As we all have expressed the eels do not have any representative players to be a top side you need that to win premierships.
Is it our recruiting which I am sure has a part or let’s cut the bullshit the salary cap & TPA’s is a fu$$king joke.
Top 4
Souths; 4 x origin players & now just signed Roberts
Storm: 4 x origin players and an immortal
Roosters: 5 x origin players (includes 18th man)
knights: 3 x origin players (includes 18th man)
That’s nearly 1 x origin team
This does not include the international players they also have or past rep players it’s hard to find a player in the roosters squad that has not played representative football.
The eels in the 80’s had many representative players and hey we won premierships.
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So what you're saying is that the team with the best players is most likely to win the premiership ?
What I am saying is how do these teams have so many rep players and stay under the cap and continue to add to there roster.
How do the eels compete for the title we don’t have the quality.
We are just happy to make the top 8.
Look, it's not that simple.
The NRL has a $9.4m salary cap as we all know, but what a lot of people either don't know or tend to forget is that it also has a salary floor to ensure that every club must spend the minimum amount required for the players to get their agreed percentage of the game's gross revenues.
The floor is set at 92.5% of the cap I believe, which equates to $8.695m. So every season every club must spend at least 92.5% of the cap on players, regardless of how good they are. That's why there seems to be an obvious disparity between player salaries and their perceived level of talent.
What that means is that the most cap space that any club should have at any given time is 7.5% of the cap, which this season is $705,000.
So, how does that effect a club's ability to recruit & retain ?
Given that almost every NRL player contract is fully guaranteed, club's have very little ability to maneuver under the cap to rebuild their roster.
Teams can't trade players without the players consent.
They can't exceed the cap to retain their own players.
They can't just cut players, as they the players salaries are still included in the cap anyway.
The only way teams can get out from under a players salary is either when his contract expires, or if the player requests a release, or if the player brings the game or the club into disrepute.
The problem is, if a team wants to remake it's roster and it has say 15 players off contract, those players need to be replaced.
Now let's assume you want to keep 5 of those 15 players, generally speaking they'll want a raise, and to keep them you pretty much have to give it to them.
Of the rest, you can let them walk, but now you have to replace them. There's only two ways to do that realistically. Either by promoting a bunch of young players, with all the inexperience that comes with that, and with no guarantees of how they are going to develop, or by recruiting a bunch of players from other clubs, which generally speaking means either taking other teams cast offs or by offering overs to acquire stars.
Either scenario brings risk. If you go the rookie route, you can pretty much guarantee that at best your team is going to be inconsistant, and if they do develop, you're not gonna be able to keep all of them eventually. If you go the recruitment route, you get more immediate success, but if you don't you're right back where you started.
To sum this all up, the NRL's whole labour management system is far too rigid and inflexible, and it makes it very hard to improve your roster both for the short term and the long term, unless your lucky enough to find a young core like Smith, Slater & Cronk you can build around for the long term. Otherwise, there's just no wiggle room.
The salary floor means that every team more or less spends the same amount of money on varying amounts of talent.
With the way that salary cap and TPA’s are all hidden away behind closed doors we’ll never know. But undoubtedly other clubs are spending much more money on their rosters than we are. Legally or illegally I’m not sure which.
It is an absolute crisis that the Eels don’t have a single Origin player. Not one. The Board should be having emergency meetings about that issue and asking O’Neil and BA how they intend to fix that. It’s a really bad situation which guarantees no premiership any time soon. Isn’t winning the GF our goal or are we just here for the participation trophy?
There is only one way to fix it in the short term, and that is to pay massive overs to get them, like the way the Dragons did to get Ben Hunt.
Would you have given Ben Hunt a 5 year $6m contract Mutt ?
Which player in the league would you go out and sell the farm for, and how much of the cap would you give him ?
Latrell Mitchell, whatever he wants
So if he wants $3m a season ?
You’re over simplifying this.
I said it’s a crisis. It definitely is
After 6 years of BA he has to answer as to why he hasn’t identified and developed just one Origin player. Those 34 Origin players picked weren’t all poached from somewhere else. They were young guys identified and developed into Origin level players at their clubs. Why haven’t we been able to do that? It’s a fair question.
So no obviously we can’t go out and give 30% of our cap to one player. But we can’t continue to accept that Origin players are playing for other clubs and we just have try and buy them if we can afford it.
O’Neill and BA have to answer that question. Where are our Origin players and what’s the plan to develop our own???
Brissy, I believe can release 6 to get 2, I think Brett is pointing to the number of players we have off contract end of this year, we also have 14 that will remain with contracts, if by targetting two critical needed area players, especially a front rower who can play big minutes it will help, a good centre also helps. I see around 5 out of the off contract players as keeps, that is a NRL squad + one.
Add the Development players that we also have available after June 30 gives us options for the top squad.and we are at 23 players without the new signings. So by targetting 2 key areas and making sure they are the ones to make a difference and are players that lead by example the rest will follow. Fergo is a good example of that sort of player. We do have others than can also be the same, with Lane being one who goes non stop, good to have in the team.
From jersey 8 to 25 parra is about the same. If we just fuck our depth a bit we should be good. I think BA is a bit of a worrier just always concerned about depth when I don’t think the top teams really bother just let our juniors be our depth.
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