Indeed. That said, given the amount of debt that most clubs are laden with, I would hazard a guess at "BADLY" as a description of how clubs are run.

With relegation back in the mix and the fiscal consequence of dropping down, clubs at the wrong end of the table would overspend in a desperate spending frenzy to avoid the drop. Clubs like Wakey, castleford, Hull KR etc would be forced to either pay the salaries that Salford can offer or miss out on players and dice with the drop.
Our TV deal is about 20 million a year.......we can't afford to play soccer type monopoly.


Psssst.....just pointing out that being good at making money doesn't always translate to knowing how to run a club.

They won't be forced to pay anything? If they don't have the money they shouldn't pau it simple as that, it's the old case of if I put my hand in the fire.

Salford went through that for years and years before the salary cap and so did other teams? Why is this generation any differently that's sport for you.

and also inadvertently pointing out how regardless of SC or not, if you run a club badly, you will run it in to the ground. The SC is irrelevant to it.

True it's not about the cap it's about the people running the club, Salford were nowhere near the cap 3 years ago yet we nearly went pop Wakefield The same on numerous occasions, Bradford Bulls also,.so why didn't the cap save those clubs from there near disasters.

So you think that threatened with the very real prospect of relegation, clubs wont over spend in a vain attempt to stay up? Are you new to RL?

Leeds, who I suspect are the best run RL club in the country, if not the game, would struggle to keep pace with Salford if you let Marwan off the leash. He has insane amounts of money and he really does seem to scatter it about like confetti. He'd be on a plane to 'stralia and signing up most of the Kangaroo back line, even if it meant buying them european heritage to get them under the quota. Inglis would be on a million quid straight off, with thurston not far behind.
Imagine if the top few started paying over the odds, what would happen to HKR, or Widnes, the latter who have a very real history of spending to win and then imploding.
Soccer is fine.....they get telephone number size TV deals and 3nd tier clubs sell more replica shirts than us, but we need to keep a lid on spending.

If there had been no salary cap, Hughes would have spent twice the amount with exactly the same outcome. Whilst I have no doubt the Lenegan or Salfords Doctor are not stupid, if Marwan is let loose, then the salary expectations across the board will go up and we've already agree our TV income for the foreseeable.

What makes you think Wakefield and the less cash rich teams would spend anywhere near what the big clubs do? And come on surely they must have some financial sense, they'd know if they overspent weather they stayed up or not would put their future in doubt,you name me a team that's gone bust trying to stave off relegation?

In what way would London having put out a better squad and ended in the same position have been worse for the game?

Marwan can only buy so many players.

I think what Gutters is trying to say is that allowing clubs to spend whatever they like drags other clubs up to (or close to) the level of the highest spending clubs. They have to to compete. Either to remain in the hunt for trophies or to avoid relegation.

Football just about manages it. But they've got 90-odd full time clubs so if they lose 2 or 3 a season it's not that big a deal. RL has far fewer and can't afford clubs going under, it significantly holds back the sport. They've also got such massive clubs like Man Utd and Arsenal who can compete with the super-rich owner clubs through their own spending power. RL doesn't have that. As Gutters rightly points out, no club could come close to matching Koukash's spending. So 1 man can massively affect the sport, which isn't true of football.

Leeds is by far the best run RL club in financial terms, yet even a modest increase in the salary cap would severely stretch Leeds' resources. If there were no salary cap and Dr Koukash was spending at a level necessary to compete with Union, Leeds would be nowhere near able to compete without spending more than their income and hoping that either higher crowds or final appearances kept their heads above water.

It's not just the badly run clubs that would be in financial problems, it would drag in the well run clubs too. Just like it did prior to the salary cap.

I agree with you entirely that it won't prevent a badly run club from going under. But it gives the opportunity for reasonably well run clubs to remain solvent.

I actually think the opposite is true of what you say about no need for a salary cap now there's P&R back. I think there's even more need for it now, and there was less justification for it during licensing.

What him said ^^^^^

There are two, possibly three "we'll run" businesses (clubs) in SL, so basically it could throw SL into self destructive chaos.


Even though clubs were going to the wall during licensing, I think that's true.

Shall we just accept that RL will stay where it is then at the bottom of the pit miles behind all other sports.

Nope, but binning the cap will see us in the news for all the wrong reasons

Hopefully those that actually make decisions on this sort of thing won't retain a blinkered view. Rugby League has huge potential in the UK and globally if only the right things are done. Would Abu Dhabi have put their hundreds of millions into Man City if there had been a salary cap preventing them buying some quick success whilst their long term investments there start to bear fruit? The salary cap issue and its gradual removal is something that needs to happen to benefit the game over the next couple of generations - not a decision to be based on the likely whims of the current owners of a few current Super League clubs. The RFL as the game's governing body has a responsibility to the UK tax payer to do what it can to prevent loss of tax revenue via it's member clubs going bust and re-starting anew as a matter of course. Some sort of "tinkering" with the free market has to be accepted therefore. The salary cap is just the wrong mechanism. The tinkering should just involve the RFL requiring evidence that a player contract can be prudently afforded before it will register it. Pretty simple. If that means, for example, adequate share capital rather than loans that are repayable on demand, so be it. I suggest a club's player registrations would be automatically ok up to a total players' contract value equating to the amount of central funding provided to the club.

Then what do we do then? Because the game hasn't grown since 1998.

