Re: Castleford Friday : Tue Sep 19, 2023 7:10 pm  

STEVENM1000 wrote:

Do Cas pay up to the cap limit or afford to do it ?

Can you get done for not spending a minimum of a million like a minimum speed limit?

Re: Castleford Friday : Tue Sep 19, 2023 7:11 pm  

If you see a semi codger trying to console a wailing 6 year old boy because we’re playing crap, feel free to buy me a hot chocolate

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 5:36 am  

I’m not going, can’t make it. Let’s hope we finish with some pride. Desperately needed but I can see Cas sneaking it

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 6:30 am  

The NRL talked about a minimum cap spend a while ago. When David Middleton was with the NRL he visited England and said some teams were spending only 30-40% of the cap while others were maxed out. Leeds were one of the clubs who voted against increasing the cap for a long time, and its one of the reasons why even with marquee allowances SL clubs just cannot compete with the NRL. We have to use marquee for average NRL players now, and most clubs are picking up fringe players. I know the NRL cap has exploded, but SL didn't even keep pace with inflation for years.

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 6:54 am  

It’s an interesting point. The idea of a cap works in theory to even out a system, but it assumes a closed system. In reality we are in competition with our core assets - players - with RU and NRL.

Whether many clubs could afford to increase the cap much I don’t know - aren’t all clubs pretty much posting losses as it is?

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 7:10 am  

Most likely. If we increased the cap we'd see a big few open a more consistent gap on the rest, but just looking at most seasons it seems like some clubs just don't spend as much, and 'mid size' clubs tend to get lucky with players or they are unlucky (lucky and unlucky could equally mean badly managed) and don't tend to stay at the top for long. What Leeds are showing is that with the cap acting as a very hard limit, its really difficult to swap out a lot of players in one go. It will have taken us two off-seasons, and even then the squad for next season probably isn't exactly what Smith (or any other coach) would want.

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 7:12 am  

I'm no expert on the cap but if you have homegrown exemptions, marquee etc doesn't that raise the cap significantly?

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 7:18 am  

They have built loads of exemptions into it and over complicated it to the point where for me they should just raise the cap.

These policies must suit the whole game and not just Leeds of course, but there’s no point encouraging clubs to develop young talent if they just get cherry picked off by richer competitions all the time.

We could have spent hundreds of thousands invested in Newman and as soon as he strings some consistency together an NRL club offers to double his salary and poof.

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 7:28 am  

tad rhino wrote:

I'm no expert on the cap but if you have homegrown exemptions, marquee etc doesn't that raise the cap significantly?

In theory you could spend any amount on your marquee allowance, but that doesn't raise the wage of the average player. I would think Wire and Catalans probably outspend everybody else, but even they wouldn't be spending over 2.5 million.

Re: Castleford Friday : Wed Sep 20, 2023 7:43 am  

Cas deserve to go down if they've broken the cap paying that lot!