THE debate surrounding the salary cap is an ever-changing one.
From the need to try and balance the competition to the fact that only three teams have ever won the Super League Grand Final, there are raging arguments on both sides of the equation.
For one side – the Salford Red Devils – the reality is that they cannot afford to pay the full salary cap and have to try and do things differently to their rivals.
“If you look at our list going back to 2018, there’s probably 15 to 20 players where they all had an individual reason why they weren’t making it,” Blease told Roar.
“Either cast aside by their clubs, problems off the field, not wanted, fell out with someone – a whole host of reasons.
“But we do due diligence on their background. Phil Clarke called us ‘the team of misfits’ when we got to the Grand Final, which some of our fans took exception to, but without disrespecting the team, he was probably right. Three-quarters of them were players that other clubs didn’t want.”
With that, the Red Devils have to make it work financially and that means paying much less than the actual salary cap of £2.1 million.
“We pay hundreds of thousands of pounds of salary cap lower.
“There’s only a couple in the league who are near us, the rest are probably paying much more than us, so we have to be very selective.”
It is this incredible statistic that makes it scarcely believable that Salford made it to the Super League Grand Final in 2019 and then the Challenge Cup in 2020.
Paul Rowley, appointed as head coach ahead of the 2022 Super League season, continued that good momentum in 2022, bringing the Red Devils to within 80 minutes of the Grand Final when few gave them a chance of even making the play-offs.
