Paul Kent: Salary cap saga the NRL’s game of unknowns
THE NRL’s salary cap saga is a drama that leaves Game of Thrones for dead, writes PAUL KENT.
NRL
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SOMETIMES, the NRL makes it so easy you sit down to write and the words just jump off the keyboard.
This all seems like it began early this week when I go on TV and, with my big mouth, I say up to 11 clubs are over the salary cap for next year and there might be chaos to come. At this, the NRL media department, when it is not bumping into each other, sends out a tweet denying such information.
Privately, it says only two clubs are over.
How it can be so sure given the NRL, its own employer, has not agreed on any cap figure and why it does it with a sneaky tweet, instead of picking up the phone like grown-ups do, shows you that nothing is too small to occupy its mind.
I say it because I talk to the clubs, who talk to each other. Every club you speak to talks of a potential fire sale at season’s end — just not at their club, they say — while the NRL whistles away.
The whole fight began, in truth, in a private conversation between NRL boss Todd Greenberg and chairman John Grant near the end of last year.
In the days preceding, Grant had calmed the clubs down with a simple promise. It did not matter what the new salary cap would be, he told them, the clubs would be funded 30 per cent above the cap. The figures thrown around were a $10 million salary cap to come from $13 million in funding.
At this, the clubs sat mute and rubbed their bellies. Nobody says no to free money.
Yet some time not long after that Greenberg, with a light sweat on his brow, found Grant and asked what in heaven’s name he was thinking. His promise had united the clubs and the players in their pay dispute with the NRL.
The NRL would haemorrhage money.
Grant, an honest man with not a pinch of street cunning in him, realised what he had done.
The Memorandum of Understanding was left to expire and just a small civil war broke out in the game before a new deal was patched together months later.
The NRL’s revised offer was $13 million in funding with the salary cap to be worked out within that. The clubs and players were again at loggerheads.
Then the NRL began to play what some clubs believe was dirty pool. The NRL formed a committee to represent clubs in Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations.
The committee was Raelene Castle (Canterbury), Don Furner (Canberra), Paul White (Brisbane) and Jim Doyle (Warriors).
Almost immediately, they could not get on. Castle, Furner and White preferred the salary cap to keep rising, their clubs able to afford it, while Doyle from the privately-owned Warriors argued the cap should come down.
In the background lurked the NRL, still lumbered with Newcastle and Gold Coast to sell and the Dragons still to pay back an NRL loan.
It sympathised with the privately-owned clubs wondering about its own bottom line.
So debate was vigorous.
Then, you would not believe it, the committee was suddenly expanded to include Graham Annesley, chief executive of the NRL-owned Titans and Dave Donaghy, chief executive of privately-owned Melbourne.
They sided with Doyle in the fight and at this point there is nothing left to do but ask how can you not love this game?
Game of Thrones offers nothing by comparison.
Doyle and Annesley soon became very vocal about where the cap should land and their motivation became clear to the others.
For the first time in the history of rugby league, the power base being exercised by clubs was driving spending down, to the lowest common denominator, and not rise. Somewhere, Nick Politis was in a cold sweat.
As all this was going on, no club knew what it could spend on the salary cap but all found they were forced into a position to spend anyway as the player market waits for no one.
It was a dangerous game of blind poker. No salary cap figure has been decided even though the NRL privately speaks of a $9.5 million cap.
In what world that exists nobody knows.
The base figure the NRL has offered for the cap is $8.4 million cash. Into this, the NRL has thrown a $100,000 car allowance, a $300,000 veteran player allowance and then tried to include a $200,000 medical insurance allowance and a $150,000 welfare officer allowance, costs previously not included among the players.
After protest from the Rugby League Players Association, the last two items were backed out but a $400,000 integrity bonus was added. In all, $9.2 million.
That $400,000 integrity bonus has all the appeal of a wart, though, and the RLPA and clubs won’t touch it. They argue it will have the opposite effect the NRL intends.
And yet it causes considerable concern among the clubs. If the NRL digs in and this $400,000 bonus it doesn’t want disappears, then many clubs will already be over.
Up to 11 of them.
Meanwhile, the clubs that tried to behave proactively and get their 2018 salary cap in shape early have been stung by a shrinking cap and the twin problems of how to move them to clubs who can’t afford them while also accommodating players who now, by definition of working towards a higher cap, are on about 10 per cent more than they should be on.
It is a legitimate problem. Stick that on Twitter.
Originally published as Paul Kent: Salary cap saga the NRL’s game of unknowns
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