Do you think its about time the salary cap was increased as the NRL salary Cap has increased from next season.

We cant wait until players like Roby, Briscoe and Tomkins are lost to the NRL because they can get double there salary across there.

No, not enough of the clubs can support it.

And it's no use saying that some can because of their owners. Clubs shouldn't be able to deliberately lose money as it is not sustainable.

How many SL clubs make a profit? Hull, Leeds and Warrington possibly?

There isn't any room for central contracts either as the RFL don't have sufficient revenue to support it.

Better lost to the NRL than to rara. The NRL cap increase is a good thing IMO. We will have little choice but to develop young players which can only improve the national squad.

If Hull, Leeds and Warrington can then why should the rest of the league hold these teams back.

If the Super League is going to get stronger clubs like Warrington have to take the lead honestly not loan players out half way during a season to get under the cap.

A business has to be able to stand on its own two feet and if they cant then get out of the Super League.

Its called Super League for a reason

Because unless you have a level playing field, the only clubs that will be able to win are those 3. This increases the gaps between the haves and have nots and the league lowers in quality. It would be like the Scottish league with Rangers and Celtic.

Manchester United is one of, if not the biggest sporting brands in the world and they are a loss leader, piling on huge amounts of debt. Its very rare for sporting clubs to make a profit, they're not expected to do it.

Cap (as it stands) shuts money out of the game. If Roman Abramovich suddenly found a love for a League club, there's essentially nothing he could do about it. Nobody just shoves money into a sport, only into a club, for the prestige (they hope) of making it successful.

Cap as a means to equalize competition I've never agreed with (punishes success). Why not just make the best players wear Mr. Blobby suits? ( think Wigan tried this with O'Carroll )

However...I'd add 4 conditions should this imaginary collection of Russian billionaires want a piece of a League club:

1) Money has to be a bone-fide investment so the money is genuinely the club's to spend and the club isn't put at any risk due to debt.

2) Clubs are banned from spending more than is economically sensible - e.g. some % of turnover, BUT PLUS money put in, debt-free, by any investor.

3) There are still hard limits on size of squad, and number of players paid more than £x. This prevents a mega-rich club, buying up too many world-class players just to keep a bench warm, and to keep them away from other clubs, which would just rob fans of seeing the best people on the park each week ( It also goes someway to stop the rich team becoming ultra dominant - to take this to an extreme example: the 'best' 17 in the world aren't guaranteed to smash the second best 17 - in fact it would be pretty hard to agree which was which anyway )

4) Salary costs above a hard-limit £Y are 'taxed' by the RFL at 20%, with this money put into grass-roots game. ( I think Basketball in the US does or did this, but I could be wrong ). So by making Hull, say - nearest to Russia

mega-rich, Mr Abramovich is automatically forced to put good £ into grassroots League.

5) Audited by someone who can count. (spot the deliberate rubbish 'counting' joke).

Or is Harlequins nearest to Russia?

Those teams don't make [ubig[/u profits, iirc. With the possible exception of Warrington, I'm not sure even they'd welcome a [ibig[/i increase. It could go up from £1.65m to £1.7m, but the consequences - positive and negative - would be predictably minimal.
There just isn't the money out there to make loosening the restrictions dramatically worthwhile or meaningful.

Binning of all but the richest clubs will leave you with a very small League and very repetitive fixture list.

Actually, rich people prefer the salary cap, and here's an example:

Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner didn't buy Liverpool because of the Premier League not having a cap, and a small salary cap of 1.65m or whatever it is in Super League would actually encourage not put off any potential investor, the problem is the majority of the planet has never heard of the sport.

Nonsense - he could use his dubiously acquired wealth to buy a club and invest in a stadium and infrastructure. He just couldn't massively distort the sporting competition and effectively guarantee on-field success - which is what sucks so much drama out of the processional Premier League.

I'd be suprised if Warrington made a profit without owner investment. Id imagine Leeds, Hull & Wigan are the three clubs to make a profit, IIRC Cas did pretty well the last time accounts were released?
But the rest were making a loss fairly easily.

What's the point of raising the cap simply to make us all feel a bit better. The cap is finally starting to bite and level out the competition, now is not the time to raise it until at least 12 or 13 clubs out of 14 can regularly spend the full cap.
Also to compete with Union or the NRL we would have to probably double the cap, which no-one can afford and would merely lead to the kind of reckless spending that the cap was brought in to try and avoid.

tbf, the main reason Man U have a massive debt is because of a leveraged buy-out: ie the Glasiers borrowed money to buy the club, and then disposed of the debt by putting onto the company they bought. Modern finance, hey? (though I suspect that's a Sin Bin subject)

The massively successful processional Premier League. Where teams like, say Sunderland, couldn't possibly win it but have a huge fan base.

The salary cap might* encourage a for-profit investor, but isn't much use to the 'prestige' investor whos more interested in on-field success.

