CAN we afford overseas players?
Next season the Super League clubs will receive £200,000 each less than they have received in distributions from the RFL in 2023.
The amount of money being generated by the broadcasting deal with Sky Sports will fall to £21.5 million.
That contrasts with a figure of £40 million per annum that was being received as recently as 2021 following the deal that was negotiated in a five-year deal by the RFL’s former Chief Executive Nigel Wood.
We can either conclude that Wood is a genius, or that the current negotiators are not up to the job, or that conditions have changed in the broadcasting world to reduce the value of Rugby League’s TV rights.
The truth probably involves a combination of all three of those suggestions.
But what is blindingly obvious to me is that there is no sign of that downward trend being reversed in the near future.
And in fact the new TV deal will kick in next year and run for three years.
Unfortunately our sport has fallen well down the pecking order as far as Sky are concerned, compared with the days when Super League was inaugurated in 1996, when we were arguably the second most important sport in Sky’s schedules.
Unfortunately the people who have run our game in the 27 years since then have shown absolutely no sign of being able to successfully expand our sport’s footprint to make it more valuable to sponsors and broadcasters.
The result of that is what we see now – a declining income and clubs under more and more pressure. It means that the club owners who have independent wealth of their own will have to subsidise their clubs even more.
And the clubs that don’t have wealthy owners will have to cut their costs even more.
It’s no surprise that one of those clubs, the Salford Red Devils, have recently sold two of their star players to Leeds Rhinos for an apparent total transfer fee of £300,000, which represents the total reduction of their income for this year and next, as reported in our news story on page 3 in this issue.
So what can be done to protect the clubs from going broke?
In my view, one of the steps that could be taken would be to set a separate salary cap for overseas players.
I’m continually amazed that our clubs are still signing countless players from the NRL and offering them big money to come to this country, when they could be spending that money on developing their own players, as Wigan, St Helens and Leeds continue to do.
I would propose a salary cap being put in place – perhaps £500,000 – to represent the maximum a Super League club could spend on overseas players.
I have a great deal of admiration for some of the overseas players who have graced Super League over the years. But unfortunately they are draining Super League of its financial resources while not attracting new fans to the game.
We can’t continue as we are and we need to restore some financial sanity before some of our leading clubs head the same way as some well-known rugby union clubs that have given up the ghost in recent years.
