The SL salary cap for a year is £1.825 milion.

Clubs should be allowed to exceed this, without any RFL penalties, so long as the excess in any year is matched by an increase in the issued and paid-up share capital of the entity owning the club.

Then any owner could offer any player say a £250k a year contract (even if the club is already committed up to the cap) - so long as he buys £250k worth of shares each year to match that excess spending.

Yes. Because what we really want is for half the clubs in the league to be rendered uncompetitive, reducing their fan bases or worse still, have owners who live beyond their means and turn their club into Bradford Bulls.

The devil would be in the detail, as always. But if an owner is prepared to put share capital in - AND commit to NOT reducing it for a decent period - I think that idea, or something along those lines, warrants consideration.

If you don't put the capital in, you can't spend it. So such a proposal would not lead to living beyond means.

Owners and directors often invest in the form of loans though.

When they want their money back...

Not quite clear on just what is being proposed here.
Is the OP saying that to spend an extra £250k then that amount MUST be put into the club as share capital or that to spend an extra £250k (raised any way) then an extra £250k of share capital must be introduced, ie an increase of £500k into the business over the financial year?

1 - a loan is not an investment. Go google it.

2 - in future, owners should be free to put their money in in the form of ordinary shares, preference shares, stupid investor shares, or loans. Substance is just the same.

But any loans would have to be subordinated to the claims of other creditors, and not able to be repaid until and unless all other creditors have been or clerarly can be repaid in full.

Which, funnily enough, is precisely what Mr Khan at Bradford would have HAD to do anyway, as soon as his company drew up its annual accounts, to avoid a going concern qualification.

And plenty of precedents amongst the responsible owners of clubs that are or were technically insolvent - like Davy, for example. That is precisely what they already did, and where relevant do. The only reason Khan got away with not doing it was because his company was too new to file accounts.

Under company law its VERY easy to reduce share capital as long as the company is solvent.

Indeed. Which is why I said anyone seeking to avail themselves of such a provision would have to commit to not reducing the share capital for a defined period.

That's my point!

Do you even read threads?

As the OP suggests, investment can fund spending over and above the cap...not loans.

The suggestion being if the money is the club's, not subject to repayment in any way, why shouldn't they spend it on players?

Unfortunately, owners and directors tend not to give their money away. Koukash and Davy may be the only ones with anything like the funds or the will to do that.

Er..how can you "...invest in the form of loans" then? I read what you wrote, and responded to what you said.

I assumed you were having yet another dig at Bradford. If you were not, then I apologise for mistaking your motives.

You are obsessed man!

No-one mentioned Bradford and given their plight, I don't see any way in which a thread about rich owners being allowed to overspend the cap through non-returnable investment, could be!

You are doing an equally-good impression of being obsessed elsewhere! So I'm sure I can be forgiven if I interpreted your comment about owners' loans as a sly further go at Bradford? Even if this time I appear to have been utterly and completely in error, and am totally happy to acnowledge it.

And indeed, "Bradford" and "Rich Owner" is a clear oxymoron, now and for the foreseeable, unfortunately. Unless Ken Morrison treads the Road to Damascus...

OK, no problem.

For the record, on the subject at hand, I think I prefer a consistent cap, though the OP makes an interesting suggestion.

I do believe that any relaxation in the cap MUST go hand in hand with strict limits on squad sizes.

Strangely enough, although like you I think the OP makes an interesting suggestion well worth considering, I tend agree with you. I'd like to think I still would, even if my club was owned by a Good Doctor rather than being on its financial uppers...

Shall we nip back to the other thread now, to carry on knocking seven bells out of each other?

Ha ha later maybe...bedtime!

"See you" Thursday maybe...we need the money!

Probably one of the biggest issues facing the game in England today.. That dreaded Salary Cap!

You either stick with it and allow for a reasonably competitive league (taking into account there aren't enough good players to make it fully competitive)...

Or..

You allow clubs to spend what they want and we can go back to the days when Wigan won everything at a canter.

If you stick with a cap you'll always risk losing the best players to either the NRL or Rugby Union - SL won't get stronger.

If you scrap it we'll end up with a huge gulf in class and clubs going bust... may as well just have a 6 team SL if that is the case.

I'd prefer the option of sticking with a Cap and enforcing it out of the two choices.

Until the RFL can scan the globe and find 14 (or 12 from next year) very weathy individuals who will take a stake in each club - then we can't change the Cap.

you have created a false dichotomy. THere are a million and one options we could take. It disappoints me the lack of imagination we approach it with .

^Exactly this^

Reforming the way we control the risk of overspend doesn't have to have anything to do with 'equalizing competition' ( the merits of which people have different views on anyway )

Separate the issues and we might get somewhere. People insist on assuming that anyone talking about cap reform MUST be talking about scrapping the cap completely and allowing completely uncontrolled squad limits so that Wigan (or in reality more likely Salford!) just buy anyone with talent and destroy the game.

So why was the Cap introduced in the very first place?

Was it to stabilise clubs in SL or to even out the competition? Genuine question.

Because if it was to even out the competition - what possible gain or advantage would it make that if a club wants to spend over the cap they also have to invest further into the club?..... You'd end up with rich clubs and poor clubs (a bigger gap than now) and a competition that doesn't interest the public because only a select couple of teams win everything.

I hate all this, flippin money.

was looking a r.union forum, them talking about non-rugby football stuff too. flip, I'm such a socialist.

Good question, and I think the answer is that at the time it was justified as addressing both those problems. As Smokey has pointed out, they're different problems and so it's not at all obvious that a single solution can deal with both.

For what it's worth, I repost (with a minor edit) my suggestion below. I'm sure it's full of flaws and would need lots of smart people to work on anything like it for a while to create a workable set of rules along those lines. But that's not really the point - the point is that there's a ton of ways to address issues - it's not just cap vs. complete free-for-all.

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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.

[iClubs with less money therefore still have a viable strategy for doing well.[/i

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.
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