How about Cleary or Walsh in Super League?
LAST week on the League Express Podcast the host Jake Kearnan and I had a discussion about the apparent offer Hull FC had made to Australian superstar Nathan Cleary to come and play for them in Super League, with Hull more or less telling Cleary to name his own price.
I’m assuming there is some truth in this story, although I believe that Cleary has said that he isn’t yet ready to play in Super League.
He had apparently given Wigan a similar response when they enquired about his potential availability.
The signs are that he might even be signed by the PNG Chiefs, the new NRL club that Willie Peters will coach when it enters the NRL competition in 2028.
That would of course be an exciting prospect for them, although quite frankly I would prefer to see Nathan, who many people believe is the best player in the world, plying his trade in Super League than remaining in the NRL.
But the interesting point that we discussed, which isn’t often recognised, is that any ambitious Super League club with plenty of money available (if such a club exists) could easily outbid the NRL clubs for some of the greatest stars in the game if they were so inclined to do so.
And that is because of salary cap regulations that allow Super League clubs up to three marquee players.
If they sign a player from the NRL they can pay him a potentially limitless amount, let’s say a million pounds a year, and his salary would be recorded in the salary cap as £150,000 per annum.
This contrasts sharply with the NRL, which doesn’t have a marquee player system, although of course the general salary cap is much higher, at around A$11.95 million per club, which at the current exchange rate equates to around £6.2 million, which is probably just over double our salary cap once you include all the allowances that clubs are entitled to claim.
Nonetheless, if an NRL club were to make an offer to a player of Cleary’s standing, all his salary would have to be included in the salary cap. If they wanted to pay him a fortune, it would mean that they would have to adjust all their other salaries downwards to fit them all into the salary cap.
That wouldn’t be a problem for a Super League club.
All it would need is an owner who would see some merit in signing a player like Cleary or, let’s say, Reece Walsh and being able to afford to pay him an awful lot of money.
Given the wealth of some of our club owners, I’m slightly surprised that we haven’t seen some of them going after the genuinely top players in the NRL.