thegimble posted:
MO either needs to shape up or go. Too much money was given in the contrats to Faz, Rads, Connolly and a few others and now we pay the price as we ended up with no real quality through the squad and any one deluded enough to think the youngsters will become great players need to realise none are holding there own in their position against most SL counterparts today.
To be a little bit fair to ML, the Farrell contract was a 6 year contract put in place before the salary cap was reduced to £1.8m, and Rads' contract has been part-funded by the RFL althougj his next one would have to be fully-paid by Wigan if he were to stay, but the amount of that contract was partially determined by the RFU's predations rather than what Rads necessarily wanted.
Perhaps Maurice should have known that the amount of salary cap money was going to be cut to £1.8 from what was available when these contracts were signed. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if these contracts really were too expensive even at the lower cap limit. Faz was on £166k/year, and being captain you'd expect that to be the highest salary (but is less than Paul Sculthorpe?). If you take that amount off £1.8m, then we've still got £1.63m left which is enough to pay 19 more players (20/20 rule) an average of £86k each, not a bad salary. Now, some of the players will probably be on more than that, some of the 20/20 players probably less, and that only allows 20 players, so here's some maths:
Salary cap £1.8m
Farrell £166667
5 (say) non-20/20 players @ £19.99k (£100k for argument's sake)
19 other players = average of £80k each (£1.53m / 19)
Total squad 26 players, not unreasonable, all the 20/20 slots filled and the £1.8m all used up. Even having another player on the same as Farrell only brings the money for the other 18 players to £1.36m, average £76k each.
Some of the 19 are going to be on more than £80k, some on less than £80k so I think they will balance each other out. Tickle might only be £40k, Dallas on £100k, for example, and the younger players have still got time to get those top salaries. We've had a big player turnover in recent years so I think only Faz and Radders have been on big, long-term contracts.
I don't see a couple of big salaries as being the problem. Unless we're trying to pay all our 20/20 players top-whack then there's enough leeway in the £1.8m cap to pay for a couple of top-rate players like Farrell without any trouble.
And pay them we should. If you want the best, you've got to pay the best wages. The only scenario I can see where we would have had a problem is if we weren't making enough money to be allowed to spend £1.8m (there's still the 50% of income rule). Have we not been making enough profit, meaning we've not had the full salary cap to play with? That seems incredible given our attendances have been rising, corporate money should have been coming in and we've got all kinds of other marketing schemes going on. Ticket sales alone account for something like £1.5m, nearly half of what's needed, but maybe the club hasn't been performing in other areas. If that's the case, then we're definitely looking at the management being at fault, not players wanting big salaries.