Re: Is RL dead? : Sat May 04, 2019 6:52 pm  

The_Enforcer wrote: Who exactly came up with the salary cap idea? Its socialist/communist in nature and just drags the top teams down to the level of the bottom teams. Surely it is illegal if challenged in court? It limits a company investing in better players to increase their revenue via more people coming through the turnstile to see those better players. post wrote: It was brought in to stop us winning everything, in realty we pushed the boundaries and became the most famous rugby team in the world, up there with the all blacks, we were in debt and had to win the challenge cup every year to break even though. I wonder what the Premier League would look like if they were only allowed to spend 1 million a week on wages? All the superstars would go abroad, as would the sponsors and their money, the standards would decrease and the spectacle would follow, because of that the viewing figures would decrease as would the revenue from the TV deals. And here we are. Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap

The_Enforcer wrote: Who exactly came up with the salary cap idea? Its socialist/communist in nature and just drags the top teams down to the level of the bottom teams. Surely it is illegal if challenged in court? It limits a company investing in better players to increase their revenue via more people coming through the turnstile to see those better players. post wrote: It was brought in to stop us winning everything, in realty we pushed the boundaries and became the most famous rugby team in the world, up there with the all blacks, we were in debt and had to win the challenge cup every year to break even though. I wonder what the Premier League would look like if they were only allowed to spend 1 million a week on wages? All the superstars would go abroad, as would the sponsors and their money, the standards would decrease and the spectacle would follow, because of that the viewing figures would decrease as would the revenue from the TV deals. And here we are. Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap

Re: Is RL dead? Absolutely spot on : Sat May 04, 2019 7:23 pm  

post wrote:

The reason for the state the game is in is as follows ;

1 - The Salary Cap - We are shooting ourselves in the foot by having it set so low, when we are competing with the NRL and Rugby Union by having a cap so low, we have become a feeder sport. People will say we haven’t got the money, teams can’t afford it and will go bust but on the flip side you won’t get wealthy investors, or wealthy owners wanting to chuck money at a club because they’re not allowed to. It may be a cap on players wages but the knock on effect is it waters down the quality, therefore putting off investors and sponsors and it’s a vicious circle. None of the major team sports make their money from crowd attendances, it’s from sponsors and TV money and we are dealing ourselves a thick un by hamstringing ourselves from the start with the salary cap. Which leads on to the next issue:

2 - Bad Management - It may sound like paranoia but surely if a rival sport wanted to destroy our sport, then surely put someone in or put someone to ruin it from within, like a Trojan horse or fifth column. Now not for one minute am I saying this happened, I’m saying it would be an option for an unscrupulous rival sport. Anyway, totally separate, Nigel Wood did a very good job of ruining our sport in my opinion. The constant changing of the rules, the league structure and so on just complicated things and people switched off eg The Super 8s, getting rid of GB and the Ashes, changing of the challenge cup.

3 - Sanitisation of the Sport - From removing the shoulder charge to getting rid of the biff to having overzealous refs and players blatantly cheating. From having the players back 10 metres, to scrapping certain rules like stopping tapping and go at the PTB and striking at the PTB the game has been sanitised.

4 - The Switch to Summer Rugby - We lost the Boxing Day Derby for all teams, the New Years Day fixture too. So that’s two bank holidays when everybody’s off work with nothing to do because it’s too cold to have a barbecue, go on holiday or anything else. I have a theory that with our shift to Summer, it may be nicer weather to watch a game in but people have lots more options in the summer and therefore more competition from days out. In winter, on a Sunday afternoon there’s nothing to do, so having a rugby match to go to each week gives you something to do. Say, a fixture in August on a hot Sunday afternoon will be missing some fans who have chosen to go on holiday or have a barbecue instead. Football haven’t switched to Summer, they still get good attendances during the winter months. This also killed off the challenge cup and the proper tours.

5 - Competition from outside - Whether it be other sports like football, boxing or rugby union or newer ones like UFC, or even newly followed sports like Darts we have more competition. Plus nowadays computer games are realistic and can be played 24/7 against people all over the world, you have the likes of box sets and Netflix and social media to contend with.

All in all it is the salary cap which is holding us back, I watched the NRL this morning and when they showed the teams walking out there were genuine superstars like Cronk, Warea-Hargreaves, Mitchell, Cleary, Tamou, Tedesco, Maloney, Campbell Gillard etc not to mention the British contingent of Bateman, Hodgeson, Whitehead and Sutton. When we played London, both team bar Gildart and Williams looked like League 1 teams. You’ve got to speculate to accumulate and it’ll take some rich owner to splash the cash on genuine superstars to make everyone else follow suit and keep up.

Re: Is RL dead? Absolutely spot on : Sat May 04, 2019 7:27 pm  

[quote="Liftman"][/quote]
Absolutely spot on , good post

Re: Is RL dead? : Sat May 04, 2019 8:36 pm  

Sir Kevin Sinfield wrote: Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap The salary cap works well to equalise the teams competing within a certain competition, whether it be sL or ru etc. But rugby competitions ie. Sl, NRL and RU (spit), are competing with each other. So whoever has the highest cap, is the winner. A cap would only work if it was upheld by all competing codes/genres of the overall sport.

