I agree that we need to compete with the NRL in the amount of salary cap ceiling, and that funding must either come from TV, sponsorship or benefactors. I just don't see loans being the answer.
The other problem we have are chairmen who won't let other backers in without receiving either some, or all, of the funds they've put in. The bottom line is getting cash into the game, when currently, we have some chairman who won't commit any further cash to their clubs.

You've mentioned Football, F1 and Cricket, which all have their dedicated Sky channels. We don't appear in the promo's like we used to do, and were down the pecking order at Sky. Our next TV is critical, and I think were going to be disappointed.

It's going to be extremely difficult, but agree that something needs to be done, without mortgaging the future.

Between RL Sl/NRL and RU domestic and internationals and reruns....there's enough to have a dedicated rugby channel between us.

How could we possibly increase the cap to match that of the NRL when the TV deal, attendances and income are way below that of the NRL.
If we increased the cap to the same as the NRL it would be more than half the SL clubs annual income and leave the likes of Wigan, Saints & Warrington with only a couple of million to pay for everything else. It’s entirely impractical.

There are many reasons why RL’s national profile has de lines since the 90’s. The salary cap is NOT one of them. The bankrupting exercise RL’s clubs merrily engaged in in the 80’s and 90’s very much is. That’s why we have out of date clubs playing in out of date, embarrassing facilities in front of sometimes embarrassing crowds.
There are other reasons such as the concentration of media in the south and the focus away from regional to national stories/interests. Along with a media refocus away from working class to middle/upper class audiences. No-one is bothered about watching 2 small northern towns play each other anymore. They want clubs and places they can relate to. We don’t provide that. The majority of people in the country wouldn’t be able to find on a map where half the SL clubs are.

But let’s not kid ourselves that if only we could spend more money on overseas players that would solve the issue. Not at all. If we have money spare to spend on overseas players that we’re not currently using then it’s a disgrace that that isn’t being spent on domestic player development.

The reason why only 5 SL clubs own their own stadium (and only 3 of those are of a good standard) is because of the ridiculous overspending in the 80’s and 90’s. We desperately need to spend money on infrastructure, marketing and development. Not on players.

How old are most rugby league clubs? 100 years old most of them aren’t they? How long is a ground supposed to last once built? Can’t those clubs do what each and every one of us does and get a loan to pay for the building of the stadium? Pay it off over 40 years?

It’s an investment for the club, they can have all sorts on at the ground like concerts and so on.

So your attitude is to carry on the way we are going which is on a downward spiral into a part time feeder sport.

A previous poster had a good idea of not letting 3rd party sponsorship count on the cap, if it’s coming from a third party what harm is it going to do? Raising the cap is not the b all and end all to the problems we face but nothing can get better until it’s either raised or abolished.

For me it's the sports demographic that has hampered Rugby League more than anything else. I can see why people want to blame the salary cap, but getting rid of it with the sole intention of hoping clubs spend big money to get top name players is a recipe for disaster since clubs can barely break even as it is.

Over the last few decades more than any other time, sports have become global. The Premier League ended up with a huge bidding war because it was massively marketable in this country, then took off on a global scale because it featured marketable city based teams such as Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham etc that could gain support around the world. Rugby League doesn't have that. We also suffered during the financial crisis. Working class towns were hit the hardest, and that's where most rugby league support comes from. The value of the pound went down, the value of the Aussie dollar went up and suddenly there were less reasons to come over to Super League, while Super League players found it much more affordable to move to the NRL. Had we scrapped the cap at that time and had clubs start chucking money around it would have been a disaster.

Scrap the cap and you might get some bigger names playing over here, but to be honest most rugby league players from the NRL aren't big names to the general public. Then you still have the problem of the difference in lifestyle between Super League and its major competitor. There's no real competition between living in the North West of England and living in Australia.

There are plenty of towns in the UK which are in decline, so is it any surprise that sports teams in those towns might be in decline? Or that a sport still largely based in those towns has suffered a decline? All the focus is on cities. There's greater incentive for sponsors to get involved and it's sponsorship that dictates the sporting landscape these days.

I just don't see how clubs with a working class fan base are going to generate the interest among sponsors to grow. As a result any improvement in the quality of the competition will largely go unnoticed. Even when we had a better standard of players in Super League I wouldn't say the game was thriving financially. The NRL can thrive because it's one of the main sports in Australia. It's played in the big cities but mostly ed around Sydney. There's plenty of incentive to get involved.

This is why Toronto is such a big opportunity. It's why New York and Ottawa provide opportunities too. The only problem with those sides is that while it might bring more marketing potential to Super League, it might not do enough to help the issues faced by the heartland teams. Expansion is important for rugby league if it's going to start making a name for itself against stiff global competition. It hasn't helped that previous attempts have targeted areas with the exact same demographic and the same issues - such a Crusaders in Wrexham. The sport won't gain much by expanding into working class towns.

