The NRL Players Association will push for the NRL to fund the cost of having Income protection for players that suffer career ending injuries.
This is a good move and one that you would hope is easy to implement and doesn’t cost too much. It is something that we need too. I think of players like Adam Ritson and Taniela Tuiaki who both had promising careers cut well short because of illness or injury.
Right now teams can basically cut a player who suffers a career ending injury and only have to pay them a small percentage of their signed on salary figure. With income protection, a player would receive a payout based on possible future career earnings.
All of this is pretty straight forward, but in the era of a tiny salary cap figure and paranoia fueled by self interest, teams and therefore the NRL itself wanted to make sure there were no official back door ways to sneak through extra player payments on the back of wrinkles in the salary cap.
That is why any third party sponsors a player can gain are heavily scrutinized by the NRL. Because clubs didn’t want other clubs to offer a player an overall salary package that would include a third party sponsor that would pay them most of their contract, and only a small percentage of their contract was actually received from the team itself and therefore helped that team under the cap.
Right now we are seeing some teams who are looking to add talent to their side mid season. The West Tigers are a great example. They are looking to sign St George/Illawarra Dragons lower grader Ray Cashmere to bolster their soft forward pack.
Understandably, the Dragons have refused. After all, the Tigers completely screwed them over in the whole Tim Moltzen affair.
So why can’t we have transfer fee’s in the NRL and not have those fee’s count against a teams cap as happens now?
Imagine how much that would help teams like the New Zealand Warriors, Canberra Raiders and Penrith Panthers, all of which has giant junior leagues that produce a lot of talent and that other clubs would love to tap into mid season.
If the Wests Tigers pay a transfer fee for Ray Cashmere to the St George/Illawarra Dragons….where does that deal become unfair to anyone else? As long as none of that fee is filtered through to the player, and the club can afford to pay the player under their salary cap, surely there are no downsides to allowing such a thing to happen.
Now, I can understand why you wouldn’t allow transfer fee’s to occur between teams outside of the NRL, where one side would have no obligation what so ever to uphold the integrity of the competition, but within the NRL, it should be allowed.
One thing we will see as time goes on and the salary cap increases is that there will be less obsession about teams breaking the salary cap. Hopefully that will allow a few things to be free’d up, such as third party sponsorship and transfer fee’s.
It is good that the Players Association can now go to the NRL and look to secure funding for things they haven’t been able to in the past. Because the game was so severely under funded, there just wasn’t the scope to be able to even think of things such as income protection.
To the Players Associations credit, they understood the situation and soldiered on, knowing that eventually they would get what they wanted. Now that time is arrived, and both sides have shown they are willing to think outside the box a little.
Hopefully this will continue on into other areas and allow the players that play the game at the elite level to have careers knowing there are safety nets in place for if their careers are over, and that things have been made as easy as possible for them to have a long and prosperous Rugby League career.
