We have seen a big trend in the last decade where the top 3 SA teams throw huge sums of money at players to get them to join their union, unlike NZ where all of the players are on central contracts. Allowing there players to stick at the unions where they believe they would get game time. SA players have only two options, either go to a big union to get more cash or head abroad and play for some sub average club team but get paid huge sums of money and guaranteed game time.
What I would like to see is a wage cap to prevent good players having to make a financial decision to go to bigger unions. The reason for my thinking is that if you look at a player like Sadie that is on a R1.4 million contract a year. That is massive but unions such as the cheetahs and Lions could never match that. It is also shocking to see that they can offer that amount of money to a young player ensuring that they hold on to the best players without having to guarantee them game time.
A salary cap is not that straight forward as it would mean that most of our best players would leave our shores and in return we would end up with weaker teams. So here is my suggestion. Rather than cap the entire squad, unions need to name their 15 – 22 Marquee players which they don’t have to disclose how much they pay for these players. It is the players that are not a Marquee player that they would need to cap. By doing this it would create a natural dispersion of the top players in the country and ensure that that we have all of our best players in each position get as much time as possible and not be lured by a higher pay check but lack of game time and development.
