You'd not need brown envelopes though. That would be deliberate breach of the salary cap, and all the club chairmen and owners are too honourable and astute to consider going down that road, are they not?

As I have said at various times, all you need is for some totally "unconnected" third party to decide there is benefit to his business through paying a player a load of money for his image rights, or for other services that that player can provide. The player then finds that he has nearly enough income for his needs, and decides that he would feel more comfortable playing for a club more out of passion than for the maximum money he can extract from the club of his dreams he has signed for. I suppose you can only applaud players who choose to put playing the game ahead of personal gain - how many of us would be prepared to do that?

The trick is to make your club the club of payers' dreams, so they queue up to sign for you at well under market rate having first somehow managed to find some third party to pay them enough to be financially comfortable. All within the salary cap. After all, some UK clubs are near-legendary in the antipodes. Simples.

And when you consider the short career these guys have, it makes complete sense to be paid less and suffer financially later in life.......

I think you posted the wrong smiley by mistake - surely it should have been a

or maybe a

??

Makes you wonder if there's a point to having a salary cap at all if there are such holes in it.

I felt sick to my stomach yesterday when i was reading about puletua resigning with saints because within the story lied who had been chasing him and it was wire, how blatant are they getting?
The real problem is the rfl 's determination to find new winners of the comp by extending the rules to them.
I find it astonishing that prior to the live cap we had people going over every year but all of a sudden we enter the "live" (we can turn a blind eye easier to this now) cap and we have not had a single offender? We should be able to audit rich investors accounts (as part of a pre agreement when taking over a club) to see what they are putting in and how! and why they need this extra help.
We always get people arguing against our cap with football doesnt use it but they will soon enough!

You'd neither be able to get permission nor would you be able to conduct such an audit effectively anyway.

And if the player was receiving monies from "independent" third parties, that would not identify it anyway - nor should it need to, since such payments fall outside the cap*. You, being the salary cap auditor, might look at a player's contract and be surprised at how little he seemed to be prepared to play for the club for. But if no rules appeared to have been broken, there is no further action open to you.

* Unless of course someone not friendly to you finds a way to demonstrate the third party is not really "unconnected" or that the substance of the payment is that it is really for playing services. We of all clubs know all about that.

OR, you find a third party individual who would be willing to testify that they would act as a third party to pay for a player if they returned

Sorry, wrong thread.....

I would expect to see individual players from the successful, sorry salary cheating, clubs pasted all over places like Leeds & Huddersfield if this was the case. I see bits about the Rhinos in Leeds but struggle to see much pushing individual players for their use of the latest ipad. Or are these unconnected third parties also owned by the sugar daddies & are paying the players for no return?

For example,

Could Club chairman / owner "M" own his own business, say "RC", and say to one of his clients "X", can you pay £200k to player "J" for his image rights, so it doesn't count on our salary cap?

"X" says what do I get out of it, and "M" says he will pay an extra "£200k" for product "CD" than normal to him and he can use player "J" for some marketing / PR so "X" would not be out of pocket?

Just hypothetical....

The problem with that paranoia, sorry hypothesis, is that I am yet to see any SL player I can recollect doing any/much individual publicity. Unless they don't have to do anything for that extra £200k.

This could shed some light on it, what happend there, could happen here! www.watoday.com.au/rugby-league/ ... 1ej1s.html

This could shed some light on it, what happend there, could happen here! www.watoday.com.au/rugby-league/ ... 1ej1s.html

Paul Sculthorpe with Gillette?

I know of one ex-player who did do work a couple of nights a week for a 3rd party to top up his salary by making apperances....

Got it in one.

See, I don't think there are many, if any, individuals with that find of money around involved in RL prepared to write off so much on an annual basis. Possibly the odd £10-20k here & there.

Maybe that's true for the most part but I suspect Moran at Warrington has access to that kind of cash and the network of contacts. We'll never know for sure but if you look at their squad you have to wonder how they stay below the cap limit unless there are certain payments "off the books".

