I don't blame the players for one minute. If a player is offered a 3x (or more) increase in salary then they are going to take it. The thing that annoys me is that Andy Clarke has been promoting league players to union for years. Andy was the reason that Chris Ashton moved to union.

Phil Clarke was a joint shareholder of the company that generated fees from Andy's activities (he is his brother afterall!!). Phil then appears on sky stating that the RFL have to do everything in their power to protect the sport and the talent that is developed by the clubs. B*****s Phil, your brother has been generating fees from doing the very thing that you are stating the RFL need to protect against.

At the end of the day money talks and the Clarke brothers (particularly Phil) should do the honourable thing and f**k right off.

Now that the firm has been acquired by James Grant my real concern is that the better UK based players will trot along to the kick and clap brigade.

The question is now how the RFL will respond.......

I won't hold my breath.

Rant over

1 rumor in the 70's was that the players for Wales got paid by adidas to wear their boots in games. During my time of playing union we were hearing stories of players getting paid backhanders to play. No such thing as ametur in union tbh. Difference was when it became a fully professional run game the organisation's became professional as well. RFL is amaeturish run by people in charge.

I'm not sure that Joel Tomkins will make it in rugby union. I don't think he is a back as he wasn'ty a great centre at Wigan. He certainly isn't a front row forward and the top class backrow forwards in RU are taller than Joel.
I think he will struggle at this alien game and he will return to rugby league in a couple of years as Smith of Leeds did. Not sure if Eastmond will make it either.
Our only hope is that all rugby league signing fail so the Union hierarchy will think twice before signing anyone else. I do think Sam would be outstanding on the dark side.

How do you suggest that the RFL should respond, given all relevant legislation on restraint of trade etc?

It is not up to the RFL to respond to any players being tempted away, that is totally within the remit of individual clubs. There have been suggestions of raising the cap - that would be fine if the majority of clubs were spending close to the cap. It would be even better if the clubs were providing enough income to cover paying their players AND investing in the future, without the need of any sugar-daddy benefactors.

Just remember, you haven't got a ground you can flog to Tesco anymore.

You don't know much about union do you? He'd easily be tall enough to be a back row forward, although I wouldn't expect him to plan on being a flanker or no8. He's a typical modern day union centre and has all the attributes to do so. His only negative point is that at centre his defensive footwork and positioning could occasionally be found out in league but this won't be exloited as much in union as far as I'm concerned.

I don't want him to go by any means, but I do think he's going to do quite well. I think Sam on the other hand, despite being the better league player, would struggle to adapt to union as there isn't any particular position that stands out in regards to his size and main qualities.

No I don't know much about union having been a pupil at John Rigby which only played union, then played union until I was 29 and had to quit because of injury. Joel is not a high calibre centre in either code. He will go okay but won't be worth £400k per year to Saracens.

There are plenty of things the RFL could do as opposed to the clubs. They could change the rules so players earnings from outside their club wages did not count on the cap. So players being sponsored, any advertising earnings they could get and now image rights are not a tax dodge the RFL could remove that from the salary cap calculation and let players earn money from that and so on. Basically the cap would be based on what the club paid the players not what the players earned so that would address your concern of clubs not being able to afford higher wages because they would not be paying them any more then they are now.

Former England captain Bill Beaumont got banned for life from the sport by the IRB because he wrote an autobiography including (obviously) his RU exploits and dared to earn money from the sales. (The ban was rescinded after they went pro in 1995 and he is now on the IRB himself). The idea RU was basically a pro sport in all but name pre-1995 is nuts.

Dave, Dave, Dave you really must think these things through. How would such a proposal help Wakefield et al?

It probably would help them anyway if you think about it. If a player was earning money from activities such as selling his image rights or whatever from outside his club salary he would bring that income with him to Wakey. They would get a more valuable player without having to pay him a higher salary.

It's not a new idea either. This is what Bradford got done on the salary cap for a few years back. Harris was being sponsored by a company and they had an advert either in the program or round the ground. I don't think the advertising mentioned Harris at all but the fact they advertised with Bradford was enough for them to be judged to have a link to the club and so any money paid by them to Harris had to count on the cap as income earned and that is why they went over the cap.

Reforming these rules has got to be the easiest and cheapest way for the game to let its players earn more money which it definitely needs to do and provided it is clear clubs can't sponsor players etc then it won't cost them a penny more in wages than they pay out now.

It is also then allowing the rich clubs to pull even further away from the less well off. Or is that what you are looking for, a four-team super-duper league?

You assert that it will cost the clubs nothing, who are you trying to kid? Who would sponsor a player and then expect nothing from his employer in return?

