Quote: Fatbelly "Sport is about emotion, tribalism and loyalty. Business is centred around none of these factors.
Ideally each RL club would be able to attract enough paying customers, advertising, merchandising sales etc to cover all salary and running costs, but the Engage Super League is not a financial utopia. To do well clubs must have a backer who has the wealth and passion to fund success.
We all want the very same thing, a thriving Super League, where we are able to attract / keep the very best players, and clubs are viable. Unfortunately with the Salary Cap at half that of RU and also less than the NRL we are at disadvantage.
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That shouldn't just be an 'ideal' that should be the minimum of what each club does, otherwise its unsustainable. What you seem to be saying is, we can't afford to cover our costs, but we need to have a salary cap increase to allow us to spend beyond our means even more.
Like you say sport is about emotion, tribalism and loyalty. Fans support the club they aren't attached to a player.
Remember a few years ago Kevin Penny burst on the scene and he was linked with RU. We managed to outbid them to keep him but what would have been the loss if he had gone to union? Would our fans have said that without this exciting player there was no point watching Warrington, or would they have said, hmm ok we're left with Chris Riley so lets give Riley a chance and see what he can do and support him?
Look at the NRL, it has shedded players for years to Super League and that keeps up the vibrancy of the competition. Ten years ago Royce Simmons coached Penrith, they came bottom, and then the SL clubs came and raided them, we got Domic and Rodwell, Leeds got Matt Adamson, Halifax got Robbie Beckett, Widnes got Steve Carter. Result - John Lang came in and refreshed the team with new blood from their youth set up and two years later they were Grand Final winners. The turnover of players creates opportunities for new players who otherwise wouldn't get a chance. Now the NRL is facing players going to union, players going to AFL, but its not going to collapse, they just give opportunities to new blood and the fans get behind them.
In fact I wonder what the effect would have been on guys like Riley and Harrison if the salary cap had been higher, whats the betting we'd have signed another established winger and another established back rower, those guys wouldn't have had the chances they did.
If we are going to increase the cap then I think we need to seriously reduce the number of teams in SL, otherwise a lot of clubs will end up in the hands of the administrators, forget about clubs like Harlequins and Celtic Crusaders and possibly even clubs like Cas or Salford. There's no point having teams who are whipping boys who can't compete at the bottom, or teams who are in administration because they have gone into the red. If we do decide that as a sport we need only those with rich backers to be viable then we need to look at a small competition eg 8 team league, everybody plays everybody else 4 times.
