'better elsewhere' is 1 of the problems… No NRL Team will meet or pay above a current registered NRL Contract. They would be stupid to do so [unless its Marty Taupau]!
They will only take Player A on ?#$% and we have to continue to pay the remainder of the registered contract.
This technically reduces our salary cap moving forward and is possibly one of the reasons we seem to exhaust the cap?
But realistically, I very much doubt we have exhausted our Salary Cap. I feel the Board has set a Salary Budget we must operate at, built around our income levels to ensure we trade responsibly.
I'm almost certain you must spend "X" percentage of the cap. You can't operate too far under either, otherwise poor clubs would be funnelling large parts of their grant into the operational costs and perpetually run in the bottom four.
I think it is as simple as our cap has been grossly mismanaged with backloaded contracts, bringing players up through mass injuries, players on good coin not performing and locking up juniors on big money.
There is no rules in how much you must spend CB… Noyce successfully did it while at the club in the late 00's.
Same goes for the NRL Grant. Its intended to cover the Salary Cap, but clubs are free to use the grant as general income.