Sir Kevin Sinfield wrote: Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap The salary cap works well to equalise the teams competing within a certain competition, whether it be sL or ru etc. But rugby competitions ie. Sl, NRL and RU (spit), are competing with each other. So whoever has the highest cap, is the winner. A cap would only work if it was upheld by all competing codes/genres of the overall sport.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 12:04 am  

Sir Kevin Sinfield wrote: Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap You're right, it's probably not going to die. But as long as the new regime - which your chairman was near enough the only CEO to oppose - takes over, it'll continue on its route to semi-professional mediocrity.

Sir Kevin Sinfield wrote: Salary cap’s are used throughout most sports other than football. Rugby League isn’t on its death bed, it has simply become less popular in Wigan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap You're right, it's probably not going to die. But as long as the new regime - which your chairman was near enough the only CEO to oppose - takes over, it'll continue on its route to semi-professional mediocrity.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 12:49 am  

I do agree that the season starts too early.
Expand to 14 teams and drop the 6 loop fixtures and start the season 2 weeks later.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 9:33 am  

rubber duckie wrote:

I do agree that the season starts too early.
Expand to 14 teams and drop the 6 loop fixtures and start the season 2 weeks later.

I agree with less fixtures and later start, but the sticking point is going to be Sky getting their money's worth to enable this to happen.

The salary cap came into our game due to Maurice Lindsay bankrupting Wigan and other clubs trying to keep up with them. The RFL and the clubs then took the Sky shilling to keep going with a full time squad.

The salary cap can only be raised if there's more money in the game, and there's only one way for this to happen - through TV. However, I'm not confident that we'll get an increased TV deal.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 9:52 am  

MorePlaymakersNeeded wrote:

I agree with less fixtures and later start, but the sticking point is going to be Sky getting their money's worth to enable this to happen.

The salary cap came into our game due to Maurice Lindsay bankrupting Wigan and other clubs trying to keep up with them. The RFL and the clubs then took the Sky shilling to keep going with a full time squad.

The salary cap can only be raised if there's more money in the game, and there's only one way for this to happen - through TV. However, I'm not confident that we'll get an increased TV deal.

1 - The salary cap can only be raised if there’s more money in the game.

2 - The only way to get more money into the game is via sponsors, TV deals and rich owners.

Sponsors won’t sponsor a second rate competition, they want their brand associated with top level sports, hence why we are sponsored by betting firms, mushy peas, cider and cheap spartan cars.

TV money won’t be raised or we won’t get a much better deal because TV companies aren’t falling over themselves throwing money for our rights because the standard isn’t good enough, the standard is t good enough because we don’t have the players, the players won’t come because we don’t have the money etc etc and we enter into a vicious circle.

Rich owners won’t come into our game and spend money because they aren’t allowed to, look how Marwan Koukash was treated, he’s a well respected owner in the horse racing industry but he was treated like some backwards naughty upstart who dared to dream. If that doesn’t put money men off coming to our game I don’t know what will.

We are in a vicious cycle, the only way to break that cycle is either by Sky throwing a load of money at the game to improve it, so we can increase the cap and sign the best players from NRL and Union or

We scrap the cap.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 11:36 am  

post wrote:

1 - The salary cap can only be raised if there’s more money in the game.

2 - The only way to get more money into the game is via sponsors, TV deals and rich owners.

Sponsors won’t sponsor a second rate competition, they want their brand associated with top level sports, hence why we are sponsored by betting firms, mushy peas, cider and cheap spartan cars.

TV money won’t be raised or we won’t get a much better deal because TV companies aren’t falling over themselves throwing money for our rights because the standard isn’t good enough, the standard is t good enough because we don’t have the players, the players won’t come because we don’t have the money etc etc and we enter into a vicious circle.

Rich owners won’t come into our game and spend money because they aren’t allowed to, look how Marwan Koukash was treated, he’s a well respected owner in the horse racing industry but he was treated like some backwards naughty upstart who dared to dream. If that doesn’t put money men off coming to our game I don’t know what will.

We are in a vicious cycle, the only way to break that cycle is either by Sky throwing a load of money at the game to improve it, so we can increase the cap and sign the best players from NRL and Union or

We scrap the cap.

That would be fine if we had a number of individuals with the cash (owners or otherwise) to spend on player recruitment.

I don't think that there are any, the other option is by funding through debt. That's just not sustainable, and led to the salary cap in the first place.

Your correct with the "vicious circle" but there's no easy answer to breaking it.

Re: Is RL dead? : Sun May 05, 2019 1:06 pm  

Cruncher wrote:

The days of muddy pitches and snow along the touchlines are over. You are quite correct. But other points that were made stand.

The NRL, for example, doesn't labour under the stringent salary cap restrictions that we do, and is therefore able to thrive.

My opposition to the cap has fluctuated over the years, moving from outright opposition to tacit support and back to opposition again. But we're now in a crisis, I feel ... dying a very slow but quite evident death.

Something has to change very, very soon. We have to make the British game appealing to star names again, which in its turn may reignite some interest among fans.

i agree with about the SC. Removing (even substantially raising) it is no panacea, as others have said, it doesn't solve the issue of lack of money in the sport, but things have reached the stage where action on it needs to taken. Taking third-party deals off the cap would be a simple and pretty painless reform; there's no reason that couldn't be done right away.

What I don't agree with is the complaints about "sanitisation of the sport". If the sport is so sanitised, how come RL suffers more injuries than any other sport? The game is plenty tough enough.

And old-skool fans may want to "bring back the biff", but

a) It's just not going to happen, is it? Everyone knows this. And

b) TV networks and sponsors don't want to see it either, which is why is has largely disappeared from other sports like RU.