Are you serious that payments in the form of Pensions, EBT's and the whole myriad of other arrangements don't count on the salary cap - if so this makes the whole system pointless. Simply pay every player minimum wage and pay the balance into a proper EBT (not one set up for tax avoidance) pay the money straight out to the player (paying the proper tax on the way) and you will never get near the salary cap.
The point I was making earlier is that most of the £1million to the revenue is essentially extra payments on behalf of the players. It never crossed my mind that the payment in to the EBT didn't count on the cap if this is the case we may as well scrap the salary cap totally.

As regards the retrospective closing of loopholes I don't think this is the case. The clubs will have been aware from day 1 that the use of EBT's in this way is a high risk tax avoidance strategy. I think these schemes are notifiable to the Revenue under their "dotas" rules which should automatically put anyone using them on notice at the outset, what has happened is that the clubs (and to be fair a good number of other business's) have taken a risk which looks like its going to come back and bite them.

standee has made a good point here though. football with all the money sloshing around can afford to employ the best lawyers to fight or at least delay these issues for years. RL cannot afford such luxuries, except perhaps in the leeds test case. we should all hope that leeds win this one

HMRC are skint, they need to set a precedent of case law (Leeds?) So they can go after the bigger fish. They'll get them.
We should support HMRC in their actions as tax avoidance costs the treasury billions every year. In these austere times, I don't think we can afford not to.

As they have got big fish in the past, only to see the European Court eventually overturn the verdict and then have to repay the money.

The Leeds case is nothing to do with setting a precedent by HMRC. It was an action by Leeds to try and demonstrate that RL players actually HAVE an image to which a value can vbe attached. The underlying battle over whether there should be an upper limit on the proportion of a player's total package that can consist of club-paid image rights (15%) was lost long ago.

HMRC WILL get soccer in the end. It is effectively part of the "non-dom" issue. My guess is that we will see legislation in a future Finance Bill to formally address the issue of image rights in sport, and embed the arrangements reached with other sports in statute.

In my view, HMRC are correct in pursuing this issue. It is desperately unfortunate that, in tackling RL, they were dealing with a sport and a game that is skint and is kept alive at the top level by a handful of sugar daddies.

so in the case of ryan mcgoldrick does he have to pay some money back