Ditch marquees if you want fair play
Last week the Premiership confirmed their new salary cap regulations in a typically self-congratulatory way, with chief executive Darren Childs proclaiming that they were ‘the right set of powers, obligations and sanctions for the longterm benefit of the sport’.
I beg to differ, and would argue that the cap in its current state is damaging for the game, and needs to be further amended.
The purpose of a salary cap is to help control costs, and prevent a spiral where the clubs with the wealthiest owners simply buy success by outspending their rivals.
That’s another way of saying that it’s there to ensure that there is a level playing field, and every club competes on equal terms. On that basis the Premiership salary cap fails the test.
The problem is excluded players, generally referred to as marquee players. For this season, and the next, clubs can have two such players, and that’s what makes a nonsense of the regulations. The headline numbers for the cap are £6.4m in 2020-21, dropping to £5m in 2021-22, and at the top level the decrease is something to be welcomed.
However, a ‘poor’ club could spend up to the limit and still be seriously disadvantaged against their wealthier rivals, who might pay a couple of players £1m each. If that happens then the real level of the cap for the wealthy club might be 30 per cent higher than the notional limit this season, going to 40 per cent for the next one!
The argument for marquee signings is that punters want to see the very best players in the Premiership, an argument I never bought in normal times, but with what’s happened to the world in the last nine months, that’s an archaic view.
What fans want more than anything is to be assured that their club will survive – in fact, they want every club to survive so that we have a thriving and competitive league – and to see competitive matches.
The best way to achieve that is to drive the salary bill down, in an equal way for each and every club, not to proclaim a headline figure that actually means very little.
Of course, the clubs say, those marquee players are under contract and we can’t just walk away from that. No, but they could be told to buy out those contracts – I wouldn’t mind that being a one-time exclusion from the cap!
It would be good to know how many of those contracts were signed in a rush back in June when the agreement to change the cap was first agreed. That’s important, because there’s a plan to reduce the number of marquee players to one for the 2022-23 season. That sounds encouraging, but as there always seems to be with the Premiership, there’s a caveat.
If a player is on an existing contract that was signed before 18 June 2020, then they’re still excluded until that contract runs out!
Finally, remember that these changes to the cap were announced as temporary measures, in place until the end of the 2023-24 season: surely with everything that has happened it would be sensible to declare that these are to be permanent changes, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one! The bottom line is that a level playing field seems to be as far away as it ever was.
Nigel Owens yesterday achieved the remarkable milestone of refereeing 100 Test matches, and at 49 that might well be his final one, although he still hopes to have a swansong in next year’s Six Nations.
During his career he has changed the public perception of rugby referees. There were big personalities among the reffing community in the past, but none of them would have merited being described as celebrities, which is definitely the category into which Owens has placed himself, with his book, his television shows, and the publicity he generated when he chose to reveal his sexuality.
One thing that has always bemused me is that he has never seemed to try to learn a few words of French – compare him with Wayne Barnes, and others of the younger refs, who have embraced the idea that it’s respectful to try to communicate with players in their own language.
“What fans want more than anything is to be assured that their club will survive”