You think "I Hate Pies" is a Wigan fan? Odd choice of name.

According to the SL website, clubs will only be able to sign a marquee player if they meet certain affordability criteria. This could rule out half the clubs in SL from the start.

So effectively it exempts any salary over £100k for one club-trained player or over £175k for one non club-trained player from the cap?

Not going to make that much difference then, is it? How many clubs are spending or will spend more than 10% of their cap on just one overseas player?

Depends how good the player is? Using 10% of your SC on a Weller Hauraki would be daft. 10% of the SC on a Cooper Cronk could be decent value?

At the moment, signing a Cooper Cronk would take up a lot more than 10% of the cap, so wouldn't be that worthwhile.

Paying weller hauraki whatever he's getting paid at the moment, is daft.

Think there will be a fair few in SL at and around the 175-200k level.

What I don't get about this is that the main reasons quoted are

'As well as'. Either or surely?

Another interesting element is



Surely to god no clubs other than Leeds and Warrington would pass any sort of financial sensibility checks? Salford? Pah!

Another thing to check is staged contracts. For example. Player A signs from the NRL season 1, for £1.5m first season, with £200k a year after that. He's marquee player that first season, then next season the club signs player B and he becomes marquee. Is that allowed?

So many people in here disingenously arguing that their enjoyment of the game is dependent on some nebulous and highly relative concept called 'quality' when they really mean - success.

Well, I guess the reactionary Pie element which has been crying like a whipped cur ever since the arrival of SL and the institution of some semblance of salary controls will be happy today.

What makes me laugh is the astonishingly poor grasp of fundamental supply-and-demand economics many of those arguing for a return to the bad old days seem to possess.

Although as someone who once delivered the "National Curriculum" to secondary school kids I can't say I'm the least bit surprised.

Can't enjoyment be dependent on both those things? I want success for Hull FC, but on a Thursday night at home watching the game on Sky, I want to see some decent rugby being played.

Despite you being Chief of RLfans, that doesn't automatically mean you get to arrogantly tell people what they really mean.

It might have been SOLD as a means of evening up the competition - but without further intervention into the games finances it could never hope to match the sales pitch.

The cap and associated tools have been far more successful in kickstarting the junior development program.

Even though money is incredibly tight we are now producing more young talent than at any point in the last thirty years. On the flipside, since the Australian game has been flooded with cash the hacks are now talking about an "unprecedented crisis" in junior development.

Just as we found out in the 80s - the Aussies are now discovering that huge injections of cash are often more trouble than they are worth.

When you can quantify "decent rugby" (real figures) and demonstrate how you and everyone else is being short-changed (real figures) purely because teams aren't being allowed to spend more I'll take you seriously.

the SC has nothing to do with kickstarting youth development. Leeds and saints et al are benefitting from youth development structures put in place prior to youth development. If anything the SC is a disincentive to youth development as producing lots and lots of quality in an SC sport virtually guarantees you losing quality ayers you developed

The salary cap was brought in to prevent clubs from repeating Wigan's mistakes and encourage greater reliance on younger (and therefore cheaper) recruits rather than splashing cash over mediocre foreign has beens. Admittedly, it was a flawed model. But SL recognised this and augmented the cap with additional rules and mechanisms to further improve the sport's viability at junior level.

Now, we can argue about the successfulness of the cap as a tool toward this aim. But denying that it has any effect at all is just silly.



I'm sorry, Google Translate just throws up an error with the above.