Crazy NRL player market is a mess no one enjoys
This season has been a soap opera and the bad news is that there is no obvious solution.
League fans enjoy the ride, because 2017 is a season like no other. The uncertainty over next year’s salary cap has caused an unprecedented number of high profile players to be off contract at the same time and in turn the rumour mill has been in full swing.
It’s resulted to the on field action sometimes being secondary to player movement discussions.
In all, there are more than 200 players off contract: an average of more than 13 per team.
Wests Tigers, the Knights and the Bulldogs are the clubs grabbing most of the attention but the Warriors haven’t been immune from the hype.
The focus was on top-end players at the Warriors like Kieran Foran, Shaun Johnson and Ben Matulino, but there are also 15 others at the club coming off contract.
This situation has been building for years. For the big name players, their agents didn’t want them to sign deals for beyond 2017, because they didn’t know how much the salary cap was going to go up.
The current salary cap is $7million and will go up to around $9.6million next season, possibly $10million.
Signings like Ben Hunt to the Dragons next year for a reported $1.2million a season has inflated the market, leading to other players asking for bigger contracts.
Josh Reynolds is believed to have signed to Wests Tigers for $3 million over four years – that’s a huge amount of money to pay a slightly above average five-eighth in the NRL.
The Bulldogs offered him around $450,000 to stay, so it’s no surprise he’s on the move.
While some Warriors fans may see it as a disappointment that Matulino has left the club, it was perhaps a sensible decision not to match the $750,000 a year Wests Tigers were prepared to throw at him, given his poor form last season.
Matulino is in a position where he could do with a fresh start somewhere else anyway.
The salary cap will cover the GETTY IMAGES top 30 players, rather than 25, but those bottom five players will almost certainly be on the minimum wage, which is expected to rise from $80,000 a season to $100,000.
Thankfully or unfortunately, depending if you’re into the constant speculation, the situation will return to normality next season, once the new fiveyear broadcasting deal kicks in and there’s certainty around what the salary cap will be.
It’s expected to go up by GETTY IMAGES $200,000 each season, to reach $10.4m million in 2022 and then we’ll go through this same mess again.
One of the talking points this week has been on whether a transfer system would work in the NRL. It won’t, because of the salary cap.
If there was a midseason transfer window, say in June, there would be huge speculation throughout the first half of the campaign on who clubs have already agreed deals with.
Also, because of the cap, a lot of players can’t instantly transfer between clubs because there might not be room for them inside the salary cap straight away.
When players come off contract at the end of a season a club can offload players to fit new ones in.
The Warriors have signed Tohu Harris for next year, but wouldn’t be able to fit him in now, because he’s taking the place of Ryan Hoffman, who won’t be kept on next year.
There’s no doubt that the current situation is a mess, which isn’t good for the players, clubs or fans. But the problem is that there’s no obvious solution.