not if "marquee contracts" are'nt included in the salary cap

Exactly. So it would mean they don't actually need the exemption to keep Tomkins, they need it to sign whoever else they do sign.

On the information we've got now, the whole thing stinks. The other clubs have already built their squads to the rules in hand. Wigan don't feel they should apply to them so apply for them to be changed. If the other clubs weren't consulted in advance it's terrible. If this has been planned and discussed and the other clubs are happy with it, then fine, but it seems strange that it's not been discussed publicly by any of the clubs.

No, not really.

Say Sam has been given Joels contract on top of his (reasonable assumption for arguments sake)

That still leaves Deacon, Hoffman and Coley out with Lauaki, Dudson and Flower possibly in.

I'd wager those 3 incoming barely total Hoffmans wages.

And Saddened, on a side note....

If these rule changes had been announced 2 weeks ago by the RFL, with no mention of Sam Tomkins anywhere in sight, with a clear and concise procoss of what the changes were and how they would affect clubs, would you not be happy that at long last the cap is not only:

a) no longer limited to a figure which was set in place a number of years ago, meaning that in relative terms RL players are earning less now than they did.

b) clubs are now rewarded for producing and developing Home Grown players who then turn out and play for England.

c) give clubs a viable way or warding off interest from RU

For a start Saints would be one of those teams that would benefit the most from this, especially as you are victim to one of your young "stars" taking the money and running.

This is the RFL and their shoddy PR enabling some opposition fans to claim Wigan are bending the cap or making the rules up themselves, when in fact the new changes should benefit any club that develops their own players and wants to keep them. Don't let your anti-Wigan bias hide the fact that these changes (if they are as they sound) have been a long time in coming and were sorely needed.

But you haven't signed them yet, so why did you need an exemption from the salary cap in the first place? The rumours about an NRL centre being announced after the 4N have reached the papers today I believe, so that would blow ins and outs out of the water and would make the increasing the cap look farcical.

As ever with the RFL they have handled this horribly. Why not announce the new rules properly before the Tomkins deal, or even with it? Today makes it look like they've given Wigan carte blanche to ignore the salary cap for another 4 years. Was there even a plan in place? Or has this just a hatchet job to keep Wigan happy and the actual rules that result from this will be shoehorned in as suits over the next few weeks? Lots of unanswered questions here.

and it probably was.......so wind ya neck in





as long as every club is allowed to take '1 marquee englishman' off the salary cap then nobody should have a problem with it imo

Half your post about the RFL's PR work has been dealt with in my post above and I agree with you. At the moment there isn't enough information to hang Wigan on the morality cross, just suspicion based on your past exploits. Your points about the benefits of the exemptions are worthy, but it all depends on the impact on the league. For example if Cas got Daryl Clark marquee status (He is being chased by 7 NRL clubs according to reports), would Wigan then be able to sign him and have him on marquee status too?

Saints won't benefit from these rules at all. We lose half a million pounds a season, so if the club spends a penny more on players, it's a penny it cannot afford to spend. If Saints did take advantage of this new rule, I for one wouldn't be happy as we'd be being irresponsible with the club's future.

I'm not so sure. I don't think it had even been considered until Sam signed to his Union agent and (quite possibly) told Wigan of his intention to league for Union if he wasn't paid more.

The problem with the 1 marquee Englishman thing is that some clubs will have more than 1. Teams like Saints, Hull KR, Wakefield, Quins, Salford etc won't be able to pay anyone anymore without being irresponsible with their finances, so won't benefit. Wigan, Leeds and Saints with the youth systems they have could quite easily have five or six players that would qualify, so it won't solve a problem at all. Those players won't be able to move in SL as half the league won't be able to afford them and half the league will already have used their one spot.

I doubt it, I'm under the (current) assumption that the marquee player would have to be produced by said club. That would make more sense, so it's probably the opposite of what they've done! The likes of Graham would have been your marquee maybe, now its probably likely to be Roby.



But will you still be making such a loss in your new stadium?

It's up to Saints to make a profit in order to benefit from the new rules, the new stadium is a massive step towards this, which is one of the main aims of the whole franchise system. I think it was an earlier post on here in which I said you shouldn't be dragging down the top teams to match the middle, Saints were slipping (in financial terms) towards being a middle team in SL, the new stadium should mean you jump right back up again.

no....cos wigan already have their marquee player off the salary cap

So if we assume it's one home grown player, what happens if Joe Mellor (Or whoever) comes through and plays like Alex Murphy next season? Does he move to Saracens or do Wigan apply again?

