Sydney Roosters keen to lure golden son Sonny Bill Williams back to NRL
Date
April 23, 2016 - 10:00PM
Danny Weidler
Sport columnist
It's hard to say no to Roosters chairman Nick Politis, and when the Roosters make one final play for Sonny Bill Williams, the club will be banking on their friendship to make a difference.
Politis, Willliams, his agent Khoder Nasser and former Roosters director David Gyngell are good friends and catch up when Williams is in town. There is a meeting planned in the next month.
But being the successful businessman he is, Politis knows he is going to need to come up with a plan to lure Williams back to the NRL. As it stands right now the Roosters have been told that it's too difficult for Williams to rejoin the club and they should move on.
But the Roosters won't wear that. The focus and discipline in the group was never better than when Williams was at the club. Not to mention he was a key figure in their 2013 grand final win.
That's why the Roosters are hatching a plan. They know that Williams loves living in Sydney and has family here - that is an attraction.
But central to it will be a job with the Roosters post-football. The club can't match the kind of money - the equivalent of around $3 million sign-on, that he is being offered per year in Europe.
The All Blacks will also have a greater ability to entice Williams. But a job later in life is what the Roosters can look at. There is a commonly held view that post-football jobs are are a way of rorting the cap.
The NRL's overriding principle is that they monitor any agreement/contract which could be a way of getting around the salary cap. But they also encourage clubs to set up players for a career after their playing days are over.
If a club came to the NRL proposing a contract which included ambassadorial work after someone's playing career, they would first ensure that the payments were all in line with their assessment.
So the payment would have to be high enough during the playing years, and the ambassadorial salary would have to be in line with market rates. The NRL know those rates because we have about 40 ambassadors.
But if the club didn't tell the NRL and just hired the player after he quit, they can still go back later and determine if there was an attempt to breach the salary cap while he was playing.
John Morris was a good example of this: the Sharks set him up to be a coach and then paid him a fair amount once he finished his career.
Williams won't make his final call until his commitments are finished with the New Zealand Sevens team at the Olympics.
