Khoder’s catchcry: ‘All the way with SBW’

The Sonny Bill Williams saga is fast becoming a classic for modern times. It has everything; money, glamour, sleaze and a whole lot of deception and misinformation.

Of course, these days the public can only get so much of the picture because nearly every comment a journalist gets either comes through the club’s media manager or the player’s manager.

Roosters win: go back to top of ladder

And management is all about stage management.

But what do we know?

Well, Williams is a very talented rugby league player and is one year into a five year deal that earns him a reported $450,000 a season.

That looks like serious dollars until it starts getting bandied about that Williams could earn double that money playing rugby union in France.

How do we know this? His manager, Khoder Nasser, has said so, as has Eddie Jones, who works as an advisor for Saracens in England.

So far it should be made clear it is all speculation. Jones knows there is a lot of cash floating around in France and so does his manager. But we haven’t heard anything concrete from anyone in France.

Spiro Zavos: ‘Sonny Bill’s poaching shows up RL hypocrisy’

It’s a bit like when you get an unsolicited letter from a real estate agent in your letterbox telling you they could sell your house for x amount of dollars. You know you have a house and you know you could sell it, but it might be an idea not to crack the bubbly on the strength of that letter addressed to “The Householder”.

France has a professional rugby union competition and they may be interested in players of the caliber of Williams. This is where the facts end.

Then comes the spin.

It is fairly obvious for anyone with more than three brain cells that this whole saga is about cash. Cash for Sonny and cash for Khoder.

Of course, that doesn’t help your client’s image, so Nasser has already started talking up other reasons why Williams has a yearning for France.

It is worth pointing out here that, for those that don’t know Khoder Nasser, he is also the manager of Anthony Mundine. It is worth pointing out because the noises being made from the management team are very Mundine-esque.

Williams dropped his previous manager Gavin Orr (who had negotiated his last contract) after joining Camp Mundine and being convinced that Orr had not got him the best deal.

What is more, they had just the manager to get him a better deal.

For a moment let’s go back to that original deal, which is currently being talked about as though it was the great rugby league swindle.

Listen to his management and you’d think the Bulldogs have cheated Williams on a deal worth half his real value and that Bulldogs fans should all bring some tins of food to the next game to keep their star second-rower from going hungry and help make up the shortfall.

Of course, that is not what it was like at the time of the deal. Plenty of people couldn’t believe the Bulldogs had signed such an injury prone player to a long term deal and one that contains no clauses regarding minutes on the playing field.

But the Dogs were keen to get his name on the contract so were happy to give Sonny a generous deal. So generous, in fact, that he and his manager decided midway through the negotiation that they wanted to bump it from three to five years.

The next bit of spin, which St George fans will still have ringing in their ears from when Choc wore the red V, was that Williams has achieved everything in the game.

In short, that’s garbage. A longer answer goes to the point about young players having their egos massaged whenever they feel the need.

It is any wonder modern footballers have a problem with an over-inflated image of themselves if they have always have someone on hand to tell them “you’ve done it all.”

Despite being a player of enormous potential, Williams hasn’t done it all. Not by a long way.

He has one premiership medal, which he earned by coming off the bench, less than 100 first grade games for his club and a mere seven tests for his country (even Thomas Leuluai has six!)

In the cold light of day, those figures are hardly the CV of a rugby league immortal looking for new challenges.

Then there is talk about his not being respected at the club, not being consulted enough by management, and not having his captaincy ambitions taken seriously.

Let’s be fair dinkum for one moment. This is the first season the big SBW hasn’t been getting dragged through the press for drunk driving, public urination and You Tube footage with Candice Falzon.

He openly said he had a problem with alcohol and, as such, was hardly the bloke a club which was trying hard to improve its public image would be rushing to make club captain.

But I’d argue that the key to the matter comes down to cash a lot closer to home.

After the pre-season departure of Willie Mason, the Bulldogs have plenty of space to move under the salary cap.

In order to maximize their cap for future seasons, the Bulldogs have looked at front loading “more now, less later” contracts to current players.

Given he has had a good season so far, it seemed fairly logical that Williams might be one of those players they look to extend under that deal using this honey pot (although some of his teammates on $80,000 might also like a slice of the pie).

But that is where the fun really begins and modern day sport comes into its own because Sonny Bill Williams has an agent that isn’t accredited with the NRL!

No matter what deal Nasser thinks he can broker with the Bulldogs, the club can’t speak to him, and even if they could, the NRL couldn’t register the contract because it hasn’t come through an accredited agent.

It beggars belief that a player would agree to be represented by an agent that isn’t accredited. But at the same time, it certainly doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

This circus has got a long way to go yet, and with the quote machine Mundine in the shadows, who knows how some perverse version of it will be played out through the media.

Of course, given the track record of publicity for Mundine and company, I wonder whether a conversion to Islam will come before a conversion to rugby for Sonny Bill.

Super 14 tipping now live for sign-ups. Join now and invite your mates.

Free Email updates:

• Get Steve Kaless's articles emailed to you
• Get a daily Rugby League email

Our daily emails are only sent if there is content for the sport or that author. You can subscribe to multiple daily emails; or get the daily Roar email with all our content in it. We value privacy. More...