Then he would be wrong. It's a self serving circular argument that when all the invented justification is stripped away basically says we are run by idiots and the players are going to pay financially for that.

Your basic argument is that well run clubs are only well run because they collude to pay their players less than their free market value, and of they were to have to pay their players their free market value they would immediately become insolvent.

The obvious problem with that argument is that a business which only survives because it under pays it's employees is not a well run business.

As a point of order a modest increase in the SC would not stretch Leeds financial resources at all. Less than 20% of leeds outgoings are player wages.

It is immoral that players bare the responsibility for protecting owners from themselves, it is immoral that leeds can post profits in the hundreds of thousands but Ryan Hall is not allowed to negotiate his salary in a free market.

As for P+R needing an SC that's just nonsense. It does nothing but en tench the status quo. Why on earth should Club x languish in the lower leagues because club Y cannot afford to spend as much? Especially when the limit figure bears no relation to affordability for either.

There is one reason and one reason only the SC exists, to facilitate the exploitation of players by owners, if you cannot afford to pay the free market rate for your players you are operating at a level higher than your business can operate

As opposed to with the SC where it has been a veritable blizzard of good news and positive press.

Smokey had it bang on, it's all about the owner underpaying their players to gain profit, if you boss did that to you at work you'd be calling him all the names under the sun.

It's not about being run by idiots. Do you really think if there were no salary cap that spending would stay the same? If the players are being under-paid and removing the SC means they can negotiate their full market value then surely you are admitting players wages will increase. So either the likes of Leeds, Wigan & Cas (clubs who've managed to run on what they bring in) increase their spending to compete or they accept they'll be mid-table indefinitely. How is that good for the game? If they increase their spending they're doing the old 80's & 90's trick of spending more than they've got and hoping for an increase in revenue from any success. We all know how well that worked. Wigan and Leeds have only just recovered from it.

That isn't my argument at all. My argument is that players are currently paid their market value. Because clubs can't afford any more. You are suggesting players market values should be inflated by 1 man who's willing to lose a lot of money. That doesn't happen in any other business, which is why sport is different from business and shouldn't be viewed that way.

The players aren't underpaid. They're paid what RL clubs in this country can afford without making huge losses. That isn't underpayment.

Your point of order is incorrect. Leeds make a profit of around £200k per year over the last few years. Even if you leave out the fact that that profit is used to invest in the stadium, an increase of the SC to just £2m would wipe out Leeds profits.

What are you on about with club x & y. The SL SC has no bearing on which team is promoted.
You keep saying it has no bearing on affordability, yet it clearly does. Leeds, Wigan & Cas etc are clubs for which the cap is affordable. For other clubs it's their aim to get to a point where it's affordable. How would increasing players wages help keep clubs afloat?

Ahh now you're getting it. Yes many clubs are operating at a level higher than they can operate. That's why they struggle to pay for everything they need to, including wages. Your solution to this is to increase wages because 1 club can currently pay it. That's madness.
You're conveniently ignoring the point that 1 rich man can massively and significantly affect the sport unlike in football. Man City's owners are the richest people in the world (or very close) and yet they still cannot guarantee victory in any football competition because there is the likes of Man Utd, Arsenal etc who can compete with them. When Man City were taken over they didn't start spending 4-5 times on wages than Man Utd, what their takeover did was take them to a position where they can compete regularly with Man Utd. (Though if you talk to sports finance people they'll tell you it's unhealthy for the sport that player wages are so inflated).
In RL the removal of the SC would mean that Salford would win virtually every competition every year. Because no other club can afford to lose millions per year. Great for Salford fans for a few years. But can you see a similar pattern to what happened not that long ago?

A SC is necessary to prevent 1 man artificially inflating players wages beyond what the sport can afford from its income.
If we had 90-odd clubs and a 20 club SL then I'd probably agree with no SC. But we don't. Any club that goes under is a blow to RL because it means another decade or so of a club that can't effectively compete and can't grow as much as it could've done.
As I said, the SC won't stop badly run clubs from spending more than they earn, but it does ensure well run clubs DONT HAVE TO spend more than they earn.

No but it's prevented plenty of bad news.

Bad news like losing Burgess? Eastmond? Graham? Tomkins? Ashton? Bad news like Bradford going bust? Wakefield? Crusaders?

1 man doesn't artificially do inflate anything. If he is prepared to pay to pay x amount to a player that's how much that player is worth. The only artificial part of it is the artificially low wages that players are being paid. If my boss decided to get together with our competitors to collude to pay me less the last thing he would hear from me would be an instruction to go fsck himself as I walked out the door. By the way. That happens in every market. In fact it's pretty much exactly how a market operates. The person willing to pay the best gets the best and a man is able to sell his labour for the market rate. Anything else is exploitation.

It isn't the players responsibility to allow themselves to be exploited so clubs can operate at that level.

You pretend that it is based on affordability then list three clubs with Wildly different turnovers and financial situations. It's a hell of a coincidence that a club with a turnover of 11m and a club with a turnover of less than 4m can only afford exactly the same amount isn't it. Every club in the country can afford exactly the same amount. It's an unbelievable coincidence.

Well run clubs don't have to spend more than they could afford without an SC. In fact if they did they wouldn't be well run clubs.

Thanks for bringing Union into it, you've just sunk your entire argument. The Union cap is going up to around £6m. Which SL clubs other than Salford could spend even half of that?