Do you think its about time the salary cap was increased as the NRL salary Cap has increased from next season.



We cant wait until players like Roby, Briscoe and Tomkins are lost to the NRL because they can get double there salary across there.

No, not enough of the clubs can support it.



And it's no use saying that some can because of their owners. Clubs shouldn't be able to deliberately lose money as it is not sustainable.



How many SL clubs make a profit? Hull, Leeds and Warrington possibly?



There isn't any room for central contracts either as the RFL don't have sufficient revenue to support it.

Better lost to the NRL than to rara. The NRL cap increase is a good thing IMO. We will have little choice but to develop young players which can only improve the national squad.

If Hull, Leeds and Warrington can then why should the rest of the league hold these teams back.



If the Super League is going to get stronger clubs like Warrington have to take the lead honestly not loan players out half way during a season to get under the cap.



A business has to be able to stand on its own two feet and if they cant then get out of the Super League.



Its called Super League for a reason

Because unless you have a level playing field, the only clubs that will be able to win are those 3. This increases the gaps between the haves and have nots and the league lowers in quality. It would be like the Scottish league with Rangers and Celtic.

Manchester United is one of, if not the biggest sporting brands in the world and they are a loss leader, piling on huge amounts of debt. Its very rare for sporting clubs to make a profit, they're not expected to do it.

Cap (as it stands) shuts money out of the game. If Roman Abramovich suddenly found a love for a League club, there's essentially nothing he could do about it. Nobody just shoves money into a sport, only into a club, for the prestige (they hope) of making it successful.



Cap as a means to equalize competition I've never agreed with (punishes success). Why not just make the best players wear Mr. Blobby suits? ( think Wigan tried this with O'Carroll )



However...I'd add 4 conditions should this imaginary collection of Russian billionaires want a piece of a League club:



1) Money has to be a bone-fide investment so the money is genuinely the club's to spend and the club isn't put at any risk due to debt.



2) Clubs are banned from spending more than is economically sensible - e.g. some % of turnover, BUT PLUS money put in, debt-free, by any investor.



3) There are still hard limits on size of squad, and number of players paid more than £x. This prevents a mega-rich club, buying up too many world-class players just to keep a bench warm, and to keep them away from other clubs, which would just rob fans of seeing the best people on the park each week ( It also goes someway to stop the rich team becoming ultra dominant - to take this to an extreme example: the 'best' 17 in the world aren't guaranteed to smash the second best 17 - in fact it would be pretty hard to agree which was which anyway )



4) Salary costs above a hard-limit £Y are 'taxed' by the RFL at 20%, with this money put into grass-roots game. ( I think Basketball in the US does or did this, but I could be wrong ). So by making Hull, say - nearest to Russia

mega-rich, Mr Abramovich is automatically forced to put good £ into grassroots League.



5) Audited by someone who can count. (spot the deliberate rubbish 'counting' joke).

Or is Harlequins nearest to Russia?

Those teams don't make [ubig[/u profits, iirc. With the possible exception of Warrington, I'm not sure even they'd welcome a [ibig[/i increase. It could go up from £1.65m to £1.7m, but the consequences - positive and negative - would be predictably minimal.

There just isn't the money out there to make loosening the restrictions dramatically worthwhile or meaningful.



Binning of all but the richest clubs will leave you with a very small League and very repetitive fixture list.

Actually, rich people prefer the salary cap, and here's an example:



Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner didn't buy Liverpool because of the Premier League not having a cap, and a small salary cap of 1.65m or whatever it is in Super League would actually encourage not put off any potential investor, the problem is the majority of the planet has never heard of the sport.

Nonsense - he could use his dubiously acquired wealth to buy a club and invest in a stadium and infrastructure. He just couldn't massively distort the sporting competition and effectively guarantee on-field success - which is what sucks so much drama out of the processional Premier League.

I'd be suprised if Warrington made a profit without owner investment. Id imagine Leeds, Hull & Wigan are the three clubs to make a profit, IIRC Cas did pretty well the last time accounts were released?

But the rest were making a loss fairly easily.



What's the point of raising the cap simply to make us all feel a bit better. The cap is finally starting to bite and level out the competition, now is not the time to raise it until at least 12 or 13 clubs out of 14 can regularly spend the full cap.

Also to compete with Union or the NRL we would have to probably double the cap, which no-one can afford and would merely lead to the kind of reckless spending that the cap was brought in to try and avoid.