how long has he got on his contract?
Be great to see him signed up for a good few years in league before he goes to the dark side

He signed a 5 year contract this year. So did Joel.

Even a 10 year contract would mean love all, i'm sure Rah Rah have the finances to buy out a contract.

Hope to god he doesn't get booed playing for England and he does stay in League though.

It's a sad state of affairs when I'd actually be made up if somebody said we could have a couple more seasons out of him and then he will leave for the NRL.

I just hope Wigan and the RFL can sit down and come up with something. They were prepared to offer Cunningham extra money and he never even bothered to turn out for GB and they gave Rads extra money and as good as he was Sam could be even better.

Yep, me too.



The whole salary cap needs re-thinking. Clubs should not be afraid to bring talent through instead of worrying about Union or the leagues bigger clubs stealing them.

IMO - any player that comes through your academy should have 50% of his wage exempt from the cap.

Teams should have a minimum of 8 players from their academy in the 25 man squad and 3 in their 17.

A transfer fee should be paid for ALL British players under the age of 24 regardless of whether they are under contract or not (therefore, effectively, the club that brought him through hold his registration until he is 24)

The cap should be split into British and overseas with the majority being on British talent. (say £1m and £600k)

I'd have similar. I'm not sure clubs could afford to have every player they bring through counting only 50% to their cap.

I'd want 2 things put in place around the cap-

1. When a player that has come through your system becomes a full international only 50% of their wage counts on the cap. I would have a limit of 5 players for each club as again having everybody may not be affordable and it would also give the RFL Rhinos.....err Leeds sorry an unfair advantage. This would encourage more clubs to produce top players and strengthen the game at the top end.

2. I'd bring in a minimum salary cap spend. If clubs in the lower half don't want it raised fair enough but if they want a franchise in superleague they must be able to spend up to a certain limit of what's the point. I'd have the minimum at 1.4m and the maximum still at 1.6m. There would have to be the odd dispensation for when players leave at short notice ala Joel Tomkins but if that was brought in it then truely would even the comp out whilst ensuring teams strive to improve.

We need to drag the lower clubs up whereas at the minute it's these clubs that would rather bring the better clubs down.

its not a SC thing, we just dont have the resources to match RU due to the fact they are a national sport with huge tv deals and sponsors such as Heineken Guiness etc pouring millions in, which filters down to the clubs, whereas we have Frontline Bathrooms of Dewsbury

As far as I'm aware, admittedly don't know a lot about RU clubs, aren't a few of them struggling financially?

1) something I have been advocating for years

2) I'd go a little further, it should be a minimum of five in a nineteen man squad. There should be six substitutes, but once you're off you're off, and two of those subs should be 21 years of age or under at the start of that season (maybe 1st January).

Some are bankrolled and losses just paid for but the likes of Northampton Saints who play in a 13,000 capacity stadium turned over £13.175m last year of which £801,314 was profit. [urlhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/14681036.stm[/url

To put that into perspective Wigans turnover was just over £5.2 million and a profit of around £110K

But we have much the better attendance so where did all that Northampton money come from?

Better sponsorship, use of the stadium for conferences etc, bigger prize money, more expensive admission and probably better merchandise sales.

They got to the final of the Heineken Cup which is broadcast over Europe and as a result TV rights to clubs would be high. Also just checking on their site their prices for a normal league match range from £28 for terrace admission and £40 for a seat in the "Tetley Stand".

I'm making assumptions here but our attendance could counteract their higher admission prices, prize money will be less than a million and, re merchandising, do they have a bigger fan base than us? What I'm getting at is that not owning your own stadium seriously curtails your ability to generate revenue. I know for a fact that LSV is fairly busy during the day with business meetings in hired out boxes and none of this income finds its way into the sport. It's a different debate but perhaps the ability to generate income from ownership of your own ground could have been made a SL licensing criteria? Developing this idea, all or part of such income could be added to the SC?

Warrington generate more revenue from merchandising than Wigan do from a smaller fan base (IL at the shareholders meeting)

Newcastle Falcons did, but we are improving rapidly.

The figure were from 2009, I expect 2010 will be better because of the Wembley factor.

£40

Bugger me

me too, I think enough is enough with the booing. not playing for England anyway.

TBH I can understand this. Firstly, they have a lot of relatively new fans. Second, they probably all need the larger replica shirts!

Is that a proposal ?

I think all RFU sides get a wadge of cash off the RFU but wherever it comes from I think those figures blow away the idea we can't compete on salary to keep players.

What I mean by this is even after a successful season, inflated ticket prices and whatever else gave them their income, they "only" made £801K profit which means they could only afford two "Joel Tomkins" @ £400K a piece before their profit was wiped out. So given they only want our best players if we had central contracts for England players to bump their salaries up it would soon become prohibitively expensive to buy their contracts out.

This means we do not need to simply raise the salary cap across the board and sit there feeling sorry for ourselves because there is not enough money in the game to do that. Having central contracts and improving the wages of the best players could well offer some protection. (As well as paying our players what they deserve). It won't work every time and there are probably richer clubs than Northampton Saints around but the game should certainly consider it IMO.

The problem with central contracts for our best players is, who would decide who the best players are? If its the (current) national coach then we would be well and truly fecked!

Well someone managed to work out Rads and Cunningham deserved it. If all else fails we could always ask the RFU

There should be a committee to decide such decisions, I think the candidates for it are obvious.

If that decided central contracts then there will be a lot more cases like the Rangi Chase one imo. The national coach deciding it would cause a lot of aggro because no doubt some wouldnt be happy with his choices and call him biased etc.