By MICHAEL BYRNES
EVERYONE who’s anyone has had a say in the ongoing NRL vs Players Association industrial dispute, including most recently, Steve Mascord. And now me, the pick of a bad bunch (drum roll please).
Mascord’s 150-word precis takes issue with the very existence of annual leagues club grants to NRL clubs but his motivation to take up the point comes from the rumour that the players have deemed themselves entitled to 29 percent of that leagues club grant money, as part of their argument that overall player remuneration be 29 percent of the game’s total revenue.
As much as I concur with his rationale that the game should be financially self-reliant and certainly not dependent upon poker machine revenue, there isn’t much else in his argumentation that stacks up.
While each club’s annual leagues club grant might ebb and flow with the year to year profitability and financial position of the leagues club, there is no doubt that some level of funds injection from the leagues club is expected, planned for, and factored into the budgets of most NRL clubs, as a normal part of their financial operations. Whether that money comes from poker machines or chook raffles is irrelevant in terms of the football club’s revenue-vs-expenditure picture. It is an intrinsic part of the game’s funding and fair game in determining what proportion of the game’s revenue the players are taking home. (continued below)
The players’ demand for 29 percent of revenue has been widely reported, but it should be looked at in context. On the spectrum of global sporting affluence, the NRL is at least a second, if not third tier sport. Who knows? Maybe fourth or fifth. As Phil Gould said during the Cronulla-North Queensland game the other night — whatever these guys are getting paid, they deserve it and more. There are very few elite sports that take the same physical toll on the body that rugby league does.
It could be argued that the NRL operates with something akin to the funding picture of the early 1980s NFL. It should also be pointed out that the NFL’s 1982 player strike was about the players receiving a guaranteed percentage of revenue. Yes, they resolved that argument 35 years ago. It should also be pointed out that in the latest NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement, the players are guaranteed 48 per cent of revenue. The NFL salary cap for 2017 was $US167m (53 players), the NRL’s was $AU7m (25 players).
Funny how the NRL governing body and its clubs send fact-finding and best-practice-seeking delegations to the United States to canvas NFL clubs each year, yet amazingly none of those delegations seem to have picked up on or reported back the nature of the revenue sharing model the NFL has employed for the past 35 years. Actually, I guess it’s not that funny.
This should all be taken into consideration when attempting to paint our current players as money-hungry mercenaries (I’m not saying that’s what Steve Mascord was doing but others certainly are). Given what the players contribute to the game, the impact it has on their post-football wellbeing, and the expenditure breakdown that has been deemed normal in other elite ball sports for many, many years, I think we can probably afford to give them 29 per cent of the game’s total funding, without diddling them out of leagues club money on the basis that the game shouldn’t need it.
