more, Cas etc can't spend any more than currently, and the likes of Wakey etc can't afford to spend the current cap.
Which doesn't mean you get rid of a cap and say you spend what you want. It means you find a reasonable amount that allows richer clubs to spend a decent amount without being totally out of reach of the poorer clubs.
You can keep ignoring the football analogies all you want but there's a reason why it doesn't have a SC yet Union does. Why does Union not get rid of the cap? For exactly the same reasons that League keeps it. They've a small amount of clubs with wildly differing incomes & income potentials. As with League, if Union loses 3 clubs it's a disaster because there's only 1 or 2 in the lower leagues that could potentially take their place. If football loses 3 clubs there's another 20 ready to take their place.

Really? But what happens to those "well-run clubs" incomes when they've no chance of winning a trophy? Do you think Leeds income would stay at £11m and attendances stay at 15,000 after 5+ years of no finals and finishing mid-table? So they reduce spending further (not to mention ploughing every available penny into the first team) taking them even further out of reach whilst also neglecting facilities. Again, is this sounding familiar to pre-SL days?
Do you really think the Carnegie Stand would have been built at Headingley without a salary cap meaning Leeds could compete at the top level AND spend on areas other than the first team?

Even better think what it means for Hull KR. Already spending £200k+ more than they bring in, regularly mid-table, a good season means playoffs, a bad season means avoiding relegation.
Now increase the amount they have to spend by hundreds of thousands in order to compete with the clubs around them. What do you think their response will be? Will it really be to say "Well I won't spend any more and take the risk of relegation"? Or will it be to spend more in order to stave off relegation?
You say that's running a club poorly. But it's not, that extra spending is an insurance policy against the disastrous financial effects of relegation.
By doing away with the salary cap you're giving the likes of Hull KR a choice. Either spend a few hundred K more to avoid relegation. Or risk losing millions by being relegated. Which choice, as owner, would you make?

Leeds cannot afford an extra £1.2m per year. Neither can Wigan, Saints or Warrington unless their owners decided they were happy to lose the extra every year. Something which none of them have seemed to want to do. All the owners of those 3 clubs have been trying to get their clubs on a sustainable footing.
The only clubs that can afford an extra £1.2m are Salford, and well, Salford. And that gets you to half of the Union cap. So we're still not competing with them, so what's the point? All we've done is inflate wages, put the financial stability of clubs at risk and divert spending from other, much neglected areas, to the first team.

What you in about Smokey? Turnover is irrelevant when a club has a sugar daddy owner. But there is only 1 in RL. Koukash. Who can spend way more than any other club or owner can/is willing to.

Yes because for decades other areas of the club had been severely neglected such as the stadium, marketing and management. Not to mention massive increases in the amount clubs need to spend on development, sports science, physios, ground staff etc.
Its exactly because every penny was spent by clubs on first team players in the past that we need a salary cap now. If not then Leeds ground wouldn't need as much redeveloping as it does, same goes for Cas, Saints wouldn't have needed a new stadium and Wigan, Wakefield etc would still own their own stadiums.
Leeds can't afford to spend more on players because they have to spend it on a stadium that was neglected for decades, and Headingley was looked after better than most!

yes it does. businesses don't run at a continuing loss regardless of whether they pay their employees well or not

nope i simply assume that different clubs can afford different amounts. whichever wish to
I'm not interested in your guessing which clubs can afford what. Clubs can decide for themselves.

it's not a surprise that your arbitrarily chosen figure isn't of much use. And nobody had inflated wages (I'm still not sure why our players being paid as little as we can get away with is a good thing). Players are simply being paid what they are worth. If they aren't worth it, they won't get it.

no. They are exactly like other wages. They are a payment for skilled employment.

collusion to stop a man selling his labour for its market value is exploitation. It's just a longer way of saying it.

So what you are saying is that the cap isn't based on affordability because different clubs can afford different amounts.
it does when you are the one earning less because of it.
I'm sure any business would love to pay it's employees less. As slavery proved you can build some pretty big businesses when you don't pay your workers.

but all clubs who are paying these wages are going bust so why can't a well run club win things?

Headingley stadium was built and stood for a century without an SC, so yes I so think a new stand would have been built. It was.

Though I'm not sure why Danny McGuire should earn less so that Leeds can have a new stand. It's not his place to pay for it.


That's a decision for Hull KR to make and a risk for them to take. It isn't up to Ryan Bailey to take the financial hit.

turnover isn't irrelevant to affordability. And if Koukash is willing to pay whatever to a player, it is a nonsense to say he can't because another owner can't. If my employer told me he was going to pay me less because another business couldn't afford to pay their employees that much he wouldn't even finish the sentence before I was gone.


None of that is players cross to bear. If Cas need a new stadium they pay for it. Not Jordan tansey

I may be wrong but haven't Leeds carnegie uni built that stand for the rhinos? Which included classrooms and a base for the uni to work from?

The Aviva Premiership salary cap is quite impressive. I like the student fees not being included and they have the One exempt player rule too.....which will hit us. The amount of money is not quite the same issue as they have bigger squads of players so spread the money differently to us. The main difference though is the central funding money. Their salary cap is bigger because they have more central funding. I'm sure the income through the turnstyle isn't that different but without RU millions, and increased salary cap will not make a dent in the RU plans www.premiershiprugby.com/premier ... ry_cap.php

The Aviva Premiership salary cap is quite impressive. I like the student fees not being included and they have the One exempt player rule too.....which will hit us. The amount of money is not quite the same issue as they have bigger squads of players so spread the money differently to us. The main difference though is the central funding money. Their salary cap is bigger because they have more central funding. I'm sure the income through the turnstyle isn't that different but without RU millions, and increased salary cap will not make a dent in the RU plans www.premiershiprugby.com/premier ... ry_cap.php

PopTart has nailed it on re Rugby Union: we cannot compare finances. They have such central funding lnked to sizeable investment in the sport from every international.
I am minded to compare RU amateur clubs to RL amateur clubs: note the background of the people behind the clubs: there is a resource there we cannot beat.

Also re. the good doctor: he is used on here as someone who will continue to pay and pay. I'm not sure of this. Our matchday funding streams are poor: the stadium company's contract blocks much income to the club. He is a businessman and unless he gets more from ticket and programme sales, he may pull out.
Our hope is that he follows the City model. The investment City have put into producing their own is huge: check the new developments at their ground. He has stated a greater priority to develop youth.
But, do not assume he will continue to pay out for a player unless we get results and so boost ticket sales. We're not. The start of every season for Salford fans is like Bernie in the Golden Shot: we're blindfolded but hoping for a result.