COMMENT: Bombshell David Fifita signing is final straw for cooked NRL
David Fifita’s league-shaking signing with the Sydney Roosters is officially the final straw for the NRL as a hated trend continues.
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COMMENT
It won’t be lawyers or doctors or a wet lettuce slap across Tom Trbojevic’s chops that eventually kills rugby league.
Why?
Because you can’t kill something that’s already dead.
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Book the priest and dig a grave deep enough for 116 years of wasted history, because rugby league has officially drawn its last breath.
With David Fifita accepting a $200,000 annual pay cut to join the cashed-up Roosters, the game has been crushed to death under the weight of select elites and their imperious net worth.
Fifita’s decision to abandon the poorly Titans has confirmed rugby league is now nothing more than a capitalist playground for a handful of Gordon Geckos.
Profiting on a skewed economy, bottomless third party clout and shifty player agents, elite clubs have bastardised the player market beyond repair with their financial doping.
Everywhere you look, the rich are stockpiling Origin players purely in case of a rainy day by pecking the destitute to death like blinged-up bin chickens.
And it’s sadly left the NRL fatally riddled with impoverished clubs that will never attract another quality player again.
Unless these pleb sides are willing to concede a raft of dangerous contract clauses and 130% of their annual turnover, they are destined to live forever off hand-me-downs and various dalliances with Kyle Flanagan.
Fifita’s decision to abandon money in favour of an enormous queue of gun backrowers proves the NRL’s days of a functional salary cap are finished, and Gorden Tallis agrees.
“This is what I don’t get, you have got these struggling clubs down below who are trying to compete in this premiership,” the Queenslander mourned.
“He is on a three-year deal for $3 million and he goes to a club for less. That’s the part I don’t get.”
Sure, there’s nothing novel about the Roosters swooping at the midnight hour for something shiny.
But this was more than an impulse purchase, it was the canary in the mineshaft.
Players like Fifita and Jack Wighton won’t be the last guys taking unders to “chase the dream”, meaning the NRL is heading towards becoming a competition of soulless super-teams feasting on plankton.
Like the English Premier League, the NBA and federal politics, only a select few will ever compete for the title, with the remaining participants serving purely as numbers to sustain the TV deal.
Imagine one team hoovering all the talent every year and predictably crushing its opposition?
It’s woeful enough with Manchester City and the Maroons, and it will satiate nobody in the NRL except bookies and corporates.
Rugby league is meant to be the egalitarian game, a commercial utopia where paupers rub shoulders with princes and every dollar is equal unless it’s the NZD.
But the lure of “culture” has become the most volatile market manipulator since “compassionate grounds”.
Sure, powerhouse clubs can offer so much more than more money, and who among us wouldn’t waive a few hundred grand for the privilege of post-career financial advice and Justin Holbrook.
And who wouldn’t be tempted to accept less to fulfil their “dream”, especially if their “dream” was a round of golf with a club’s tactically-distanced business contact that finishes on the 19th hole with a club sandwich and the keys to a new condo.
But what post-career guarantees can competing clubs offer?
Barbecues and CTE, and that’s it.
No wonder desperate clubs are throwing the farm at anything with a pulse and conceding generous clauses that allow the legal power to bend the Titans over a barrel.
Make no mistake, the race for Fifita’s signature is exactly how all big-fish negotiations will now be conducted:
Tokenly.
Sure, Penrith thought they had a puncher’s chance - but only before they realised the Roosters had entered the fray - while the Dragons were at the table the whole time like the microphone at a Milli Vanilli concert.
It means the strong are only getting stronger, and to be honest, the only reason Dane Gagai didn’t also sign with the Roosters was because there was no more room that night on Nick Politis’ catamaran.
So everyone enjoy the last cadaveric spasms of “The Greatest Game of All” because it’s been choked by the wealthy’s need for three rep back rowers in their NSW Cup team.
Your treasured game built on tradies and raffles is now run by aristocratic corporates laughing from their ivory towers, and they’re distracting us with strips of surplus wagyu while tapping-up your best junior talent.
- Dane Eldridge is a warped cynic yearning for the glory days of rugby league, a time when the sponges were magic and the Mondays were mad. He’s never strapped on a boot in his life, and as such, should be taken with a grain of salt.
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