IS it time for the Rugby Football League to take a more draconian approach to policing the salary cap at Championship level?
John Stankevitch, the Rochdale Hornets coach, certainly thinks so.
In a revealing interview in this month’s Rugby League World magazine, Stankevitch outlines exactly how Rochdale’s player payments are structured, and claims that rival clubs are guilty of paying their players outside of their own books.
Practises like that are hardly new in professional sport, of course, but Stankevitch believes the situation has become such that Hornets’ current stance is the best one for a viable long-term future.
This season Hornets only pay the 17 players that take the field every Sunday – something that is replicated by Doncaster and Gateshead among others.
But it is the structure of payments at other clubs in the division that concerns the former St Helens second rower.
“Anyone in the right mind just has to look at the rugby papers on a Monday and look at the amount of fans that clubs are getting through the gate at this level – common sense says that those attendances don’t even pay the match fees of the players, never mind contract money,” Stankevitch told RLW.
“The RFL must surely be looking at things and saying ‘look okay, this club are only getting 200 people through the gate and yet they’ve got contracts submitted for £10,000 plus match bonuses’.
“I know players that live local to me that are picking up three different cheques a week. What does that say – that can’t be through the books.
“It doesn’t make sense at all, and it definitely needs to be more stringent, the process of actually examining what money is paid out.
“At Rochdale we do everything down the line, and at the start of the season I signed all the players on the same day at the same time, and they could have a look at each other’s contracts. Every contract was exactly the same. The only guys that get paid are the 17 that play on a Sunday, and they all get paid the same – £250 a win, £100 a loss.”
So should the RFL look harder into how some players are paid at part-time level? Is it possible to activity prevent clubs from making payments outside of their own books?
Something certainly needs to be done to stop clubs getting into positions that jeoparidse their futures so regularly. Stankevitch has called for guaranteed payments at Championship One level to be stopped all together, with match payments only being permitted, and that may be one way forward.
You can read more on this story in the August edition of Rugby League World, online now and on sale from Friday 2nd July.
By Gareth Walker
