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Have the Melbourne Storm killed their franchise?

22nd April, 2010
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Expert
22nd April, 2010
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Melbourne Storm NRL

The NRL has stripped the Melbourne Storm of two premierships, as well as any competition points this season, and fined a total of $1.6 million after being found guilty of long-term salary cap breaches. AAP Image

The swingeing nature of the NRL’s punishment of the Melbourne Storm for rorting the salary cap system suggests that when the full story comes out the once-esteemed franchise has been put into a situation where its credibility will take years to restore.

In other circumstances, this elaborate and contrived rorting which involved (Medoff-style) two different set of accounts would spell the death-knell of the franchise.

But the NRL needs a presence in the second biggest market in Australia. The Storm will survive. But it is doubtful whether it can get together a team of stars as it has in the past to take it to premiership glory.

That glory has turned to ashes with the NRL taking away its two premierships victories in 2007 and 2009 (but not passing them on to Manly and Parramatta).

The club must pay back $1.1 million in prize money. It has been fined $500,00 (the same amount as the Bulldogs in 2002). And the club will not be able to accrue any more points this season which effectively rules them out of any premiership contention.

The elaborate rorting system, with its two sets of books, meant that $1.7 million was over-spent against the salary cap in five years, a total which included $700,000 this season.

Aside from the implications for the Storm itself, with News Ltd already sacking several administrators (‘I feel sick to my stomach,’ John Hartigan, chairman of News Ltd is quoted as saying), there will be questions raised about the salary cap itself, the future of star rugby league players staying in the code and what interest there will be in the Storm’s matches this year given the fact that they are playing now to stop other sides from accumulating points.

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The salary cap system must come under intense scrutiny.

This scrutiny will also be applied to the amount of money the NRL doles out to the clubs.

In turn, there will be renewed criticism (from commentators like Phil Gould) of the cosy arrangement that exists between News Ltd, which finances the Storm, and the NRL which allocates the payments to the clubs and receives monies from the television channels (not enough according to many people) for the rights to televise the games.

There will now be a witch-hunt into those Storm players who have benefited from the salary cap rorting.

This has already begun in regard to the Storm captain Cameron Smith and his third-party agreement with Fox Sports.

My belief is that the salary cap should probably go.

It is being rorted one way or another (coaching staff are not part of the cap, for instance) and the clean way to go is to abolish it.

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Then there can be transparency in payments. The impossibility of holding a team of stars together under the salary cap of $4.25 million means that clubs determined on success will try to get around the cap in any way they can.

The future of rugby league code in Melbourne will be greatly jeopardised.

In Melbourne, the Storm has built up a successful rugby league franchise and with the new stadium dedicated to the football codes, that franchise was in a position to start posting crowd figures that would make the club extremely viable.

You would think, too, that the Storm’s loss of credibility would be a boom to the Melbourne Rebels, the Super Rugby side that will start operation next season. But the problem here is that the CEO of the Rebels is Brian Waldron who was a CEO of the Storm.

Hartigan says that ‘at this early stage’ he believes that Waldron was the architect of the two sets of books rorts.

Both the rugby codes have been given a terrible belting in Melbourne, therefore, from the scandal.

I believe that the Rebels can get out of their mess by sacking Waldron. But the Storm do not have such a comparatively easy action to take to clean up their mess.

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