With all the calls for the salary cap to be increased in the NRL, I have another solution. The NRL needs to allow for each club to have a marquee player. Two of them, while we’re on the subject.
Right now there is a “marquee” player allowance of $300,000, the NRL needs to bite the bullet and allocate some of its future fund toward the game’s elite, taking the pressure off the clubs and placating some of the players currently (and rightly) calling for an increase in player wages.
Each club could nominate two franchise players, who would be rated by the ARLC and given a value. That value would be redeemed by the NRL.
Part of that extra income from the game’s administration would be earned through greater promotion by franchise players, especially with regard to junior football and the game’s outer reaches, such as the south island of New Zealand, Perth, Adelaide and Victoria.
How this might affect possible transfers is unclear (not that they often occur with the game’s elite players).
The NRL could demand a no-trade clause in franchise players’ contracts, or maybe there wouldn’t need to be any restrictions on mid-contract player movement.
The great irony of all this is that this has been tried before, for different reasons and in a profoundly different context. The ARL “loyalty” contracts foisted on players in reaction to the 1995 News Ltd raid on rugby league. This time round, the game’s stability and administration has never been more united thanks to the formation of the ARLC.
Most major sports leagues around the world don’t have to resort to signing their players directly, but the NRL is in a unique position. Rugby league in Australia is positively surrounded by rival codes to which its players can flee, yet without any chance of poaching players from those other codes in response.
We cannot leave it up to clubs that are already struggling financially and asking for annually larger NRL grants. With a $1 billion rights deal and the promise of even more cashola down the road, the NRL Franchise Player must come into existence.
I’ll even throw Eels fans a bone and select Jarryd Hayne to be that club’s first.
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