*however, this is dubious (at least at the current limit). Growth sometime requires spending. So, for example ( alert - for example ONLY ), imagine some rich guy thinks that he can grow a club's fan base and media profile (and thus profit) dramatically by signing Johnny Wilkinson, Chris Ashton, etc. Right or wrong, that option just isn't open to him.

True, but it still shows that even the biggest and most powerful of sporting brands don't behave in a way that you might expect a traditional business and that they are always in a precarious situation. They are in a way just one greedy banker away from everything going pop.

That means that you can't really say if you're not making a profit, you can't meet an enlarged cap, so you can't be in SL. Its not how sporting clubs work.

And made a loss of £27 million, before tax, last year. The death of the dream is taking a toll at a number of second tier PL clubs, as they have been relegated to the status of 'opponent'.
The existence of a virtually self-perpetuating Champions League elite has contributed to that as well, tbf.

Good for international game but not for the league that we watch week in week out. As soon as a youngster looks good off he goes for big bucks NRL

It's frankly embarrassing that after 10 years the SC hasnt risen once. Players are paid less today in real terms than they were 10 years ago. That is a terrible record and should shame all clubs.

If an equal competition means second rate players playing on low wages, then we would be better with an uneven league.

We are in a vicious cycle where we cant increase our revenue because we cant increase our visibility and we cant increase our visibility because we arent allowed to pay our visible assets enough to keep or attract the very best. They are all playing in other more visible competitions on higher wages. The SC entrenches this vicious cycle and something will need to be done to break it.

Quins could spend a million pounds advertising and marketing next year and it wouldnt be as big a boost as paying that mill to SBW.


There are better more obvious ways to stop a club from buying all the talent

Yes, he *could* do that, but that would make him a saint (no pun intended) - most people like him (and yes, Abramovich is a bit of a daft example, for the case of Rugby League, we only need think about a guy with a few millions to splash about), want to live the dream - i.e. they DO want to distort the competition. Actually most fail to acheive it. Abramovich suceeded for a season or two, but not forever.

What really distorts competition in football isn't really the standard of the top clubs' first XI, but the number of international superstars sitting on premier league benches (which the smaller clubs can't afford to do) .

No matter how rich Chelsea or City or whoever were, as long as they could only buy (say) the best 15 players in the world, and the rest had to be self-trained or vastly cheaper, then you'd allow the rich guys the pleasure of thinking they owned the 'best' players in the world, but also stop them dominating totally, because there just isn't *that* much difference between the 'best' 15 and the 'second best' 15, or the 10th best 15 for that matter.

I'm not advocating the removal of any form of salary control, rather suggesting that there's something wrong if we're literally blocking money out the game, even if that money was constrained by rules which made it 'safe' - i.e. couldn't bust a club.

Unfortunately it's unrealistic to expect RL to grow as a nice even competition - you'll always have breakaway leaders who 'set the pace', but you *can* structure things to try to extract the best out of that phenomena - for example 'taxing' the overspend for grassroots development - and you can structure things to prevent extreme distortion of competition and the sad phemonoma of healthy world-class internationals sitting out games.

I accept that distortion is a bigger risk in RL and needs more control (e.g. a *very* small 'high-paid' squad limit). Two reasons: firstly there's far less players to go around, so the 'best' 13 RL players are significantly better than say the 10th best 13 (even worldwide, not just in the UK). Also the nature of the game itself makes it harder to 'equalize', because small-ish gaps in standard generally lead to big gaps in results. In football, Man Utd *can* have a tough night away to a championship side, and indeed lose to them. But for Warrington RL to lose to a Championship RL side would be almost unthinkable. In football, almost any premiership team can pull off a result on their day, and whilst it's true that even in football the same sides get to the top - it's because there's a lot of games in a season to even out the anomalies.

Most attempts to control salaries, etc. have good points but also unintended consequences. Over-emphasizing the need to chase 'equality' can easily lead to the unintended effect of dragging down the overall standard.

I don't think 'cap or no cap?', or even 'what's the right cap?' is the right debate - rather 'can we design a system of salary control which accurately targets what we're trying to acheive?'

I'm not sure there's a clear consensus in the game about what exactly the cap is for? Is it for stopping clubs going bust, or is it to equalize competition? Even if you answer "Both those things!", one can still ask the question "OK, so what's the relative importance of the two?" It matters, because a system heavily emphasizing equality may have a different set of rules than one that was much more focused on finances.

Explained better than I managed. Spot on.

Has it not?

What two MASSIVE clubs who are known throughout the entire world?
God forbid we would have teams like that in our sport......

It says something when only 34 people know Wigan, the team with the biggest profile in the sport on Pointless

Salary cap was originally brought in to level up the league and make all clubs be even

Its not worked

Ask Bradford if it as helped them before the salary cap they where a top four team they spent big on good players and made profits, now they are struggling because its too even

Warrington are the club that have benefitted the most as they have played the salary cap the best by having a brilliant owner who knows how to work the cap by releasing players on loan.

Ask Harlequins or Wakefield if the Cap has helped them NO

It was set to £1.8m in 2001, and reduced to £1.65m a few years ago when tax and NI was deducted from the SC calculations.