As the recent travails of Jason Taylor and Des Hasler show, players can make or break coaches. How players perform each weekend is attributed to their coaching and, right or wrong, if players perform poorly for long enough, the coach gets it.
It’s like this because players are the stars of the show. Each week the NRL puts on a show – eight games of footy. Rugby league is entertainment and players are entertainers. And if a dud movie is made, it’s the director who won’t work again, not the top actor.
Players are the stars. Not the suits in League Central, not the talking heads on television, not the coaches, mascots or Manly Sea Birds. The players are the ones putting on the spectacle. The game exists because of the people who play it. They put bums on seats and eyeballs on screens.
And yet they feel they are not paid commensurate with other branches of the entertainment industry for what they bring to the table. And they’re not happy about it.
Two hundred of rugby league’s finest will descend upon a conference room at Homebush Bay on Monday – half on site, half via video link – to talk about their role in the greater game.
It’s the great gathering of their union – the Rugby League Players Association. This is their war council. They’ll talk tactics and triumphs, and “challenges” and “going forward”, and how they’ll convince the NRL to give them a fair suck of the greater souvlaki.
What do they want? A percentage share of revenue. When do they want it? Later in the year when they meet with the suits from the NRL to discuss the next collective bargaining agreement.
As it stands, players are doled out a certain amount per year courtesy of welfare and education grants, a retirement fund, and such things. The money is held and managed by the NRL, who earn interest on it, another bugbear. The RLPA see it as players’ money that players should control like self-managed super.
The RLPA argues that were players to receive a fixed percentage of the game’s income, players would have a vested interest in promoting the game.
Talk to media and “access” to players is ever bemoaned. Players are reticent to be “burned” or “thrown under a bus”. And it’s perhaps understandable, if a little hysterical. Players see their “image”, their “brand”, as their living.
And yet, the argument goes, were players to see tangible, annual financial benefits players would have more of an interest in talking to the press, promoting themselves and growing the game.
They would game grow through their profile, their image – their fame. And the more promotion they do, the more the game grows, and the more money the players get.
It sounds simple, but it’s not. These high-end money deals are typically vexed by lawyers and accountants and other sundry actors. And there are several strands to the argument. And the NRL’s side of this is a whole other yarn.
Consider third party deals – the ability of players to earn money outside the salary cap. Currently “the game” owns the players’ image, which is used to sell the game. Players can’t use themselves to sell themselves – not wearing NRL-logo clobber anyway.
Where’s the NRL player taking the multivitamins? Plugging the big TVs like David Warner? Jarryd Hayne, the NRL player, can’t use his considerable profile – his fame – to enrich himself as much as Jarryd Hayne, the San Francisco 49er, could.
Are players being greedy? Not if you consider that these issues are being driven by senior, marquee – and already set up for life – players. Guys like Cam Smith, Johnathan Thurston, James Maloney – all in line as next RLPA president – are vocal in their support of fellow players’ rights.
Any CBA would barely affect them; they’re at the end of their careers. They’re making the calls on behalf of their mates.
“The good thing is the top players, the high profile guys are across it,” says one NRL player. “But it’s not about them, they know they’ll be looked after, they’ve done well. But they play with guys who do what they do every week but don’t have the same benefits.”
If – when – the NRL raises the salary cap, the minimum player wage might rise a bit. And the marquee players will earn more again. But the vast majority of players, the NRL’s middling, non-Origin-player rump, guys on $200,000-a-year who’ve played a hundred games, and who haven’t been able to set themselves up, they might not benefit greatly.
And it’s these guys Maloney, Smith and Thurston want to help. They play with them every week, they train the same; they do the same hard yards.
None will say it publicly but some in the RLPA feel patronised and disrespected by the NRL. “They’ve laughed off things,” says the player. “And things haven’t really changed. The last CBA, the players’ wages went up but the running costs of the NRL nearly doubled. And there aren’t many people who’d see a ridiculous amount of difference what we have before and after.
“The NRL says they can’t give us $X, they’ve got to feed grass roots. How about [Todd] Greenberg and the suits take a pay cut? They’ve got a job because the players put on this game; they’re in jobs because of it. I don’t think there’s an understanding or respect of what the players put their bodies through.”
He points to the previous generation of players, walking around today “banged up”. “They haven’t been looked after financially, they limp around. That’s not how great footballers, blokes everyone’s looked up to, they shouldn’t finish like that, trying to get any old job. The game has to look after its own.”
