Australian Rugby / RA

[barbarian]

So the Tahs have lost Folau, Foley, Phipps and maybe Hunt.

The Brumbies have lost Pocock and Lealiifano.

The Rebels seem to be losing Genia and Quade, and have certainly lost Coleman.

The Reds have lost Kerevi and Higgers.

Who are the remaining marquee players in the country? The people that non-rugby fans actually recognise?

I reckon it's Kurtley Beale, Michael Hooper and then daylight. Tongan Thor can get there, Kuridrani has had a nice career, Matt To'omua too. But fuck me we're in trouble next year. Will be a struggle to crack 10k.
.

 

[Derpus]

Transfer fees only apply when a player leaves whilst still contracted. It encourages teams to offload their star players whilst sill under contract if they don't think they'll be able to re-sign them.

If you look at European football, most of the transfer fees are shared between the top clubs. Lower level clubs end up selling their star player to make sure they can pay a bunch of inferior players.

If rugby introduced transfer fees it would encourage unions to sign players to longer contracts and then actively shop them to wealthy overseas clubs. I'm not convinced it would actually help.

European Football is fucked, particularly with FFP now preventing any kind of investment into non-traditional teams. That said, for the financial side of things it kind of works.

Small/mid tier clubs survive by having excellent academies that produce talent that can be sold at a premium to the bigger boys looking for ready made talent (which is essentially the position we are looking at now - in Super Rugby). Or they buy cheap talent from even smaller fish, develop it and then sell it on for profit.

Clubs that are fairly competitive and still win the odd trophy survive like this.

The revenue brought in to the big clubs through TV, selling shirts to Asia etc is effectively distributed to smaller teams that produce the majority of the talent that ends up at the revenue generating clubs.

The reality is, no Super Rugby team generates revenue anymore. Having a transfer fee would beat generating the talent, which i suspect we will continue to do, and having it go for nothing regardless.

 

[Derpus]

So the Tahs have lost Folau, Foley, Phipps and maybe Hunt.

The Brumbies have lost Pocock and Lealiifano.

The Rebels seem to be losing Genia and Quade, and have certainly lost Coleman.

The Reds have lost Kerevi and Higgers.

Who are the remaining marquee players in the country? The people that non-rugby fans actually recognise?

I reckon it's Kurtley Beale, Michael Hooper and then daylight. Tongan Thor can get there, Kuridrani has had a nice career, Matt To'omua too. But fuck me we're in trouble next year. Will be a struggle to crack 10k.
.

Kerevi aside, all those players are old. We aren't generating stars anymore.

 

[Braveheart81]

New Zealand will become the football equivalent of Brazil, South Africa the Argentina and Australia perhaps the Dutch for supplying talent for other competitions.

If you look at the transfer fees that get paid, it's not like the producers of the talent are getting regular huge winfalls.

The reality is that the players are generally being signed up as kids from Brazil and then the rich European club that develops them into professional footballers reaps the financial returns.

The highest fee paid to a Brazilian club is only the 40th highest ever paid (for Neymar in 2013).

5 years later, Barcelona received 4x the transfer fee they paid to the Brazilian club Santos to sell his contract to PSG.

 

[Derpus]

^^^^
It's unlikely European clubs will start pinching our kids. For now, anyway. The socio-economic factors mean it's not an apt comparison.

 

[Braveheart81]

^^^^
It's unlikely European clubs will start pinching our kids. For now, anyway. The socio-economic factors mean it's not an apt comparison.

Agreed. They also don't have the ability to provide better development than the kids get in NZ etc.

 

[Samson]

Kerevi aside, all those players are old. We aren't generating stars anymore.

I think we are producing stars, but have not provided the pathways to develop the talent. This seems to be partly addressed by the current junior wallabies being the first fruit of the current junior development system. The challenge still to meet is finding enough pro contracts to keep all the talent. We cannot afford to lose players such as Creighton and Ponga from the code.

 

[Derpus]

If they never had a professional contract in Rugby it's kind of hard to say we lost them.

 

[Samson]

If they never had a professional contract in Rugby it's kind of hard to say we lost them.

You could argue that a GPS Rugby scholarship makes you a pro. But citing players was to illustrate the point that we need to provide avenues for this quality of player to keep them. In Creightons case he went dark because the Tahs told him he would not be looked at before he was 23. it is the time between 20 year old star and super ready that needs addressing.

 

[Show-n-go]

This may be totally off the mark however and no i idea if this happens/if it does how it is different etc;

Why dont RA sign all aussie rugby players to a contract (i think they do this already) but do it from when they go pro till age of 34, so in most cases 10+ year contracts

Everyone starts out with wallaby match payment contracts and when you represent the Wallabies X amount of times you trigger a salary based upgrade, from there if you are an inactive wallaby for X amount of time you downgrade to match payments again

That way if we do lose someone to overseas club before their time, we do get a transfer fee and RA get some money and RA give the super club the player is attached to X amount of that fee

 

[Braveheart81]

Clearly the Waratahs should have offered Creighton a contract. Whether it would have been big enough to compete with the NRL is another question. He'd have been playing Super Rugby by the time he was 20. That was a big mistake. Hopefully he comes back and joins Jack Maddocks at the Tahs in the future.

