The new NRL salary cap has been announced at $980m (about £580m) and equates to a 52% rise in take home pay for players. The minimum earnings will be $100,000 which is over £50k and that figure rises to $120,000 by 2022.

The simple fact is we can never compete with that and any decent young player with any ambition will rightfully fancy giving it a crack. The cream of the SL crop will continue to be syphoned off to the NRL and our competition will just get worse.

Wonder what Nigel Wood will do? Perhaps we could put players pictures on Eddie Stobart wagons for free again?

It makes me wonder how the NRL can find the funding to pay this level of wages when the SL can't. What are they doing to attract that sort of cash into their competition that we are failing to do?

Their TV deal is over £200m a year, ours is about £36m a year...

It's that simple. For us, it's a vicious circle.

Yeah I get that, but how did the NRL get that deal? What have they done over the last 10 or more years to get themselves into the position where they can command that sort of money? And more importantly what can the SL do to close that financial gap? Does anyone in the RFL have a plan to get us onto a stronger and therefore more competative financial footing or are they content to carry on managing a decline of the greatest sport?

They don’t have the Premier league over there which is the biggest syphon over here, then we Have RU to compete with,and the flat cap brigade at the RFL all out on big dinners leaves nothing left for our sport, Big Nige needs to go and take that puppet Barwick with him.

They have the AFL and RU to compete with though.

The AFL TV deal and subsequently salaries are still higher than the NRL.

Premier League and Championship football, Rugby Union, Formula One, Cricket (inc T20) and now even UFC & Boxing are sports that Sky, BT, ITV, Channel 4/5 will all pay way more for than Rugby League...only really RU, Aussie Rules and maybe F1, Cricket to compete with over in Aus. RL is a much bigger sport for the south, north and east of Australia.

What it seems was our last TV deal was rather rushed, either that or BT were not remotely interested in competing with Sky for Rugby League.

this...and they don't have Hemmings and the rest of the sky sports crew which is frankly priceless.

Good for the game, but very bad news for Super League. I can envisage good players preferring to be reserves in the NRL rather than first choice in SL.

The quality of their reserves is amazing as well, watched a few games this year and it’s probably on par with SL.

yeah they have all that in Aus aswell, aswell as a smaller population, its just marketed far, far better over there and was never neglected and let to sink into the small sport.

I think the biggest issue we are going to have is player drain. They will have a minimum wage of £70k and an average wage of £200k. Just looking at us they could probably double the wage of the likes of Burgess, Gelling, Manfredi, Bateman,& Farrell and still pay them less than their average wage.

On last season's form, they'd be lucky.

With the possible exceptions of Manfredi (if he ever plays again) and Bateman (though he's done little in the WC so far), none of those players are NRL standard.

That said ... if they play to the best of their ability, which as Wigan fans we are desperate to see, then it's a different matter.

It's a real Catch-22.

If players want to go let them. It’ll make SL even worse quality than it is now and then finally the RFL might do something about it.

Like what though?
The game over here can't afford to play those sort of salaries, if we try then the game will be bankrupt in less than a decade.
Somehow we need more investment, the next t.v deal needs to be a very good one and the men at the top should be starting to look at and negotiating sooner rather than later otherwise Sky will just walk in with a take it or leave it offer, and we know what happens then.

amazing how we became World club champs seeing as they are so much better man for man that the British game......

We are a salary capped sport and we all understand why. The issue is the difference in the size of the cap. If both competitions had an equal cap then we’d at least be able to compete for the best players. As it stands, the slight increases in our cap mean very little. We still have the same pool of average standard players to choose from but they’d be paid a bit more. Unless we can compete for top quality players, the standard of our game has little chance of improvement.

to be fair the like of Whitehead and Hodgson werent great in SL but are killing it in the NRL

That's true, but why is that?

Arguably, better coaching in the NRL, and certainly, being surrounded by better players. Which brings us back to the same problem...

They didn't sell out to Rupert Murdoch..

Would they be lucky? My point was the NRL teams can now sign that level of player as a squad player, doubling their wage which would still put them on less than the average player in the NRL.

agree

SL needs a bigger TV deal from SKY / BT, and more of them.

The only salvation I see for the SL competition is TV money coming in from North America and France.

The 2022 TV deal(s) will be critical to the future of the competition.

The key to the next deal is to take exclusivity away from Sky and have some matches on terrestrial TV. Cricket as a sport is slowly killing itself in this country because it went with Sky for the last ten years or so. Very few kids nowadays can identify more than a few of the England team in cricket or rugby league. Twenty five years ago everyone knew Ellery Hanley, Andy Gregory, Shaun Edwards et al.

It must be about raising the profile of the game not just taking the highest bid.

That's why the World Cup is so important. If we could get to the final and it is shown on BBC live it will do so much for our game.