St pete wrote:
On the overseas subject, some are saying that laffranchi won't count on the overseas quota as he holds a European passport but will count on the non fed list.
Just think about it now, if laffranchi does count as non fed then what about Catalan who have many French players who will be on a european passport. Maybe the euro passports count as non fed altogether?
Saints have said he's non quota so maybe if you do carry a euro passport then your exempt from it all.
Just a thought.
No, Laffranchi will definitely still count as a non-fed player. The new system was put in place precisely to solve the problem of overseas players getting exemptions from quota thanks to EU/Kolpak passports. Presumably the French players at Cats are simply classed as Fed players by virtue of the fact that they are trained and developed at a SL club.
My understanding of the way the situation has developed (and I'm pretty certain it's right) is as follows:
- The current
quota system (a maximum of 5 foreign players) is the same one that's been in place for ages (although the number has been tweaked from time to time). It's based purely on nationality, and worked fine up until the mid-late 90s when legal challenges to similar systems by athletes from other sports meant that it could no longer stop players with EU or 'Kolpak' passports coming into the British game freely.
- As a result of this, the RFL devised a new
Non-Fed system based on a minimum number of 'home-grown' players rather than on the nationality of players. In theory this should be a direct replacement for the Quota system, and should be very simple to understand. However, as the direct and immediate enforcement of it would have meant a large number of players losing their jobs as a direct result of the new system, the RFL foresaw the probability of legal challenges from players which would potentially have both financially crippled the game and left us back at square one in terms of imports. So they granted exemptions
from the new rules (not from the old quota) to any overseas players already playing in SL or already contracted to a SL club.
- Because of these exemptions, it has been necessary to keep the old quota system in place alongside the new non-fed system. Using just the non-fed system, each club would simply have been able to add another 5 overseas-trained players to their current crop, all of whom were exempt from non-fed status. Because many of these non-fed exempt players still count on the quota, keeping the old system going ensures at least some restraint on imports. It is these non-fed exemptions that have made the whole thing so complicated.
- Fast forward to 2020, by which time, for argument's sake, all of the overseas players that were granted exemptions from the non-fed list have retired. There are now no players left in SL with exemptions from non-fed status. It will now be impossible to have more than 5 overseas trained players in your squad, regardless of what passport they hold. At that point, I suspect, the RFL will ditch the old quota system altogether and we'll have a much clearer and more effective 'non-fed' system.
