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Opinion
Players have every right to be up in arms over the NRL’s insistence on the introduction of a transfer window but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen.
The players have revelled in what has been tantamount to an open door policy for them in which they have been able to switch clubs pretty much whenever they have liked.
Apart from the couple of months left in the season after the August 1 transfer deadline, any date on the calendar has been one in which players can up and leave at the drop of a hat as long as they’ve got a plausible excuse for getting an early release.
Clubs will dish out platitudes like “we don’t want to stand in the way of a player who’s been offered a better deal elsewhere”. The players who are truly valued at their team and not considered expendable are the ones who have release requests knocked back.
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Chief executives are equally as untrustworthy as the players when it comes to sticking to an agreed contract – they scream blue murder when a player tries to wangle their way out of a deal but the bosses are notorious for shopping their squad members to other clubs, usually without the player’s knowledge, when they think they are eating up too much of their precious salary cap.
(Photo by James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Players such as Kangaroos hooker Harry Grant are nobly fighting the good fight for the lower-paid players on minimum contracts or development deals, arguing they should not be in a situation where they have to wait until an October transfer window every year to know where they will be playing the next 12 months.
It’s not ideal for an off-contract player to not know where they will be employed the following season until a month before pre-season training but the NRL knows it has much less competition these days for its elite talent.
The Super League is struggling to keep the best English talent from heading Down Under where the grass is financially greener and Rugby Australia is not the threat it once was.
With a men’s World Cup to be held on home soil in 2027, RA is firing off warning shots about a proverbial “war chest” of funds to poach NRL talent but it needs to first of all appease its own rank and file members that such investments would be worthwhile when the code is crying out for extra funding from the grassroots up to the elite level.
NRL players shoot themselves in the foot when they play the forced relocation card as a way of keeping the status quo in place.
Every year there are many players who aren’t happy at their club whose agents negotiate a better offer at a rival team or in the Super League, negotiate an immediate release and sometimes travel to the other side of the globe in the space of a few days to be running out in different colours just a few days later.
If that can be done in less than a week then surely an NRL player can wait until an October transfer window to finalise their next contract if they are switching clubs.
And that scenario should only apply to players on the move. Whichever model the NRL adopts as part of the painfully long collective barganing agreement negotiations – whether it’s one transfer window at the end of the season or having two with one halfway through the year – players re-signing at their existing clubs should be allowed to do so at any point in time.
In the age of players criss-crossing between teams more than ever before, one of the main points of a transfer window set-up is to encourage roster stability, particularly for the clubs that have developed their own talent.
There is little incentive at the moment for teams to build their junior base so head office needs to implement a system which benefits clubs that blood a player into first grade – whether they’re a local who has come through the ranks or someone they’ve recruited from another area to develop into an NRL player.
Under the CBA deal which expired at the end of last season, a maximum of $200,000 per club can be offset on the salary cap for long-serving players. The RLPA is demaning that rises to $500,000 as part of the current CBA discussions.
The NRL should introduce a system where the salary for any player who made their NRL debut at the club should get a 5% discount for every year of continuous service at that team.
For example, a player like Nathan Cleary has seven seasons in the NRL at the Panthers so 35% of his salary next season wouldn’t count on the cap.
Nathan Cleary. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
In the extreme example of someone like Cameron Smith spending 19 straight years at Melbourne, if he had decided to play on in 2021 under that system, 95% of his cap figure would not count for the Storm.
CEOs would be less reluctant to punt a club stalwart to take a risk on a younger recruit from another team and players would be less inclined to think the grass is greener elsewhere if they know they’ll be of more value to their club if they stick around long term.
It was refreshing to see Cameron Munster recently turn his back on a lucrative offer from the Dolphins to stick solid with the Storm.
He is entering his 10th season at NRL level with Melbourne so he’d be entitled to half freight under that system.
This set-up would of course disadvantage new teams like the Dolphins and whoever becomes the NRL’s 18th franchise in a few years time.
But the NRL could easily manufacture concessions for a start-up side like a higher salary cap or a designated marquee player whose salary is not included to give the expansion clubs a helping hand.
The Dolphins should have been given some sort of leg-up anyway like expansion teams get in other professional sports – as it stands, Wayne Bennett will need to produce the best coaching performance of his career just to ensure Redcliffe avoid finishing among the also-rans.
Gold Coast have been in the NRL for 15 years without any sustained success – it’s vitally important for the NRL to help expansion teams be successful from the get-go otherwise they will be just another franchise that will have little drawing power at the turnstiles or when it comes to TV ratings.
And even with generous concessions, new clubs can still struggle to be more than just making up the numbers in Australian sporting leagues as the AFL has found (but will never admit) with the GWS Giants and Gold Coast Suns.