Never thought i'd mutter those words but is it time to change how the salary cap works?
I've always been a strong believer in the cap but in it's currently guise it is hindering those that can go beyond it and not preventing those that can't from financial problems, in short it's a compromise that helps no-one.

Wakefield, Salford, Bradford, Hull KR, Crusaders have all been clubs in SL subject to cap rules and it hasn't done them any favours.

With the increase in the cap down under and with the union vultures circling the clubs that can afford to ward off don't have any power to due to restrictions. We currently have 9 teams with big pockets surely we should bring in a rule of declaring what you can afford without damaging your club and allowing clubs to spend to that.

It should be based purely on income. If you're generating more money you should be able to spend more, if not then you can't.

It's time to raise the cap & let clubs pay what they can.

There are far too many creative accounting methods to get around that. You would get Moran invoicing 'Moranovich Holdings PLC' for £5,000,000 a season for consultancy services, thus falsely inflating the club's profits.

Any reward for income, size, success or finance just makes the problem worse. If you let the strong spend more, the strong become stronger. If you limit the weak, they can't improve.

Given the financial performance of the clubs in Super League, there is a good arguement that cap is too high currently. When clubs like Wigan, Warrington and Saints can't make a profit, what chance do the likes of Salford, Wakefield and Cas have?

Just because the profit and loss account says 'loss', it can be rather misleading to say Warrington did not make a profit last year. Firstly we wrote off all the 'image rights' liability and secondly we wrote off a chunk of the value of the stadium (depreciation) to the profit and loss account (we have already paid for the stadium, depreciation is an accounting tool).

If you subtract money going out of the club versus money coming in, we were positive.

However, I would have to agree with your sentiments in general. A salary cap, if operated properly, should limit the ability of wealthy clubs / owners to cherry pick all the best players and coaches. Much as the Wiganers may have enjoyed their string of CC wins, it made the competition boring for other fans and spectators.

The thing is though WO we have 9 clubs with wealth

Wire
Leeds
Wigan
Widnes
Hull FC
Huddersfield
Saints
London
Catalans.

A higher proportion of the league is being held back by other clubs, Bradford and their new owners might be able to raise their profile again, who knows but look at Cas, Wakey, Salford and Hull KR, because of those 4 clubs the rest are suffering. Cas and Wakey if they weren't so pig headed could help each other out and share a stadium, same goes for KR who could quite easily move in to the KC. They won't so we suffer.
I feel for Wigan in a way, they have the means to keep Tomkins and match both union and NRL but because of a lack of ambition or common sense they'll lose him because someone in Cas won't share a stadium, it's BS of the highest order, the salary cap was designed to keep everyone equal and it's working, it's keeping everyone equally s--t.

I'd agree with most of what Yed says. we currently have the weak clubs virtually deciding how the game moves forward. I think Wakey, the Bulls and HKR are actually starting to turn the corner. HKR will have capacity of over 14,000 next year, compared to just over 9,000 this year, and a better stadium should lead to better crowds. Wakefield have made big steps forward and if they can keep the impetus going then they should be ok, as (hopefully) should the Bulls. Apparently Salford are in negotiation re some money coming into the club, which leaves Castleford.
If they can't resolve the stadium issue, then they should be out, that's all there is to it.

London are losing money hand over fist and it's only a matter of time before they pull the plug, it's not a sustainable business now, never mind if they spent more money. They've just never pulled in the punters, even when they were an established play off side.

I'd also question Saints involvement in that list. Although there are some very wealthy men involved, I don't think they are as committed to wasting all their money as some of the other owners.

Well, lets pretend that a super rich Sheikh ( Mustafa Cash ) is forced to emigrate to the UK along with his billions, takes a liking to rugby league and buys Salford. The RFL has scrapped the cap in the pre-season, Mustafah buys up all the best players available in season one, then strengthens further in season2. Salford go on to win 9 CC's in a row and 7 of the 8 GF's. Are you really saying that as a fan, you would be happy with this situation ?

You wouldn't find me complaining.

Ah, but that's because you are a true RL fan with a generous disposition. What would the Leeds club do with all that empty trophy cupboard space ?

It wouldn't happen though, we have rich owners, enough for SL. At the very least these owners could be capped at NRL levels, if not i think we are shortly going to see a talent drain.
If the prospect of a move to a sunny, sport conscience country with a higher profile and higher standard and double your money offer comes in how many players can truly refuse that. How's it fair if the likes of Moran could only offer 50% of what an Aussie club could for a player yet be considerably richer?

It's a sad fact that some of the best players will migrate to union and the NRL while our cap is lower, and raising it would lessen that, but a) some of those players will probably go regardless (higher publicity, bigger internationals) and b) those players who go for the money would instead migrate to the teams at the top if we raised the cap. There are a few names on that list who would be able to fight it out for the big names, so they wouldn't all go to the same team, but I also see a few on there that I would not call wealthy. We're already in a position where some clubs can spend to the cap and some can't, and some clubs have the cash to buy out a contract, snapping up players without competition from other clubs who could only afford the wages.

What we need to raise the cap fairly is to bring [imore money[/i into the sport - better marketing, better sponsorship and better negotiation of the TV rights. Some of you will have seen me arguing this point before, but it needs to be done - we get a poor deal compared to other sports for our viewing rights even after you adjust them for viewing figures, which is probably down to RL being seen as a minority sport despite the evidence to the contrary. We get more than 100,000 viewers for most games on Sky, over 200,000 for big games and the start of the season (I'll probably post the GF figures when they come out to back this up), but you probably wouldn't know it was televised at all if you weren't already interested in watching.

