And in 5 - 10 yrs they'll be producing their own stars in the back of it, but it takes time

Corrected for accuracy

Spot on - people are interested in people and RL is chock full of really interesting ones; with a bit of imagination and the right marketing team behind them, these lads could grab a lot of attention.

Sadly, we under-use the games greatest asset; the Extraordinary Rugby thing was a decent start, but it appears to have fizzled.

Marketing is down to the clubs, but they have never recognized this. They have been quite happy not to market the players beyond the local press. But now that others are coming in to buy them, with the lead from Koukash clubs will start to market players.

Get them out there in the press. Get them earning other income streams as it will actually help the clubs long term.

There are plenty of marketable players. Burgess is a great example, would not have made the back cover of any paper anywhere in the UK pre RLWC.

Even though Russell Crowe specifically head hunted him.

Now he is all the talk on here. He is marketable because of his skills with a Rugby ball and because he is a decent looking fella.

Jamie Foster was derided for wearing boots sent to him by footwear companies and his different haircuts. But we need to encourage players to be more like this not less like this. And don't tell me he is not world class, that's got sod all to do with marketing.

People market water to the public. That most common of substances, but still with marketing makes a homogeneous product sale-able.

If you genuinely prefer the game to limit the amount of money it will ever have, I can't argue with that, it's a perfectly valid opinion of what RL should be.

But if you want the game to attract big money, you have to accept that we can't do that at the same time as dictating to millionaires exactly how *we* prefer it to be spent. It's no good saying "Koukash should do this, that and the other to build from the ground up" because Koukash doesn't have to do anything, he can walk away if he likes. In the real world, people like that absolutely do want to buy success. We can work hard to address some of the challenges that arise when individual clubs find themselves rich, but the crude and miniscule cap doesn't serve us well.

The cap is a barrier to rich benefactors like Koukash. If you think that's good, so be it, so long as you don't live in a fantasy world where we can find people like Koukash who'll be happy to spend money on massively restricted terms laid down by a committee of people who think they know best,

And if football in the UK had a salary cap of the same restrictiveness (suitably scaled in raw £ terms of course) would City's investors have been there in the first place? The world-class academy and the *rapidly assembled* top-class team happened as part of the same thing. If Koukash is genuinely in it for the long-term, then I've no doubt he'll invest in infrastructure and academies, etc. Don't understand why he should be banned from buying short-term success at the same time*. He'll find it a lot easier to get talented young athletes to turn up at the academy if Salford are winning and full of world-class stars.

*once again, to clarify - the existing cap is effectively a ban on buying short-term success. I have no problem with rules to structure an investment such that it doesn't expose a club to ruin, but that is not the same thing as a low cap. Let's just say Koukash wanted to spend tens of millions, at his own risk, to bring SBW, Burgess, Tomkins, heck, even Dan Carter - how brilliant would that be for the game? Amazing, I'd be at Salford every time I wasn't at Wigan. However far-fetched such an idea seems, you'd probably be not in as big a state of shock as the average City fan is when they think back a decade. But, in RL, it's not just a highly unlikely breakthrough, we have made it an IMPOSSIBLE breakthrough, by deciding that we don't want that kind of thing.

Unfortunately (for those of us dreamers who still believe that RL can one day can be a big sport, despite 100 years of frustration), a lot of people in RL (as is obvious from these boards) are quite happy to see RL kept nice and small and provincial. And they're quite entitled to that opinion.

For the first time ever this new tv deal means ALL SL clubs will be able to afford to pay full salary cap AND have jnr team investment. At long last the next few years will see and equalling of clubs and a greater level of unpredictability. It would be insane to change the cap for the forseeable future.

No they wont!

British passport holders have more importance.

Equaling of clubs. Dream on.

We've tried dragging the top clubs down to level of the ones with no fans for long enough. Thankfully the plan has failed to achieve the worst it could have done, but has still been a millstone around the sport for too long.

CEO's voting for no increase in the salary cap!! Would the vote for no increase in the pay of CEO's?

Turkey and Christmas come to mind

With such a small number of clubs being currently able to afford the full cap, any major change is utterly pointless.
Having said that, there does need to be a way of slowing the player drain to Aus. (however, if we could keep developing enough quality players this could actually help the game over here !).
That said, it is important to be able attract the top talent within the sport to play in SL, so we do need a solution.
Perhaps the arguments against the "marquee player" are because this would make that person a "target", not so much for visiting teams, but maybe, in terms of keeping team harmony.

WHO, is this cap space going to be paid to?

Giving the current players more money does nothing to raise standards.

Any cap increase, or indeed paying up to the current cap, should be coupled with strict limits on how many players can have on their roster.

No cap, just controls on not spending what you haven't got, i.e. limits on debt. Equity investment fine, spend it how you like.

...BUT...no more than 13 players on more than 50k (maybe a bit more, not sure).

This makes it interesting. You can't just hoover up all the talent, you can't even hoover up more than one world class player for each position without leaving yourself short of a star elsewhere. Koukash can thus pay 13 'Harlem Globetrotters' whatever he likes without inflating the price too much for others. He might have the best scrum half in the world, but the second best one can only get what the next richest club will pay because Koukash can't carry two 'stars' for that position without losing another star berth. This goes on down the chain of wealth. Even the poorest club will, at worst, have access to 12th best scrum half in the country.

Moreover you'd better have a damn good development squad, because there is no way on earth 13 star players will get you through the season. On any given day you need 17 of course, and you'd be lucky to have more than 9 stars fit on the same day. Big rewards for being good at developing up and coming talent.

Your development squad is almost guaranteed to be UK ( or France ) bred too, because although the money is OK, it's not enough to attract second rate Aussies.

There, sorted

^ Well that was easy. ^

No but what it does do is spread the talent more evenly, you will see a lot more player movement between top and bottom teams and more movement in the best players. This has the effect of making weak clubs stronger and bringing the regular trophy winners down a couple of notches. We have seen it in the NRL with teams going from bottom to top within a year or two and silverware being shared out amongst clubs.