Is it now Chris Ashton's 4th season playing Rah Rah? First year they'd have been promoted anyway, second year he hardly played, third year he was a star and he seems to be doing ok this year too. If he decides to leave at the end of this year have they really had such brilliant value for money for him?

Re Wigan making a loss when Dave Whelan in charge was how he decided to do his accounts, where shirt sales went, he had his fingers in so many pies and no advantage gained by having Wigan Warriors showing a profit.

Its the same old same old from supporters of the CC.

They point out that RU has a cap - really, I hadn't noticed.

The point about the Union cap of course is that when it was brought in it was presented as a necessary evil rather than an end in itself and the express aim was to raise it as clubs got richer (which they duly did).

Why should SL clubs aim to grow their revenue or make a profit when there is no reward for doing so.

The lack of ambition - in some cases a desire to pay players less, from short sighted clubs wishing to keep wages down and envious fans alike - of the RL cap is breathtaking, but perhaps not as astonishing as the continuing failure of the pro-SC brigade to face up to its problems and the unfairness to the players, who as a whole have seen their wages eroded very significantly by inflation over the last few years.

We were told again and again by the pro-SC fanatics that Wigan fans were only against the CC because it held back Wigan. We're back on top now and its still wrong. Mind you if we stay at the top it won't be long before the Wigan haters, the my club first parochial idiots that hold RL back will set to work changing the cap, if only to find some way to "level the playing field"....

It's not envy - if a cap was based on turnover we'd have been spending more than Wigan, as would some some other clubs.

It seems to have escaped your attention that Wigan made substantial losses last year, even with a salary cap.

If the salary cap was replaced by one linked to turnover and profits, the likes Leeds and Hull would race ahead of Wigan immediately. I have a feeling you might then change your tune.

Quit with the self-important "it's all about Wigan" drivel as there are other clubs it hinders to a greater extent that don't spend all their time playing the victim card.

Is it about Wigan or isn't it? You seem confused.

I'm quite clear in that whatever system is in place it should be working for the good of the game as a whole.

I don't - as it happens - favour a turnover or profit related cap. In an ideal world we'd expand the live cap monitoring process to ensure that other aspects of club expenditure are captured so that we don't get the sort of serious financial difficulties many clubs have got into under the CC in future due to spending on stadia and other non-player related spending. But I live in the real world and this would be too complex for the RFL, so I think the best thing is to do what RFU did and gradually raise it. We need to do this at least every 5 years or so in any event because players are getting poorer in real terms due to inflation, and unless we address this its going to become a real issue before long. Hopefully the licensing process and the need to submit business plans will ensure that there is sufficient financial discipline to keep clubs in line over a 3 year period, but you never know with RL clubs and we've seen many serious problems during the CC era.

I do think many pro-CC people are motivated by envy of well paid players and think that many sportsmen get paid too much. We've had comments over the years on this board which indicate this is a factor with many pro-CC people.

I consider myself well paid so perhaps I'm lucky enough not to be susceptible to this unfortunate envy of successful people - personally I think its great that our stars make good money, I want RL to be a success and its players to be rewarded accordingly. But this ambition is not shared throughout the RL world, unfortunately.

That's a new one.

The "level playing field" or "Competitive Super League" is nothing whatsoever to do with the SC and never has been.
We have a league with 14 full time clubs and this is acheived because SKY provide something like £18m a year which facilitates this.
Without SKY's money we would have four or at the most six clubs who would be full time the rest part time.
As for Wigan being out spent, well we have been for the 10 or 11 years of the SC. Other clubs took advantage of the tax breaks and other noted scams which gave them a head start over Wigan whom DW prevented from using these methods to enlarge their spending on players. Mo once estimated some trophy winning clubs were 4 International class players better off than Wigan by using these scams which Wigan could not use.
Other clubs couldn't use them for other reasons.
Some club's fans are now complaining on their respective boards that their recruitment is negligible, perhaps the reason is they are now being held back due to HMRC clamping down on most if not all of these scams.
Following the Canterbury and Melbourne SC busts down under the NRL are to trail a system to replace their SC. We should do the same so we are not left behind yet again by RFL's slow administrators and some of the SL chairmen who are even slower.

It's a point I've been making for years, but since the anti-CC case is so overwhelming, I'm not surprised you missed one amongst a myriad of anti-CC points...

Rugby Union is very much like 'Purple Aki' in the way of harrassing young and talented Rugby League players who do not want the attention of the subject in question but gets hassled none the less.

Rugby Union = Purple Aki

I suppose that's true if you ignore:
a) the salary cap exemptions given to Wigan when the cap was introduced, and
b) the biggest cap breach penalty in SL history, and
c) the fact that Wigan have been quoted as one of the clubs that used the "tax breaks", in fact I think IL admitted as much IIRC (someone on here will recall).

Funny that Dave Whelan is reported to have refused to use such nefarious tax schemes (despite his large usage of other tax 'efficiency' schemes in his various companies), yet Wigan Athletic are one of the football clubs that are being investigated for just such use.

Amusing thread. Typical of the CC debate. Wigan fans raise genuine concerns about the threat to the game as a whole - which is consistent with the way that most Wigan fans have approached salary cap issues since the cap was first proposed, with many, myself included believing at the outset that it was worth trying for the good of RL even if likely not to be in Wigan's short term interest.

Saints fans then attempt to derail the debate and turn it into a discussion about Wigan, recycling many of the old, failed arguments, irrelevancies and urban myths.... the one argument they can't use of course is that Wigan fans wouldn't be opposing the CC if their team was on top. We are back on top and many of us are still against the CC, because we are RL fans first, not blinded by hatred/fear of another club or a parochial my-club-first mentality....