Ponga was never going to play rugby unless he was offered a dump truck full of money straight out of school (or earlier) which wouldn't have been affordable for RA. I don't consider him lost to rugby. He was never really ours.

 

[Show-n-go]

or is all that just central contracting what some people have been asking for, for ages?

 

[Braveheart81]

This may be totally off the mark however and no i idea if this happens/if it does how it is different etc;

Why dont RA sign all aussie rugby players to a contract (i think they do this already) but do it from when they go pro till age of 34, so in most cases 10+ year contracts

Everyone starts out with wallaby match payment contracts and when you represent the Wallabies X amount of times you trigger a salary based upgrade, from there if you are an inactive wallaby for X amount of time you downgrade to match payments again

That way if we do lose someone to overseas club before their time, we do get a transfer fee and RA get some money and RA give the super club the player is attached to X amount of that fee

Why would any player sign that contract unless they were offered an insane amount of money to sign their life away?

 

[cyclopath]

You could argue that a GPS Rugby scholarship makes you a pro. But citing players was to illustrate the point that we need to provide avenues for this quality of player to keep them. In Creightons case he went dark because the Tahs told him he would not be looked at before he was 23. it is the time between 20 year old star and super ready that needs addressing.

That story about Crighton has never been verified, but gets repeated as nauseam, and the money Souths were offering was way above what can be offered to a rugby player at that age, AND I have heard on very good authority that League was always on the horizon. Ponga was a league player in a rugby school at Churchie. Brilliant to watch up close (saw him) but even then, everyone knew he was contracted to go back to league again (age 18, not 20). Sure, both would be great players to have, but I don't believe either were ever likelihoods.

 

[I like to watch]

You could argue that a GPS Rugby scholarship makes you a pro. But citing players was to illustrate the point that we need to provide avenues for this quality of player to keep them. In Creightons case he went dark because the Tahs told him he would not be looked at before he was 23. it is the time between 20 year old star and super ready that needs addressing.

Did he?
He was clearly offered a lot more cash by the Roosters.
I don’t blame him for taking the bird in the hand.
Rugby just cannot compete if the Mungo’s are keen on a youngster.

 

[Show-n-go]

Why would any player sign that contract unless they were offered an insane amount of money to sign their life away?

Just spit balling - I'm not totally across how it works currently

However id just say, if you want to play for the wallabies you need to be signed to RA. At the end of the day they can just still go offshore, would just involve a transfer fee from the club they are going to

 

[Braveheart81]

Just spit balling - I'm not totally across how it works currently

However id just say, if you want to play for the wallabies you need to be signed to RA. At the end of the day they can just still go offshore, would just involve a transfer fee from the club they are going to

They players hold a huge amount of power and always will. You're never going to get players to sign a contract that is essentially one sides in favour of the employer. The only way anyone would sign a really long term contract is if the dollars were huge which RA couldn't afford.

 

[WorkingClassRugger]

I think we are producing stars, but have not provided the pathways to develop the talent. This seems to be partly addressed by the current junior wallabies being the first fruit of the current junior development system. The challenge still to meet is finding enough pro contracts to keep all the talent. We cannot afford to lose players such as Creighton and Ponga from the code.

I think it's time we stop talking about centralising the pro game and it's operations in this country and just got on with it. Maintain HP centres and academies in each state but in terms of admin, marketing etc. look to cut as much duplication as possible from the model and operate out of a central location. I really don't care where. Sydney, Brisbane, Timbuktu. Makes no difference to me.

Remove the current roadblocks in place regarding a 2nd Aus based team in GRR. Take some of the money from the savings made 1) Further bolster the development system and 2) Contract the best emerging talent from within that and then negotiate a loan agreement with the GRR for talent that talent to be farmed out to teams in order to play/train in a more professional environments.

Either that or stop dicking around with the NRC and decide what it's going to be. Either make it a proper standalone 3rd Tier or replace with a club competition featuring 10-12 clubs by setting up criteria for clubs to meet and then farm these guys out while monitoring them and providing them with professional development via the HP programs.

No more Super Rugby franchises doing their own thing at the professional level. No more duplication. No more waste. Just get on with it.

 

[Show-n-go]

They players hold a huge amount of power and always will. You're never going to get players to sign a contract that is essentially one sides in favour of the employer. The only way anyone would sign a really long term contract is if the dollars were huge which RA couldn't afford.

fair enough, although id argue in essence what Ive laid out is a pretty fair deal. RA and Super clubs put a tonne of investment into developing these talents just for them to go offshore, there's got to be some trade off from their viewpoint

and the more you play for the wallabies the more you earn, fairly simple

 

[Derpus]

You could argue that a GPS Rugby scholarship makes you a pro. But citing players was to illustrate the point that we need to provide avenues for this quality of player to keep them. In Creightons case he went dark because the Tahs told him he would not be looked at before he was 23. it is the time between 20 year old star and super ready that needs addressing.

I guess NRC is meant to address that, to some extent.

I don't really know much about Creighton. Is it the case that he was good enough but was told he wouldnt be played due to some arbitrary age thing. Or was it the case that they didnt think he would be up to scratch until he was at least 23.

If the latter, i don't see what they can do? Why wait three years to earn money when you can just do it now in another game.