There’s few things that sell in sports journalism like a good transfer story.
It’s why the IPL auction is more popular than the actual IPL, why the NFL makes its draft last for days and why the most followed football journalists on social media never report on matches.
Rugby league fans are no different and everyone who works in the media knows that. Contracts, rumour, speculation and conjecture sell better than anything.
Unlike American sports and the AFL, we don’t have a draft, and unlike soccer and the Super League, there’s no system of transfer fees in place that can move a player from one club to another as part of deal.
There’s player trading, which is pretty rare among elite players, and end of contract moves, which happen everywhere.
Built into that second part, which is how the bulk of movement takes place, is the November 1 rule, which allows players to talk to other teams within a year of their contract ending, a situation that regularly – so regularly that we barely discuss how farcical it is – results in a player playing an entire season in one of the most physically demanding sports on the planet knowing that they are not going to hang around afterwards.
With the November 1 rule, the structure of how the NRL does transfer business is quite unusual.
On top of that, the 10-day backflip rule is back in vogue, a subtle but significant change that could reshape both how contracts are done and, for both the paying punter and the working journalist, how they learn about them.
As part of the new salary cap rules, players can sign a contract with a rival team but their existing club has 10 more days to get them to re-sign. It is the kind of contracting farce that NRL fans have just learned to live with.
Everywhere else in life, you don’t sign contracts that you don’t want to fulfil, but hey ho, that’s rugby league.
Instead, we’ll get a variant of it, where clubs will be informed that their employee has received an offer from a second club, then get 10 days in which only they can negotiate with the player in question.
Officially, they won’t know how much that player has been offered elsewhere (but in reality it will be the first thing the agents tell them), and at the end of that period, the player can still reject their new club anyway.
Under the current situation, many teams do not announce that they have signed a player until the cooling off period has elapsed, a hangover from the Titans’ disastrous attempt to acquire Daly Cherry-Evans in 2015, when the halfback backflipped and was retained on a decade-long bumper deal at Manly.
In the new era, the NRL would have the offer lodged with them, which begins the clock on the current club to submit their counter-offer (should they want to make one) and in practice, the idea of such a move not making it into the media in that time frame is near impossible.
On face value, this seems both difficult to understand and massively open to abuse.
What, for example, is to stop a player from spiking up interest, fake or otherwise, elsewhere to force a better deal out of their current employer?
Here’s a theoretical example – a current up-and-coming player who is able to negotiate with rival clubs from November 1.
He is represented by one of the many player management companies who have multiple players and coaches at other clubs.
The agents could ask their client to make an offer to the free agent and lodge it with the NRL, which would force his current side to decide on an offer within 10 days.
As a result of the new rules, the news of this would almost immediately be in the public domain and widely reported on, forcing the player’s current club to face the ire of their own fans who would undoubtedly be up in arms that one of their players was about to leave.
The club doesn’t know – officially, at least – what the contract offer is but the agent in all likelihood will let them know, forcing a higher offer than they might have otherwise been comfortable with prior, but would countenance given the time constraints.
The club that’s poaching the player can bid minimum wage if they like – or, more realistically, just whatever they think is unders on the player’s value within their squad – knowing that they either get a good youngster on the cheap, force a rival to sink more salary cap into a player (weakening them relatively to the competition) or, worst case scenario, get rejected without having lost anything.
Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys and NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
The potential for player managers, recruitment managers and players themselves to collude is massive. This isn’t to suggest that they would, but merely that they could.
It’s possible to say that this is already happening, as agents regularly use the threat of an offer elsewhere in an attempt to force a club’s hand, but crucially, this new system would codify that.
The rule is nonsense, but crucially, it’s convenient nonsense. Zoom out and it suits all parties, particularly when one considers the transfer-industrial complex of sport.
The NRL is an entertainment business, the media and fans love a transfer story, clubs can get players for unders and players can get paid more. All stakeholders win. The fact that it doesn’t make any sense is for the birds.
It’s been true since about 1895 that rugby league contracts are really only worth the paper that they’re written on, and taken as a fact of life that players hold the bargaining power.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, because the players are the ones putting their bodies on the line in a game that, above all, is defined by commitment and effort. You can periodically carry a passenger in the IPL or the Premier League, but not in the NRL.
Our player market is also highly limited, which plays into the player’s hands.
Compared to the likes of football and cricket, where you can always sign someone from the outside to replace a player you want to freeze out. Beyond the elite of the elite, there’s generally someone else in other league who can be picked up and given your contract.
In US sports, they operate in an environment of at-will employment, where American workers, from McDonalds to the NFL, can be fired on the spot with little recourse. If a player kicks off about a contract, they’ll just sever it on the spot.
Since the Super League War onwards, the transfer of power from clubs to players has been gradual, and in truth, is not really rugby league’s problem.
Wages across the board have gone up for athletes and freedom to choose where you perform is widely accepted: an incident like the Bulldogs’s famous ‘Filthy Four’ in the mid-90s would now be seen as a failure to retain talent on Canterbury’s part rather than treachery from the players.
It’s notable that Souths CEO Blake Solly, RLPA boss Clint Newton and the NRL itself have all spoken in favour of these changes. They have been positively reported on in the media.
When viewed in the context of other sports, the ones with transfer fees and multiple similarly-powerful leagues, or in the wider world in general, where employment contracts matter, then they’re nonsense.
But in the context of the NRL, they make perfect sense.
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