What a load of crap, I’ve worked around Anfield and they were giving away houses it’s such a dump, most Liverpool fans aren’t from Liverpool, Everton fans are.

Same with Man City, where their stadium is is a dump too, with fans coming from all over the place and coming out of the woodwork now they’ve had a bit of success.

My point is fans come from all over when the team is successful.

All that ‘oh we’re a poor working class sport and should know our place among the pigeon fanciers and shove hapenny fans’ are pathetic. I’ve met people from all over the country who like rugby league, from all over the place who like Wigan and many due to our success in the 90s.

If Barry Hearn had your attitude with regards Darts they’d be playing MVG v Phil Taylor in the Dog and Duck on a Tuesday night before the Pub Quiz.

You've just sort of proved the point I was making. Lots of Liverpool fans don't come from Liverpool, lots of Man Utd fans don't come from Manchester. Yet these are the big clubs of football. Why didn't Blackburn become a big club when they won the Premier League? Because towns aren't as marketable as cities. Manchester is easier to market than Blackburn. Even teams without the city in their name, named after areas of a city like Tottenham, Chelsea, Everton are more marketable than teams like Bolton, Wigan, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale etc. Why did Roman Abramovich invest in Chelsea rather than Blackburn? Why did Sheikh Mansour invest in Man City when Bolton, Reading, Portsmouth and Blackburn all finished higher the season before? Surely he could have turned those teams into globally recognised sporting giants? Except he didn't, because he went for a more marketable team.

I agree that fans will come from all over when a team is successful, but we'll struggle to build rugby league up around one team, or two teams. We'd end up like Scottish football and have a couple of giants in an awful league.

I'm certainly not saying we should know our place and that we're only a working class sport and that's all we should be considered as, but if most of the teams in Super League are based in working class areas we're only likely to attract sponsors interested in advertising to working class people, and we'll never really get away from that perception That's why Cas play at the Mend-a-Hose Jungle and not the Emirates Jungle.

Even football teams in working class areas are struggling financially when trying to compete, even in lower divisions where the costs aren't as high.

Yes, Barry Hearn has done wonders with darts, turned it into something of a global phenomenon, but that's an individual sport. The likes of darts, snooker, golf etc don't have the same operating costs as team sports. They aren't really comparable. They may fight for airtime on sports channels but essentially they don't compete in the same way against the likes of football and rugby union.

I'm sure we could do better with what we have, but I'm not sure what we currently have could ever really thrive in comparison to rival team sports without altering perceptions of it.

Would those premier league teams like Man Cty, Chelsea and Liverpool be where they are if they had a salary cap below the Spanish and Italian leagues?

No, because Shiekh Mansour, Abramovic and John Henry/Fenway would have gone elsewhere.

Now we will never reach those heights, but at the very least we can be better. We should as a sport be aiming to be better than club level Union, county cricket and Championship football but in the last 10 years we have fallen behind all three which are achievable.

The salary cap is a nice little comfort blanket to hide behind for the clubs with no vision or ideas or ambition.

That's a fair point. A lot of sports that implement salary caps are those who have no significant rivals for their talent, such as the major sports like American Football, Basketball and Ice Hockey in the US. However, with only two professional leagues in our sport there's a limit to how much they can actually affect the strength of our game. The depth of talent in Australia doesn't come from pinching players from the UK. The lack of talent over here doesn't come from not being able to import players from overseas, it comes from poor structure from grassroots up to Super League and a lack of exposure for the game.

Expecting the game to improve simply by removing the salary cap is ignoring all the other issues that hold the game back. Long term it would be great to abolish the salary cap, or at least massively increase it, but getting rid of it doesn't automatically make it viable for clubs to spend huge amounts of money. The money to buy better players has to come from somewhere. The best place for that money to come from is a guaranteed source of income (at least for a set period of time) such as money from TV deals. If you start relying on rich owners chucking big money in you end up with a situation where clubs are spending pretty much all of their income, or possibly more, on player wages, a situation that isn't sustainable and can lead to pretty dire consequences, especially when wages become inflated. That's the situation that is currently blighting the Championship and lower league in football.

I can't think of many situations where a league or sport has grown massively simply because rich club owners have started spending a lot. Mostly it seems to happen through improved revenue from TV deals, and in cases where there are competing leagues in different countries, a favourable change in the exchange rate.

If salary caps are such obviously bad things for sports, successful leagues wouldn't be implementing them. The French rugby union achieved huge growth during the 2000's and into this decade, but as soon as clubs started spending big they introduced a salary cap. It may be a higher cap limit than that of other leagues, but it's proportional to the money coming into the game. There's been talk of salary caps in football for years but it's at the point where it's almost unworkable, even if FFP regulations are a form of soft cap.

I'm all for Super League increasing the salary cap or ditching the salary cap, but not if it's done solely as the big plan to fix the game. It's nowhere near the biggest issue facing the game right now.