It is also reducing what clarity we now enjoy and making it even more difficult to find those clubs that are using underhand methods to remunerate players

time for the smaller clubs in the league to get their fingers out or go to the championship where their finances/ambitions would be more suitabale

I'd expect that the reason that isn't allowed is that it's a way to get round the cap. If DW still owned Wigan, what would stop him paying Trent Barrett, Andy Farrell, Andrew Johns, Billy Slater, Adrian Morley...etc.... £150K each on the salary cap and then DW Gym sponsoring each one of them for another £150K?

well there would be a link between the club and the sponsor so that wouldnt be acceptable but if say, Asda decided to sponsor Sam Tomkins and pay him £200k/year for promotional work then i dont see the problem

So you don't think anyone would be interested in sponsoring Chase at Cas for example? This idea would make it easier for smaller clubs to hold onto their players without having to break their own bank. The rich clubs would not have a higher salary cap than the less well off.



Well for a start it is not just sponsorship that I said should not count against the cap but things like product endorsments as well. So if for example England players got a deal with a boot manufacturer why would that cost the clubs anything? Going back to your question on sponsorship I really do not know what you mean by it being a cost to clubs if a player is sponsored. RU clubs do this as a matter of course and they would not be doing it if it was a net cost to them.



What? It is dead simple if you read the rules there is a list of things that count towards a players salary cap value and all I am suggesting is some of them are removed from that list and put in anther one that is titled "Allowable earnings" or whatever you want to call it. There is nothing unclear about that and if there are other methods being employed at the moment to get around the cap doing as I suggest won't make a jot difference to that one way or the other.

You previous objection was that raising the cap wasn't affordable and I have given you a suggestion to raise players wages that doesn't require that to happen. You have come up with two spurious arguments (sponsorship is not free and my idea lacks clarity) which I reckon you really had to struggle to think of

but I suspect your first objection is where it is all at for you. The magic level playing field and I don't even think that is as black and white as you suggest.

I think the time has past where we can limit what top players earn while we wait for the likes of Wakefield to get their act together so they are on a par financially with the like of Wigan, Leeds, Saints, Wire and Hull (with their new owner). Some clubs have been given literally decades to improve and fail to do so year on year even with the salary cap.

The alternative is to let inflation inflate away the wages of our players to the extent the sport will have to revert to being a semi-pro sport. It is either that or let them earn more money where they can.

As long as that's the deal then there shouldn't be a problem.

Quite apart from: why the hell would anyone want to sponsor a RL player?

Because I bet the general public in Wigan could name more Wigan rugby players than Athletic players.

So how much do you think that's worth? Any business would want to see a tangible return on its investment, I think you're grossly overestimating the value of the RL £, whether in Wigan or anywhere else in the country. Asda has previously been mentioned, the benefits they could derive from individual player sponsorship would be so miniscule (if any existed at all), to be unaccountable. That would be reflected in the money offered, it would make no discernible difference to a player's remuneration.

The suggestion of individual player sponsorship would be viewed as what it is, a poor attempt to circumvent the salary cap. The only businesses interested in such a scheme would be non-publicly quoted, run by individuals on some sort of vanity trip.

I remember ads in RL magazines by mizunu with Inga and Botica featuring on them. Tomkins, Sinfield, Roby, Briscoe... All marketable lads. Gillette, Carneige(sp), Kellogs, Iron-Bru... All big names that have been involved in RL. These lads start endorsing those products locally and things grow from there for the next generation of Tomkins, Sinfields, Robys, Briscoes, etc.

Alternatively we could just leave things as they are.

Frontline Bathrooms Charity Calender featuring nekkid SL stars in't bath/showers for the ladies?

Sell um in shed loads,

Hang on a minute. Where is the official statement that JT has actually switched?

So why do the Tote (based in Wigan), Applicado-fs and Heinz bother sponsoring Wigan? Why does any company associate itself with ant RL club? ISC are obviously off their heads sponsoring Leeds as according to you it is a complete waste of time.

And local sponsorship by national names is not new. Companies know if they are associated with the towns successful sporting side thy benefit. Why else would they be doing it? There is absolutely no reason why individual player sponsorship could not provide a boost to player earnings. At the moment there is no incentive to even try to do this but any agent worth his salt would be off like a shot marketing his players if players were allowed to earn money in this way.



Rubbish. Removing player sponsorship from a players salary cap value calculation is a simple way to let players earn more money without increasing in the salary cap. For some reason you don't like the idea of players earning more money and are jumping through hoops to try and find objections which is very strange IMO.