Moran is definitely the exception to my rule & I do wonder how they manage. Personally I just enjoy watching them. So how do all the others manage when their chairman is a rich solicitor or works in finance? To me the accusations mostly smack of envy. Only Adey has ever put together a decent argument which I'm sure he doesn't mind me challenging. He might well have more evidence than he is divulging, him being an honourable chap & not disclosing sources. The salary cap is the only answer I know of to protect clubs from themselves. Instead of just constantly carping on about how unfair it is come up with a better solution or provide some real evidence of fraud (not you BTW Sam).

Did you enjoy watching Melbourne Storm as well?

I too would like to think that all sides adhere to the cap and that there's no funny business used using image rights or tax free payments via a non dom status and all that but we live in the real world and should expect administrators to try and find an edge to win, the players do. We tried it ourselves but came unstuck. I suspect if you're wealthy enough you'll find a way, people have been getting around paying tax a lot longer than the salary cap has been around and I suspect HMRC are more clued up than Nigel Wood & Co.

Warrington have 14 full test players in their squad as well as Brett Hodgson and Michael Monaghan. I'd be very interested to see how they that lot plus all their average earners and kids under the cap limit if they aren't finding a way to pay certain players more that doesn't show on the live cap.

Of course I enjoyed watching Storm, they had a cracking team. The scale of RL in Aus has to be witnessed to be believed, it is not the plaything of a rich local businessman. More money in sport = more corruption.

I would reckon most, if not all, clubs breach payment/taxation rules to some degree. I personally have experience of a chairman coming into the changing rooms, on a number of occasions, & putting a thousand pounds on the table & saying it's yours if you win the next 3 games, or something similar.

Is the answer not just to do away with the cap in its current form and look at a more transparent and flexible option like the points system muted in Aus?

Out of the mouths of tots...

Let me tell you what I would do, if I was a club owner or CEO who wanted to sign superstar player Mark Key but had little room under the cap.

Firstly, I would approach all my legit business contacts - and if necessary pay a specialist PR agent to approach HIS contacts - to see if a legit business was interested in paying for the player's image rights for a genuine deal. Something along the lines of Scully and Gillette or Harris and Tissot or Publico, or on a smaller scale with a local business. (On an unrelated note, it did strike me as interesting that Sam Burgess was revealed as the new face of Lexus Bradford - a business with no obvious connection with the Bulls - the day before the Bulls announced his new contract with us...). Note that we are talking genuine deals for a player promoting a business' products or services. Nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

If such a deal was done, then with my club hat on the club would then contract to pay the player the higher of:

a - the amount the player (or, realistically, his agent) needed to achieve the package he was looking for; or

b - the amount that would be sufficient to convince the salary cap auditor that there was a genuine playing contract in place.

Would I be able to sleep soundly in my bed, and admire myself in the mirror the following morning? I would be uneasy, but could PROBABLY live with myself on the basis that all the other buggers were doing the same or worse, and I was keeping people in jobs and my team successful. And I was not getting slagged off on my team's internet forum by näive fans who believed everyone conducted their affairs as honourably and with the integrity that they do their own.

Now let me tell you what I would NOT do - but I could not speak for all my fellow owners or CEOs here, just for myself.

I would NOT go have a chat with my mate, who owns a business with whom I have dealings. I would NOT suggest to him that he pays Mr Mark Key a couple of hundred thousand Aussie Dollars or so p.a., possibly from his overseas company that most folk are unaware of, into into a personal service company that we set up for the player in Grand Cayman or Bermuda or the like, in respect of "advisory and promotional services rendered by the company in respect of its employee Mr Mark Key".

Furthermore, recognising that Mr Key would not be expected to do a lot of work for his annual fee, I would certainly NOT suggest to my mate that, through one of my own companies, I would award one of HIS companies a contract that allowed him to make - for the sake of argument - a couple of hundred thousand Aussie dollars more than they might otherwise make. For no reason other than I was his pal and wanted to seem him do OK. No sir, I would definitely NOT do anything like that. Because I would be concerned that - whilst I had breached no rules, salary cap or otherwise, I had not acted in the spirit of the rules. I could not do such a thing. I would prefer to sleep at night, and recognise that the ugly fat balding ageing miserable sod (Eddivan, Dilligaf, Bullseye, Bully Boxer, MDF, Bulliac et all will confirm the description...) I see in the mirror every morning had at least retained his integrity. Since retaining my integrity would matter a great deal to me.

