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The salary cap is socialist garbage and should be binned

Roar Guru
30th August, 2018
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Paul Gallen and the Sharks. (AAP Image/Michael Chambers)
Roar Guru
30th August, 2018
55
1526 Reads

Of all the poor decisions made by Australia’s sporting organisations in the last 20 years, and there are many, the salary cap has to be the worst.

This immoral policy has succeeded in crushing the individuality and culture of clubs, rewarded laziness at the expense of enterprise, and made criminals out of what should be a perfectly legal operation.

To see the cap justified on fairness is comical. Here’s why.

Consider a club that attracts fans, and connects with the local community. It attracts legitimate lower grade talent to play for it and develops these players. It might even develop some of them to be first grade, professional players.

Suppose the club spends several million dollars investing in the infrastructure to develop these players, in whatever form it may be – scholarships, facilities, coaches.

The player then becomes of a very high quality, but the club who has spent perhaps millions of dollars making them cannot pay them their market value – it would push them over the salary cap.

Instead, a club who has invested nothing into the development picks up the player, who is now playing for a team where he has little connection.

This is the real world effect of the salary cap, crushing the incentives for enterprise and the individual community of a club, and arbitrarily rewarding clubs who are deemed to be worthy by the charity of head office.

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The resulting lack of talent, from lack of investment from the clubs creates a hole. A hole that head office typically decides to fill, with competitions like the Under-20s.

Of course, who are the better recruiters? Is it centralised bureaucrats in Sydney, with no community connection to clubs? Or is those who are on the ground, with an in depth understanding of youngsters in the local community? The game as a whole loses.

The result is that a premiership is no longer about the local club and community effort to support it, and it shows. It gift wraps premierships to teams out of nothing more than a lottery, which is justified because it allegedly ‘shares the premierships around’, which of course demeans the whole meaning of a premiership in the first place.

The great community teams of famous past are no longer possible under the salary cap. The cult like status of the Brisbane Broncos of the 90s, for example, or the Paramatta of the 80s, will never happen again.

It’s this system that sees the GWS Giants in the preliminary finals but unable to come close to filling a stadium or developing their own players.

It is high time the NRL and AFL turned to the EPL’s lead and ditched the salary cap. Perhaps if clubs want better players they should work on creating a better connection to the community and to their fans, and developing them themselves. After all, isn’t that what sport is all about? The community and the club, and people!

If it turns out Cronulla have violated the salary cap, then I will happily stand firm and applaud them for taking a stand against the tyranny of NRL head office, who has continuously crushed the concept of a club over a long period of time.

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The salary cap destroys community, and stops players from being able to be paid their true market value. It is immoral and unethical. Bin it.

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