yawn...
The salary cap is a joke and everyone knows it. It's been rorted by EVERY club for years. Only reason this latest breach has come to light is because Melbourne weren't very clever about it - and a disgruntled ex-employee seized his chance.
Looking at the bigger picture the sums of money involved are pathetically small. I mean $1.7 million over five years. Wow. That's less than a quarter of Wayne Rooney's annual salary in the UK premier league - and less than one percent of Chelsea's annual player budget. The whole debate makes Rugby League look pathetically provincial and small-time.
The NRL should just declare a salary cap amnesty and devise a new system for trying to keep the competition even - possibly involving a player ranking system.
And under your short-sighted Gus'd up idea, have about 5-6 clubs fold because they do try and stay within their means and simply cannot afford to go dollar for dollar with other clubs, or, go over their means trying to compete and go insolvent, leaving players without a job. Fantastic.
What you also fail to realise and put into your discussion is the revenues that fund the Premier League clubs and their players. The Premier League is a global phenomena; it has sold media rights for massive amounts all over the world. Merchandise for some clubs in some Asian countries would easily out-do the NRL alone globally. All told, the Premier League clubs for the most part stick within their means (however, if you look at the likes of Portsmouth that isn't always true), and their means are absolutely massive and thus they are the world game. Where do you find the money to relax all the economic restrictions of the salary cap AND STILL sustain a 15-16 team competition that we need to build media rights moneys, sponsorship moneys, by way of penetrating as many different key strategic markets as possible????
The only model I can see working is the current salary cap model, with some slight tweeks. The salary cap should not be changed because 3-5 executives at the Storm decided to do deceitful, perhaps even criminal acts. That would be like relaxing murder laws to allow .001% of the population to achieve their wants.
