Jack Burton wrote:
He'd have a point if the majority of clubs could afford to spend the full cap, let alone more.
Karen wrote:
Pat Bateman wrote:
Since the NRL’s inception in 1998, 12 different teams have won the GF. There is an argument for both sides of shall we shall we not increase the cap.
I think the main thing here is that the NRL clubs are all pretty equally wealthy whereas only a handful of SL club can even think about spending to the cap, and there's no prizes for guessing which ones they are.
The NRL clubs do have a disparity of wealth
However
the point is there is no incentive for each and every club to maximise their own business and push themselves to increase their revenues, develop their own Youth Structures etc. because the TV money covers the Salary Cap more or less
If the Salary cap was 5m for example it could incentivize clubs to look for wealthier investors, increase the commercial/marketing capabilities to turn out top clubs into 21st century Sporting Businesses (Leeds have been the best in this area IMO).
As it stands we look small time, we are small time and we become almost irrelevant
I think the Salary cap has a place in the game, but the bar should be way higher (Double IMO for a start) than it is now.
If a gun was held to my head and the question was Salary cap or not at this particular moment I would say No salary cap - Because the damage it's done over 20 years through allowing it to stagnate and how far we've fallen behind other comparable sports/competitions is bordering on Neglect.
But there needs to be an escape route to what we need to be at comparable to NRL/RU etc.
Currently we are falling further and further behind, our escape route needs to increase the cap % wise to a greater level year on year just to keep pace with them (If we raise it 10% then NRL/RU would only need to raise there's 3% to match that).
So somewhere we need to go in one swoop to say 3million with a 5/10 yr plan to raise 10% year on year to catch up.
Without having the media exposure, the access to attract top players, retain top players were just going backwards