We then either have a smaller squad, or he goes to Saracens.

no......cos clubs now have extra cash to bump up other contracts

If you ask me the best the question is exactly who decides 'Marquee'.
As an example (please dont shoot me down as I know we(HKR) have to many Aussies) would Willie mason have counted?
It would have very likely have kept him away from Frence RU if money was no object!
The RFL have made the SC rules have fuzzy lines as exactly what is right and wrong IMHO.

the marquee player has to be english (or qualified for england RL) or else theres absolutely no point having it

So the RFL have changed the Salary Cap rules to allow clubs to pay extra to certain ' long serving , Marquee , home produced ' players

But they haven't actually announced it

Happened a few years ago, they had a young lad named Ashton (whatever happened to him

) who chased the cash.

What happened when he left, easy, they found Tomkins.


Similar to Saints losing Eastmond, replaced from within there own.

We shouldnt be having to have these payments/cap exemptions although i believe the make up of the cap should be looked at and certains concessions allowed for fully developed club players etc.



As for the central contracts, weve been down this road before, Saints go one for Cunningham, Wigan for Radlinski and Leeds, Bulls and Wire too IIRC, but once FC applied for one for Richard Horne , we were told they scrapped them

I understand a lot of the reasons for complaints about this deal, but Sam Tomkins is (like it or not) the best poster-boy RL has in England. Losing him would have been a major blow to the credibility of RL, with it increasibngly seen as a feeder to RU. This may not be the best long-term solution, but as a stop-gap to prevent him going, its a very good move.

We aren't like the NRL, we don't produce players of this calibre that often - someone mentioned Ashton, but Sam Tomkins is miles better than Ashton ever was (or is ever likely to be). We simply can't afford real stars to leave.

The difference between the Union and NRL defections is often positional. Union targets outside backs, NRL targets forwards. Until someone like Tomkins goes to the NRL and stars, I suspect no NRL club would look that seriously at signing any SL backs - at least not for big money. The stars who go to the NRL will be those that really want the challenge and are willing to take a pay cut (at least until they prove themselves).

They lost a winger and gained a fullback/stand off. In the 4 years between Ashton leaving we have seen Wigan employing both Amos Roberts and Pat Richards, as well as George Carmont, Cameron Phelps.

Yet next season we will see Tim Smith, Isaak Johns, Jarrod Sammut, Ben Jeffries, Brett Seymour, Sam Obst, Mick Dobson, Blake Green, Micheal Witt, Craig Gower, Joel Moon, Daniel Holdsworth, Anthony Watts, Brett Finch with SL contracts. We can talk about how we are replacing young English half-backs with the quality of Eastmond when we arent seeing a league that needs 15 of 26 halfback spots filled by overseas players.

Has anything new actually been announced or is it merely a newspaper getting carried away?
There are after all, existing exemptions for long serving and homegrown players in the salary cap rules.

It's a direct quote from Ian Leneghan.

What the RFL have done with the Operational Rules we shall have to wait and see, but the 2011 version is devilishly detailed and I doubt therefore that there will be any particular ambiguities in the 2012 version either.

The existing concession is up to a maximum of £50,000. I can't see that being hugely exceeded. But it's a tough call. On the one hand, you want to try to maintain something at least vaguely like a level playing field (though one or two clubs have found some wonderful downhill bits); on the other, the fact is that SL/RFL simply [ihad[/i to act and do something, given the sudden increase in wealth and funding of both NRL and RU clubs, to at least give clubs a chance of keeping the best players playing within SL.

The bit that's quoted by the OP isn't a direct quote is it? The article that the OP links to has obviously been changed and like I say there is already a £50,000 exemption for long serving players and a £50,000 exemption for homegrown players.

That's true, there is the £50K "club trained" allowance too; I wonder whether perhaps they are simply going to introduce a third category of marquee player? If so, then by analogy with the existing rules there would be no mystery about it, nor any difficulty; there would likely be just one, at any given time, and it would be whichever one the club registered as such with the RFL. So in Wigan's case, they would just register Tomkins as their nominated marquee player and whatever the salary cap allowance would be would apply to him. This would mean that each club could nominate a marquee player, (though would not have to) and that player would not have to have any particular qualifications to be nominated. By restricting it to one player, this would ensure that the extra money was paid just to one player, and not just used to increase the salary cap payments across the board.

They never announce these controversial changes. They slip them into the OR's very smoothly. No-one reads the OR's do they?



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