Maurice Lindsay possibly had the answer when SL started with SKY money but the clubs poo pooed it as the mergers were not in the interests of the clubs .

If we upped the cap or abolished it, we wouldn’t get 25,0000 every game, it is t the b all and end all but it is the biggest one thing that could improve our game.

If teams needs to raise an extra £500,000 a year to pay for players wages it will have to pull its finger out to raise that money and it’s that fear that would drive them.

With the salary cap at exactly the same as the Sky money, the team could spend up to the cap and pay the players wages without even dipping into their own funds. Whatever they make as a club pays for everything else.

Put it one way, you won’t get an extra 3000 fans on the gate by signing a £80,000 a year player but you will if you sign a £500,000 a year player. It pays for itself.

The major issue I’ve got with the salary cap is it hasn’t even gone up with inflation.

I do think there should be greater incentives for teams to increase the revenue they make. The last point you made is important because it makes it perfectly clear that the game has suffered something of a decline. The reasoning given for the cap not increasing with inflation is that it's not affordable. That's a pretty big failure right there.

I don't agree about signing a £500,000 a year player adding 3,000 extra fans (although I know it's a generalisation). I don't think the top players have that much pulling power. I don't think one or two top players can really make enough of a difference, which is why I think the marquee player rule looked great in theory, but hasn't really worked as intended.

As an example, if a Super League club signed Michael Morgan, Mitchell Pearce, Anthony Milford, do you think it would significantly improve attendances? Aussie NRL stars aren't particularly well known among the general public, so increased interest would only really be coming from current fans who have stopped attending. It might bring a slight improvement, but not enough to have a significant impact. And if clubs are paying £500,000-£750,000 for players like that I'd be very doubtful that it would be worth the expense. I don't think rugby league gets the exposure to make the most of the sports biggest names, while the NRL may be one of the best leagues in world sport, but it's still not a big deal in this country to the extend of foreign football leagues or the NFL.

For me the biggest issue with the cap is that it limits what players can earn through image rights. It pretty much disincentivises players looking to gain sponsorship and make themselves into a household name. The salary cap is making it harder for the sport to create stars over here.

I don't agree with all of what Robert Elstone is doing but I do think that making changes to speed the game up were the right way to go about things. I don't think that in itself will revolutionise anything, but it shows action rather than inaction. It suggests we're trying to build Super League into more of a spectacle and that's going to be important ahead of the new TV rights deal. That new deal could be the single most important moment in the history of our professional game. Elstone and Super League clubs have basically taken charge of a competition in decline and have a short period of time in which to turn it around enough to encourage Sky and other broadcasters to pay more for it.

I think a plan to increase the salary cap could work as an incentive to broadcasters to pay a bit more. At present it's no secret that clubs don't have the spending power, so any rise in cap probably won't make any real difference. We need a better TV deal to increase the revenue of clubs and provide an image of a game that's growing rather than one that's in decline. We also need to allow the broadcaster to make the most of our top players.

Throw in some improved engagement with social media, and improving the matchday experience (Wire seem to be leading the way on that front) and I think we can improve what we have enough to boost attendances and viewing figures, get a better TV deal and use that as a springboard for growing the game. Then with the experiments in Toronto, New York and Ottawa we might be able to create greater global interest in the game and shake off the flat capper image of the sport. That's something we should already be doing though.

The marquee rule hasn’t really worked because all it’s done is help keep players in Superleague to an extent, rather than maybe attract them. Allowing 3rd party sponsorship and image rights doesn’t make clubs go bust but will allow players to make more money.

There are many ways to get bums on seats but clubs are content in just plodding on whilst the game dies a slow death.

When Superleague was first sounded Maurice Lyndsey said there’s only room for 10 clubs, there’s isn’t the quality or money to spread it out further hence the mergers. I don’t agree with people who want Salford renames as Manchester and the likes as all that will do is kill of the support that’s there.

People look to Toronto as a shining example, but all that is is a load of free tickets and booze for the Canadians, yes there will be genuine fans as a result but mainly it’s people who like a drink and a freebie.

There’s massive issues and we have been on a downward spiral since before Superleague, us and football have gone on to polar opposites of each other. Every other sport seems to have gotten their act together, whether it be boxing and darts with the hearns, or football, union and cricket or even horse racing, how many people go to horse racing now when they have an artist on after it? We need to pull our fingers out big time.

Sky really need to pull their fingers out, if they increase the money they give they get a better standard of game and more fans. If they try and get the TV rights for as little as possible then they’d be doing themselves in the long term, it all depends on this next deal for me. If the deal isn’t good enough to raise the cap then the game is dead.

The BIG problem here might be that Sky are the only bidder. It's a massive concern is the next TV rights deal.

Back in 1996, would Wigan and St Helens been happy with a merger of their two clubs. Yes, or no?