Mitchell Moses has signed for Parramatta Eels but Wests Tigers won’t let him go, at least not this year. Canterbury Bulldogs want Cooper Cronk and Kieran Foran despite Cronk being 33, Foran playing for New Zealand Warriors and the Dogs having two halves already. And the mind of Anthony Milford is so clouded, at least according to Wayne Bennett, that he’s forgotten how to play rugby league.
And thus if you listen to some – Bennett, Gorden Tallis, Titans coach Neil Henry, among others – the National Rugby League should institute a system of player transfer protocols – a “trade window” – so that everyone knows who’s going where and when. Like “consistency” and the word “deluxe”, “transparency” is rugby league’s new black.
As is ever the way, all these movements have begat a whole lot of “talk” and “noise” in mainstream press, social media, and wherever people consume rugby league. People are interested in players (and coaches) moving around – it’s one of the games within the game. And people wish the focus were on the footy this season rather than who’s playing for who next season.
Milford is one of nearly 40 rep-quality players waiting for the NRL to finalise its salary cap before signing for 2018. The Rugby League Players Association, the union, also has to nut out terms of their next collective bargaining agreement with the NRL some time before it runs out in October.
The players want a share of revenue. The clubs want a bigger salary cap. The NRL and its commission want to keep the whole show bubbling along as best they can, and feed the “grassroots” (like the meek in The Life of Brian, they’ve had a hell of a time) and keep everyone, themselves included, rolling in clover.
Yet negotiations around the CBA will take time. It will be a drawn-out process. And that’s part of the game, too.
For the players it’s not ideal because they don’t know where they’ll be living and working in 2018. For the clubs it’s not ideal because they don’t know how much they have to spend (plus many have already spent it). And for the fans – the poor, beleaguered, bottom-of-the-food-chain fans, serviced by lips, treated like mugs, patronised like tax-paying punters – it’s not ideal because they aren’t sure players’ hearts are in it.
Fans buy merchandise and TV subscriptions, and pay for everything. But unlike taxpayers, they don’t get a vote. People can vote with their feet and bums and wallets, and not turn up. But they are largely powerless to rugby league’s phantom siren song. Fans love it.
But one thing fans hate is a player leaving a club mid-season. Fans don’t demand absolute loyalty forever. They understand that in the salary cap era, clubs can’t hold everyone. Very few players are “one club” men. And everyone’s playing that fantasy footy – they understand buy and sell.
But fans can’t take someone signing for another club while he’s playing for theirs. And they really don’t like a player not seeing out a season. That Moses wanted out straight away, that Ben Hunt will be playing for Saints next year ... how does a fan who loves these guys continue to love them? Unrequited love is a battlefield, someone may have said.
NRL chief Todd Greenberg went into bat for fans (sort of) when he declared the NRL was “open” to a “trade window” as a possible solution to all this mid-season madness. It was also a chance to fire a little buckshot across the RLPA’s bows prior to the CBA negotiation.
“If that’s a discussion that players would like to have with us we’re open to it but they enjoy free-trade at the moment and that’s a big part of their negotiation,” Greenberg said. “We’ve tinkered with it over a period of time to try and put some transparency into this space, and it’s never going to be a perfect science.”
A few years ago the NRL had a rule about “anti-tampering” in relation to player transfers. There was a 30 June “transfer deadline” and clubs weren’t allowed to approach a player before then.
But what was an “approach” and what was agent and CEO having a coffee, just two guys talking, could never be policed. And so agents and clubs talked away, and their conversations were leaked to media, usually by agents, as a way to get players’ price bumped up by stimulating “interest”. Way of the jungle. Mo’ Moneyball.
So there was all that. And it didn’t work very well. As Greenberg says, there’s no perfect system. You can’t stop players thinking about their future. They’re independent contractors, small businessmen. They are professionals.
And anyway Milford, judging by his performance against the Roosters, appears to have remembered his calling. Moses was among the Tigers’ best in their upset win over the Cowboys in Townsville. Bulldogs five-eighth Josh Reynolds is off contract after 2017 and will have heard talk of Des Hasler wanting Kieran Foran at Belmore. But Reynolds knows one way to play – full on, froth, blood and bother.
A trade window? A set period of time when all off-contract players are bartered, bought and sold? What could it possibly mean? Would prices go up? Would it be good or bad? And for who?
Let’s say the NRL instituted a rule whereby players could not sign with another club outside of a designated window. Say during the month of October, post grand final. And all the buying, selling, swapping, hocking, all that, could only take place in the month after the grand final. That would take out the prospect of your team’s best player signing for Manly.
Let’s say then the hottest player in the game – think James Tedesco, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Matt Moylan, Jordan Rapana – is approached by a rival code of rugby and offered big bucks. And rugby league couldn’t compete? Because of a rule? Because of “noise”? Because fans don’t like it?
The “open slather” system suits the players because they can look after their personal brand, their small business. It suits their managers because they can do their thing and sell their people. Thus the RLPA won’t be advocating for a trade window any time soon.
But as Greenberg said, the NRL might look at it down the track, and tweak the system. But without the co-operation of the game’s power-brokers, the players, it isn’t going to happen.
