The purpose of the wage cap is to:

What do you think?

Persecute Leicester Tigers

Give Portnoy something to moan about?

Are those the only poll options?

Stop idiotic club chairmen bankrupting their clubs and pushing up wages so other clubs are forced to compete and cause themselves to struggle like in football?

http://www.espnscrum.com/timeline/rugby/story/115018.html :
Premiership giants push for salary cap increase
Scrum.com
May 4, 2010


Premier Rugby will review the Guinness Premiership salary cap on Wednesday amidst growing calls to raise the £4m limit currently imposed on England's leading clubs.

A salary cap was first introduced by Premier Rugby, the umbrella body representing the Premiership's 12 clubs, in 1999 and was raised from £2.2m per club to £4m ahead of the 2008-09 season. A proposal to cut the cap by £500,000 last year in the face of testing economic pressure was rejected and now Leicester Tigers are leading a call for a fresh increase ahead of the 2011-12 season insisting it is the reason for the failure of an English club to reach a European final this season.

"The Guinness Premiership has to decide where it wants to be as a league," Leicester's head of operations, Simon Cohen, told The Guardian newspaper. "Is it going to work to the lowest common denominator and be competitive? Or is it more important to compete in Europe and attract the world's best? If it is the former, a salary cap of £4m is clearly appropriate. If it is the latter, you have to spend the same as other teams and you are talking about £12m-14m at the top end."

"At £4m, you can put out a side that is competitive against any European side. The problem is that the salary cap, combined with the attritional nature of the league, means that you rarely have your best side on the park and the salary cap robs you of your strength in depth and you cannot afford a marquee player from the southern hemisphere."

The Premiership is reportedly split on the issue with the likes of Leicester and Northampton, who average five-figure crowds, pushing for an increase while clubs such as Sale and Wasps, who struggle to attract 10,000 spectators to their football grounds, fear slipping out of contention for honours due to their inability to compete financially. However, all 12 clubs are said to be operating at a loss in the economic downturn.

New television and sponsorship deals, including ESPN's recent broadcasting agreement, will be worth £750,000 to every club but Premier Rugby chief Mark McCafferty is reluctant to a change to the current set-up that is legally bound until the end of next season.

"The issue is what the game can afford," he told the newspaper. "Raising the cap is not a realistic option when the money is not there and while it has been a disappointing season for our clubs in Europe, the French did not provide a semi-finalist in last season's Heineken Cup yet they are providing both this month's finalists.

"We have been going through the toughest economic period in the history of the professional game and we will emerge intact. Next season will show whether this year was a blip or something more serious: when you look at the terrific form of a number of our clubs, you suspect the former."

Last week, Premier Rugby refused to be drawn on allegations that a Premiership club has been working outside of the salary cap - an accusation made by Wasps owner Steve Hayes. Premier Rugby's Phil Winstanley subsequently told the Independent on Sunday, "If we had it [the evidence], we'd take the action. You can operate outside the regulations but there comes a point when somebody decides that's inappropriate and there's a whistle-blower. It could be a disgruntled player, it could be someone else within the club who is disgruntled. If clubs have the evidence, they only need to pick up the phone.

"We're operating in sport and people want to win things," said Winstanley. "People will always push themselves and often beyond the limits. We have got a very competitive Premiership and the salary cap is one mechanism contributing to that. People say the French clubs have more money but the English performance in the Heineken Cup in the last 10 years has been as good as, if not better than, the French. We had no semi-finalists this season but that was a blip."

One former club employee told the newspaper, "Many of the directors of these rugby clubs have contacts elsewhere and they have companies elsewhere. If a player was paid extra money through another company or a sponsor, there's no way on earth anyone could check it. The payments are more likely to be for image rights than PAYE because they have a different tax status and it's easier to manage."

Stop clubs like mine (Saracens) bankrupting ourselves though we are still doing an impressive job even with the cap. The new stadium if approved will help us though.


I think the wage cap is good. There should definitely be a cap. What it should be is debatable though.

I'm not in favour of raising the cap but I am in favour of allowing EPS and the new young player RFU thingy (the £20k for each player up to 12 that is English and under 24 in the first team squad) to raise the salary cap. So clubs that want to spend the extra money are encouraged to do so either on young English players or with a core of young English players already in the squad.

At the moment teams that produce internationals are left high and dry when they are unavailable and there isn't currently a lot of benefit to keeping hold of your young players if they are only going to be stolen by England for a third of the season.