WENDELL HUSSEY | Cadet | CONTACT
In a sign of the strange times we live in, the Sydney Roosters NRL club are expected to finally fall under the salary cap for the first time since the turn of the millennium.
This comes as the RLPA and the NRL discuss the fact the game has no coin left in the bank after a single week of not playing.
The calling off of the season means that if another game isn’t played, the $12m the NRL has in its coffers works out at roughly $26,000 per player for the next seven months, if the salary cap is shared equally across the 480 players in each of the 16 clubs’ top 30 squads.
As a result, the players have been asked to take an 87% pay cut with the game’s senior and premier players urged to think about helping out.
That giant pay cut is set to be fiercely debated over the next days, as NRL players come to terms with the fact they might be treated like normal members of society.
However, one notable outcome from the inevitable pay cut means that the Roosters are finally salary-cap compliant.
“Yeah, it’s going to be nice to not have to do a George Calombaris on the books this year,” explained the Roosters head of accounting.
“I will still be keeping all those things like apartments down near Clovelly or Bronte beach, free cars and trust funds in relatives names to ourselves, but with the pay cut, we can ensure we are paying our group more than the $9.8 million as a club.”
We asked the head of the Chookpen to tell us how it was going to feel to not be cheating the salary cap this year, and he unsurprisingly told us to ‘Fuck Off’ in typical Roosters fan fashion.
“It’s not fucking funny. It’s shit chat. Just fuck off. Sorry, we actually manage our accounts and are smart with our money,” he said extremely aggressively.
We left it at that.
More to come.
