The poaching of players at Penrith is highlighting the most painful truth of this so called sport.
It is time for the players developed through a clubs junior system to have a salary cap benifit ,say, 50% of their contract value added to their salary cap.The longer that player stays at their junior club the lower the deduction of their contract to the salary cap gets down to 15% of their contract value.
There has to be a financial benifit to the football club to develope players. I say good on the Riff.
I know players move clubs for one reason or another but a juniours club has to have the financial means to counter the offers from rival clubs
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Dont worry about Penrith too much, the production line is so well run now that pathways are set for the next 5 to 7 years. Good recruitment and aligning with quality country centres known for producing tough footballers is their key. Country kids now can see a direct path from Group level footy to NRL. Matt Cameron who was a long time Parramatta coach and ex teacher and close associate of Brian SMITH is really on top of this process.
Our systems are not as clear cut. Cabramatta is a breeding ground yet Manly, Bulldogs pilfer this beyond being a joke. Their is a bus that takes all the westies from Blacktown to Manly for training. Long term feeding path were Wenty - Guildford - Cabramatta - Toongabbie etc.
I think the head coach has a lot to say in how the club produces kids. Obviously, BA is different in his approach but he still bloods at least 1-2 a year. STORM as we know are QLD rich with their system producing amazing talent every year. That is the market I would aiming at .... Tough QLD stock.
I like the idea of developed players getting more leniency on the salary cap. What I would like is a development fee where the club responsible for developing a player gets paid when that player leaves. It encourages those clubs to continue developing players.
What I don't really like is Penrith complaining about Matt Burton going when they were likely either leaving him in reserve grade or at best coming off the bench and the Bulldogs were offering him a starting role. That would be detrimental to Burton's development.
I agree Super, and let's not forget that the Bulldogs are supposedly paying a hefty price to get Burton, which carries significant risk. He's played 6 NRL games, and looks very promising, but plenty have walked that path before and failed.
It is called BUSINESS, understand that and all this pussy whinging will go away.
Companies train apprentices - the good ones rarely stay with said comapnies.
RAAF trains pilots for commercial arilines to poach them all the time. It is the RAAF who created and pays incentives for pilots to remain in the Air Force - no special dispensation from any other source.
The cap needs to be black and white with no way to manipulate it
Impossible
LOL Trent - it is a Political document so has more holes than a sieve.
It was deliberately designed that way.
The issue is, and I said I wouldn't repeat myself but here I go again, but the underlying issue is the lie / misbelief that the Salary Cap is there to distribute the talent around the league.
It's not. That has never been the purpose of any salary cap, nor should it be because it doesn't work.
When John Quayle & Ken Arthurson first introduced a salary cap way back in the mid 80's, every teams cap was different, and it was tied to the clubs revenue base. For example, in 1990 the Broncos turnover was about $10m, but Balmain's was about $3m, so the Tigers cap was about $1.8m & the Broncos cap was about $4m. Huge comparative difference.
Why that was acceptable was because the cap that they introduced wasn't meant to be a talent distribution mechanism, it was a budgetary mechanism to stop poorer clubs going broke trying to compete. The talent distribution mechanism was the draft that they introduced in 1989.
Now I'm not in favour of a variable cap tied to revenue like that, but I am a huge fan of a soft cap, which allows teams to exceed the cap to retain their own free agents, but not to recruit other teams free agents. Under a soft cap, the Panthers could decide if they want to keep their roster together for longer by exceeding the cap. However, if they do that then they couldn't recuit other teams players.
But that would suit the Panthers if they knew they could retain any Panthers junior they really wanted to keep.
With a cap or no cap, young players want a crack in first grade. They want to play in there preferred position as well. Yes you need a good junior development program but no need in spending all the coin you have on it for other teams to poach. Panthers have gone to big into the pathway program and as you can see now there is no point.
Which just reinforces the point why NRL clubs shouldn't be involved in youth development, because it makes no sense for them to spend hugecwhen they can only keep a portion of those players they develop, but the game needs those green shoots to constantly come through for the games future.
The only viable answer is centrally funded youth development.
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