Why a potential NRL player pay cut is a problem of their own making

A catchcry of the last round of CBA negotiations was for the players to become partners with the NRL - well boys, this is what a partnership looks like, writes ROBERT CRADDOCK.

Melbourne's Cameron Smith during the Manly Sea Eagles v Melbourne Storm NRL match at Lottoland, Brookvale. Picture: Brett Costello

• How COVID—19 will impact your NRL side.

• TIPS.COM.AU: Over $2 million in prizes to be won

Few words flow more easily from a man’s lips than a promise he never expects to keep.

And that is why rugby league players simply have to grin – or should we say grimace – and bear it if pay cuts come their way in the wake of the coronavirus.

Partnership became the buzzword of players in Memorandum of Understanding negotiations in recent years in most of Australia’s main sports.

Players had had enough of the employer-employee relationship and wanted to be part-owners of the game they played.

“We want to be partners which means in good times we will share the profits and in bad times we will be prepared to share the load,’’ was the type of sentence offered regularly during negotiations.

It sounded magnificently fair and honourable, but there was a catch.

Watch the 2020 NRL Telstra Premiership on KAYO. Every game of every round LIVE & Ad-Break Free during play. New to Kayo? Get your 14-day free trial & start streaming instantly >

The players must be prepared to be genuine partners in the game. AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts.

The one jolting little piece of unwritten devil in the detail for the players was that no one expected bad times. 

Australian sportsmen have become used to television rights increasing massively each time they are renegotiated.

The big sports simply expect to go onwards and upwards. No one ever expected rugby league would go backwards or hit a submerged log the size of a mini-submarine.

When the latest collective bargaining agreement was announced in November, 2017, all the talk at the press conference was about the blue sky ahead.

As you would expect at a joint collective announcement with so much good detail to share, there was no mention of possible storm clouds.

“For the first time, our players will receive a 29.5 per cent share of forecast game revenue, as well as a share of any outperformance revenue,” NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg said.

“In other words, the better the game performs, the more the players will receive.’’

The players had also signed up to cop a hit if things turned sour. 

FOOTY TIPS! Join Australia’s best footy tipping competition for your chance to win big. Add our experts to your league and join now at TIPS.COM.AU.

Greenberg may need to make some tough decisions. Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images.

But that was a bit like agreeing with your neighbour that, in the very odd event that a bolt of lightning wiped out the fence between your properties, you would share the repair costs.

Of course you would agree to it. Why not? As if it’s ever going to happen?

The problem for rugby league players is that the lightning bolt has hit the fence.

Rugby league officials reckon they only have a couple of months before the game goes broke if the coronavirus shuts the game down, and for that they only have themselves to blame.

Shamelessly greedy clubs are so interested in the here and now they were never going to listen to any plans about having a rainy-day fund if things went bad.

The fact that Cameron Smith was howled down when he suggested the game should shut down for a couple of weeks due to health reasons shows that for all of their public posturing, many club officials are as concerned by the bottom line to their club balance sheets than the health of their players.

When Smith suggested the season should be postponed, he was howled down. Picture by Brett Costello.

The Daily Telegraph’s Paul Crawley was right this week when he said rugby league is paying the price for a reckless arms race where there are large groups of players paid more than they should be.

A few years ago Kevin Walters, while accepting wages were rising rapidly, said “a million-dollar player should be someone like Darren Lockyer or Johnathan Thurston ... someone who just delivers top quality week after week and is a consistent game breaker’’.

Could you say that about Ben Hunt or Ash Taylor or Anthony Milford?

No virus will kill rugby league. It has weathered all sorts of dramas over the past 100 years and somehow boxed through them all.

If the game does collapse financially, it will somehow rise again, perhaps in the form it should have been in the first place.

THE GOOD

Club fans in all sports buying club memberships to help their favourite teams even though they might get next to nothing for their cash. It’s these types of gestures that make sport great.

THE BAD

The continued denial by Olympic bosses that the Tokyo Games are in doubt. Talk about blind faith. Or is it arrogance? But how can they possibly just keep declaring that it is business as usual?

THE UGLY

The state of Australian sport if it goes into a full lockdown with the coronavirus. It may take a generation for some sports to recover and others may never be the same.