I hope he hasn’t been taking unders from clubs based on hope.
Mate as you well know some players will sign for the club they are at for what they feel is a reasonable offer made by the club without going to market, due to the love of the club and or the players/mates they are with, even if it is probably under what their highest market value is.
Happens all the time, look at Taylan May just yesterday. Do you think that the Panthers signed him because they made the highest offer?
Simply put there are many different reasons a player will sign for less, mates, strong rosters, coaches, persuasive quality hierarchy and even loyalty are just some.
We have a captain that didn't care for any of that and twice publicly allow his manager to finger us in public so he could extract the highest offer. He showed the rest of the squad how it is done and damn the torpedos. Also doesn't help when you have a Football Manager who notoriously works at a snails pace and allows players to go to the period of their contract that allows them to go to market.
Now all our players are used to waiting it out and seeing what is on offer. It has become a thing, a habit that they are all more or less doing now. The tone has been set. It will take leadership and a mind set change to reverse this now where players start to feel that as long as the offer is good for who they are, then they take it as long as they can all stay together and be in a strong and successful club. This in turn will create a fertile environment that will slowly seep through the club and build some sort of loyalty again. Especially for the players that come through our junior development systems.
That's the whole point of being a development club right? Otherwise as is the current state of affairs at our club, what's the point of being a said development club if as soon as you created a well balanced roster of quality players with experience and youth that can contend for a title, if you don't win it in that year or two max, you are done? The vultures will set upon the players and the players won't give a toss about their mates, possible premierships or loyalty to the club and all the resources, time and effort they put into you, you want top dollar and that is all that matters because that is what your manager says is the most important thing in the world. Payne Haas and his posse say hi.
As the apologists on this forum love telling us all, the grass isn't always greener on the other side. Works both ways guys. Sometimes, especially in a well managed club and strong roster, not going to market and taking a little less is the smart and better thing to do. If we saved about an average of anything between $30-50k off of our top 20 players that would be a saving of $600K to $1m, maybe enough to keep most of them together after all. Just depends on the culture of the club and the people in charge that can talk and nurture players to see the big picture from an early age. Some clubs have got the right people in charge and around the players that can be great mentors both in football and life in general and the major decisions that young players have to navigate as professional athletes while other clubs fail to recognise the life issues part and ultimately and quickly find themselves failing at both.
I know it is a running joke on here that BA doesn't speak to anyone, but when it comes to personal life stuff and decisions I don't see BA as a mentor. Mark O'Neill seems to be just a company man that is there to get the best tight arse deal the club can get, which is fine, but again will probably only be perceived by the players as kind of like a real estate agent who is working for and trying to get the best result for their client. So an adversary. I don't know who in our club can or has any positive effect on our players to change their current mental approach when it comes to contract negotiations. But what we do know is that it certainly won't be coming from our captain and leader, of that we can all be sure of.
Players turning around 30 and looking for one last massive pay day, we can all understand. But players like Mahoney, Papalii, and especially Matterson who has always been on a decent wicket, should not be going to market looking for the very top dollar they can get the way all these players have. That is simply a failure of our club to create a great enough positive difference in culture and environment, in our DNA as a club, to sway our players to chose us at a fair value offer. Instead we are seen just the same as any other NRL club and the highest offer is the only difference that matters. That interchangeable opinion and assumption is the death knell of any club.
P.S.
Lowballing players initially may sound like a great tactic and I can see how in the beginning when we started with this tactic it made a whole lot of sense so as to shift the players and their managers mindset from the ridiculous overs we used to pay. But now I think it is causing more damage then good. In demand players and their managers will not come to the negotiating table early if they know and expect the club to always be making over the top lowball offers. They will simply take their clients to the market and tell the club, well lets see what my boy is worth then? Of course then you will have all the apologist on here again telling us all, you can't make them renegotiate early if they don't want to. But in reality, we played right into the hands of their managers and made their job much more easier then it should of been to convince their client to sit it out and go to market for that massive offer. Positive culture is driven by all the little things the people in charge are doing both on and off the field. We seem to be failing off of it, which in turn will eventually find its way onto it too.
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