That is what I would do.

But I would be sure be fooking angry if I discovered some of my fellow owners had had no such scruples.

Thankfully, I would find that I had no evidence that they had done such a thing, and so would probably manage to avoid getting apoplectic.

And, for the avoidance of doubt, what I most definitely would NOT do would be pay the player (or his personal service company) offshore any money MYSELF. Because, quite apart from wishing to retain my integrity and honesty, I would not have got to where I was today by being totally fooking stupid.

You so often talk a load of age IMO, and have been pedalling this sort of argument for ages.

And, if you were the fan of a club with very substantial resources then you might well support such an approach. Same way as I am sure the fans of Chelsea and Man City et al are quite happy with that approach.

If, on the other hand, you were a fan of a club without access to such riches, you would be a fool to support that approach since it would mean the end of your club. You would either go bust trying to keep up with the rich obsessed owners, or you would fall by the wayside by being unable to keep up.

But, having said that, here you make a perfectly fair and reasonable point that is far from age.

IMO, if an objective of the salary cap is to prevent rich owners buying success, then IMO it is failing badly. A look at the table (with the wonderful exception of Cas) should be enough to prove that? And you can maybe see which moderately wealthy owners are already struggling to keep up?

Maybe we should abolish the cap and have a free for all? Then you would end up with probably Moran, Lenaghan and Davy running away with the competition. The generally prudent Hetherington/Caddick and McManus would try to keep up for a while but IMO would soon decide the stakes were too high and settle for being the next tier. The likes of Wilkinson and Hudgell would soon realise the stakes were beyond them and fold (in cards terms) and most of the rest would accept that SuperDuperLeague was beyond their means.

I am not trying to ridicule your argument though - far from it. Maybe you are right. Maybe we need to recognise that money WILL win out, and that the wealthiest clubs need to break away to form some wider international competition? After all, you can't buck the market forever.

I know one Super League club that was paying a centre £124k in 2008...

I dont buy the argument that it would 'force' clubs to spend more, some would choose to definitely, but the points system still limits the amount of success you can simply buy in. With a total set at a deliberate level it becomes impossible for clubs to bring in an entire squad of international top quality players. You simply wouldnt be able to fit them all under your limit. It would mean a club would be forced develop its own talent if only to stay under the cap, and it would reward them when they did, aswell as making them more valuable to their home club, but also less valuable to other clubs.

What it would mean is that SL clubs could be in the market for the very best overseas players. They would count heavily on the cap meaning compromises would be needed elsewhere + there would still be a quota meaning that you couldnt bring more in, simply better quality. Plus it would get around all the third-party restrictions. If Bradford want to approach one of their sponsors, and can convince them the pay SBW £200k on top of his wages then well done Bradford.

Restrictions on money arent the only way of keeping costs down, and they arent the only way of levelling the playing field.

Smokey, can you explain the "Points System" in basic terms to those who are not that familiar with it please?

Basically players are assigned a points value and clubs an aggregate amount of points they can exceed when their players points values are added together.

A good thing about it is you can set these points values at whatever rate you want.

Personally I would look at something along the lines of

Overseas player 70pts
international British players who came through another SL clubs academy 40pts
international british players who came through your academy/from the lower leagues 30 pts
non international british player who came through another SL clubs academy 25pts
non-international player who came through your academy/from the lower leagues 20pts

With a maximum of 800pts to build your squad. Now as a quick example by my calculation leeds are hitting about 860 points and would need to shed 60pts. It would be up to them how they did it, they could drop an overseas player or two british internationals who came through our academy, or Peacock/Senior (our two british internationals who came through other academies) and a squad player like Kirke.

But whilst putting this squad of 800 points together we could pay the players what they want. So an overseas player like Kylie Lueluai who is pretty average if we are honest, would become less attractive as he would cost as on the points total/cap as if we went out and got David Shillington who we could now compete for in terms of £££