Yeah I think this is another tough spot which doesn't have an easy answer for RA.
I liked the idea of the 'fighting fund' to secure talented schoolboys. We lose so much talent to league that it made a lot of sense to try and sign a few top tier youngsters and lock them into our game. And it seems to be working so far, given the influx of young talent in SuperAU, a few of whom were secured with cash from that fund.
Now this Sua'ali'i kid seems to be the white whale, the one who has been on everyone's radar for at least two years. People who are good judges of talent rate him (I've only seen him in one Aus schoolboy game where he looked OK, but he was only in year 10 at the time).
So if you've got a fund for gun youngsters, and this bloke is a gun, then we'd be doing a disservice to the game not to at least table an offer.
But the media circus leaves me a bit uncomfortable, noting that it seems the leaks are coming from Souths rather than RA or the Sua'ali'i camp (he doesn't have an agent, which makes me like him a lot more). In an ideal world you'd leave him to finish school, but sadly that world doesn't exist anymore and I'm not sure we can afford to have the moral high ground here.
So we make a reasonable offer, tie a few pretty bows on it (eg Olympics) and see how it goes. Which again it seems like they have done, provided today's figures are correct and not the $3m being thrown around on Tuesday.
But anything approaching $500k will cause problems for RA, and fair enough too. Not to mention put undue pressure on the kid.