We need the RFL to take the figures out there and show other sports channels what they're missing, get some competition going and drive the rights prices up. If we can double the TV rights deal (which would still be less per viewer than union) that's over £1m for each SL club, which should be enough to support the clubs making losses and bring the cap up to maybe £2m or £2.5m

I think the only way we could move to a higher salary cap is by restructuring down to around 10 clubs, and that would be politically very difficult. You would have to fight not only the demoted SL clubs but also the Championship clubs with SL aspirations.

FWIW I certainly agree about the talent drain. And it has been made even worse by these changes to the SL youth set up. Half of our kids at 15 / 16 will be thrown out together with quite a lot of our 20+ age group. How does this square with the RFL policy of encouraging new young talent in the UK.

Yes. Salford would spend money, which feeds money throughout the sport to all levels. Salford would sign Tomkins, Wigan would spend that money on Huddersfield's star, Huddersfield would spend that money on Castelford's star, Cas would spend that money on Featherstone's star, Feath would spend that money on Swinton's star, with that money Swinton can afford a new training ground changing rooms ... Plus we'd still be able to attract Aussies and prevent union from picking up all our talent (which if things stay as they are, they will do freely and frequently in five years time). There would be greater interest in Super League from bigger sponsors and possibly other backers putting money into other clubs. Plus other clubs would want to challenge Salford and emulate their success so would seek for further investment themselves.

I think you have to ask yourself why the Aussie game, which makes lots of money from TV rights and sponsorship still bothers to have a salary cap.

The SC should be driven from the bottom up, not the top. It is all well and good stating a percentage of income, but that doesn't naturally flow to high income streams leading to increased affordabilty of expenditure.

Maybe the solution is to find a way around the cap... oh wait a second ...............

We bust the salary cap anyway, the only reason nobody is talking about that is because Leeds scored a couple of tries late on on Saturday.

If we had won you can be sure that the number one talking point in the rugby league community this week would be how can the Double Winning Warrington put together such a dominant side, with all the players they have, they must be over the cap.

I hadn't thought about it like that. I am starting to feel better about Saturday already.

Forget about it. The salary cap, for all its limitations, at least helps stop too many clubs overspending and going to the wall. You can talk to me all day about 'it didn't prevent the Bulls going bust', true, but without it you would have clubs like Wigan ( and probably Wire, though I'd like to think we'd be more sensible, given that Simon Moran never just threw money at the club ) simply buying all the best talent, inflating wages and making life impossible to the lower-income clubs unless they overspend.

It's been at £1.65M for some time now.
My view is that a modest increase is justified - to say £1.8M.

Keeping the cap at £1.65M has encouraged clubs to develop home grown talent which is definately a good thing, but a slight increase wouldn't give cause for concern.

I always understood that the salary cap was to make the competition more competitive by stopping a massive gap opening up between the richer & poorer SL clubs. Talking about marketing, the RFL really does need to buck its ideas up & start acting like a business instead of an organisation with a working men's club like committee...we all know what happened to them.

What i would like to see though is Sky putting the game on freeview outside the normal RL viewing areas to try and bring the game to a wider audience & give others a chance to embrace the game as something they could enjoy. It shouldn't cost Sky anything to do this as it comes as part of a package that is paid for anyway.3 or better still 5 years on freeview could do wonders for RL ,even encouraging new supporters to attend live games throughout the season , maybe even a full to capacity Wembley.

Simon Moran should start lobbying the regulators like the banks do.

He could threaten that if the RFL doesn't raise the salary cap he could simply take his wealth elsewhere and buy an NRL club where he could spend a higher amount on players.

If you regulate wealth creators offshore then nobody gains.

There's a decent argument for bringing the cap down unless most of the clubs can spend up to it. The Bulls spent at the cap, or close to it, for many years and their business model was flawed. Word on the street is that other clubs are about to hit the wall. If the sport can't manage a cap of £1.65 million then it needs to come down. If that means players leave then so be it. It doesn't matter if Sam Tomkins goes to Rugby Union. What matters is that Wigan don't get into financial meltdown - they don't have any family silver to flog any more. Similarly with us - we have a valuable asset in our stadium that has lots of equity in it. The day we start using that equity to pay the bills is the day we're on our way down.

I recall the whining from Brynn Hargreaves when he quit RL. He basically said "I was treated like crap by the Administrator at Bradford" and "There's not stability in RL, I can get more financial security elsewhere". No argument with the first bit. As for the second bit - so what? Good for you. I also recall ex player and all round complete **** Bobbie Goulding trying to make a massive issue of it on Twitter and saying "the sport needs more money". Ditto the normally sensible Mathers and the less sane Stankevitch. How? Where? Who?

It really is dead simple....

- The sport as a whole can generate X income through crowds, TV and other sponsorship.
- Clubs need to be able to manage existing debt, their current expenditure and compete on their share of X.
- If they cannot, if they say, spend 10% more than X, then on a long enough time line, the sport will collapse.

We have two options - increase the money that comes in, or reduce the outgoings. Unless we increase the money that comes in, as a sport we must spend less. That might mean the cap goes down. IF the sport is awash with money then by all means increase the cap. Doubt it will raise standards - just means that average players will drive slightly better cars and retire with £6,000 saved up rather than £2,000.

Sports finance works to the same principles as individual. We all have jobs and the people from St Helens know people who do. If we spent more than our salary every month, then on a long enough time line, we'd lose everthing. Again, if the sport can stomach it then great. But it can't.

Very interesting debate though.