For a while now, i've thought about the correlation between a certain amount of people's disollusionment with Super League, the Overseas Quote & the NRL Salary cap.

With the NRL cap set now at almost £3 million and 18 teams in their competition including SOO and with the Aussie dollar improving greatly over the pound we're seeing almost no top players coming over.

I personally, think this is having a detrimental effect more than anything else on our game. The was always the discussion that the overseas quota was killing GB's chances of beating the Aussies, but I often wondered whether this was actually the opposite way around. The GB players, playing with the best players in the world is the way to get our players to be as good as the Aussies, but the drain to the NRL isn't occuring, so we need them to come over here.

I feel there is a need for either more overseas players, or an extra salary cap for overseas talent if they are Origin or Internationals or have played a certain amount of first team games say 75% in a season in the NRL.

I think good Aussie/Kiwi players enhance the competition, making SL more interesting and entertaining, they also make our players play better and bring over better training regimes and improve the clubs in the bottom half or SL's playing standard too if they get picked up by them.

By winding down the overseas quote and the cap not being inline with the NRL, and especially with the Aussie $ whacking the GBP, I think it's time to be more active with this part of the sport and move quickly as times change.

The problem is that if we allow lots of overseas players in, but dont pay more than the southern hemisphere sides do then we dont get the best players in the world coming over here, we get some average/pretty poor players coming over here to cover for poor youth development. Thats not really a gain for us at all.

Good aussie/kiwi players do enhance the competition definitely, poor ones dont.

Rather than any change to the quota, we could try bringing the salary cap down to about £1M and bringing in a marquee player allowance of 5, so 5 players dont count on the cap. This would mean a club could look to sign real top quality players but clubs still wouldnt be able to stockpile talent.

Is it dour because Saints aren't winning? - EDIT: Just realised it's Sadfish and not Saddened.

I've quite enjoyed the unpredictability of this season so far.

Which Top shelf players in their PRIME have moved to England.
I can not think of many in the last 10 years, sure there have been some good older players but none in their Prime other than perhaps Matt King, a Winger perhaps Centre.

Joel Monaghan moved in his "prime" albeit others are unlikely to follow his unique set of circumstances.

Well i'm not talking about prime, we'll never get those, but just good Aussie players are generally as good as very good uk players.

Jamie Lyon

Ali Lauititi

There's 18 teams in the NRL?

Few getting on in age, a few still playing rep RL now, but a list of players to play SL in the last 10 years that have played for Australia, NSW, Queensland or NZ. I've probably missed loads too...
Lyon, Gidley, Sa, Buderus, Carroll, De Vere, Fitzgibbon, Tony, Webb, Perry, Waterhouse, Gower, Leuluai, Mason, Barrett, Finch, O'Meley, Manu, King, McGuire, Hodgeson, O'Donnell, Pulutua, Faiumu, Menzies, Schifkofske, Talau, Bird, Hoffman, M.Monighan, Hape, J.Monaghan, Laffranchi, Poore, Solomona, V.Anderson, L.Anderson, Greenshields, Lima.

Did you not read it properly? Tsk

Holy cow! You can actually talk sense! I'm going for a lie down.

How many teams are actually unable to spend to cap at the moment?

At a guess Castleford, Wakefield , Hull KR... 3 teams?

Not sure about Bradford now.

Maybe it's time to look into raising it, surely it needs to be raised anyway based on inflation from when it was brought in to now (if it hasn't already, not sure on this)

None of those listed were in their prime, they were all on the way down other than Lyon.
He moved to SL because Parramatta held his NRL Contract and he was barred from the Australian League.

OP is right, but it's about finding the balance.

Everyone knows that competition breeds quality. I'm an ardent socialist, even I have to - reluctantly - concede this. The more competition for places the better.

With numerous top quality Aussies and Kiwis playing in the SL, the quality of the SL is improved, the quality of the English(and British, and French) players coming through is higher.

The problems have already been outlined though. You don't want too many Aussies and Kiwis, what good is a higher quality group of English players if they're too few in number; plus it isn't good for the game at lower levels. So theoretically there's limits on how many foreign players it takes before it goes the other way and their presence is harmful. The other more relevant issue as Smokey points out, with the salary cap we're not going to get the best, we're going to get mainly less than ordinary NRL players, or old NRL players, so lifting the quota doesn't raise the standards, not unless we raise the cap at the same time.

Ideally we could raise the salary cap and every team would be able to manage, and we could therefore change the quota and start to bringing in some real great players. But that isn't going to happen I don't think, I can't see our salary cap being at a level where we can do that. So there's two choices, you flood the competition with average players who don't really add much at all, as Smokey mentions. Or you lift the salary cap regardless and the competition becomes more uneven than ever, and teams collapse in on themselves trying to match it with the big boys.

You're bang on the money OP in what you say, you only have to see how good the Kiwis have become and how quickly they've done it, and mainly it's because their players are in the NRL amongst the best. It's just not feasible to bring in great NRL players to the SL, you'd open up a world of more damning problems and we'd never cope

It could maybe be raised a little but the gap between SL and NRL and union is too big for any minor change in salary cap to make anything more than a minor difference.

Is the reward worth the risk? At best by raising the cap a little we can rewind the clock a handful of years. Not worth it right now (I don't think(