Sunday 7 August 2011

How Much, Please Sir? (2007)

Many people in the past and present, and in other era’s of time not referred to in my fifth and seventh words of this paragraph, have often been critical of the size of some players contracts and have been quite curious as to how some people are able to earn vastly more than their ability could justify.

Within this article we will learn exactly what a player earns, and how their wage is broken down, so that you can see, for the first time, how this intricate system works.

Firstly, there are seven key areas which all have varying weight of importance to the overall income a player earns. These are, with the percentage of income, as follows:

On Field Skill and Ability - 36.87%. Understandably, this has the higher percentage, without skill or ability on the field, there is an overwhelming chance you’re actually playing Rugby Union.

Advertising and Endorsement – 19.41%. This is important to ensure the sponsors are satisfied they are getting their worth out of the excessive sponsorship deal they signed. The players from time to time will have to promote the sponsor in their own time, off the field.

Media and Public Attention – 18.63%. Players have big egos and they need to be seen in the media, the more media, the more publicity the team and more importantly the code gets. It doesn’t really matter if it’s good or bad, because as the old saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.

Representative Potential – 12.77%. Players need to feel that they are elite, and we need to push this along by paying them if they can just get mentioned as being a possible representative star. It only needs to happen once a season for the payment to be justified. With the ever ludicrously inflated comments bandied around by the media, it’s easy to see how no player since Theo Anast has missed out on this payment.

Treatment of Public – 1.40%. The NRL needs to be seen as making an effort to make the players not appear as rapists, molesters, thieves or wankers. Even though the NRL doesn’t really care, due to the fact that “any publicity is good publicity.” Again, the PR staff at all clubs ensures some little diatribe is published in the local rag to ensure this payment is also made.

Loyalty – 0.92%. No one really cares much for loyalty nowadays, it’s just that there’s always a few dollars left over, and it needs to be accounted for under some unimportant sector.

Player Manager – 10%. Each player has a manager now, who needs to be paid for screwing clubs over in an attempt to get their client, and indirectly, themselves, a bigger pay packet. Their complete disregard for the game is something that gets publicised, hence rewarded as, “any publicity is good publicity.”

Now that we know the breakdown of a player’s wage, the hardest part is ranking a player based on their past performances. The first six areas mentioned above all carry a rank out of 100. 1 being worst, 100 being best. These rankings were initially carried out by Player Managers, until the results came back and every player had been ranked 100 in all areas, not too surprising really.

Now, the rankings are carried out by Mark Geyer. If MG gives someone a big wrap in one or some of the areas, we instantly know that player should be getting a pay cut because they’re obviously useless.

Once this system is in place, the clubs then have to decide how much of their salary cap they wish to use for legitimate player payments, how much they will breach the cap by, and whether that amount will be worth it. The club also needs to figure out who they will give the sack midway through the next season to free up some salary cap space before they get audited.

As you can see, and undoubtedly already understood, the process in agreeing upon a players wage is an intricate and complicated system based on many factors all reliant on other important factors. There are no certainties until the very end, and sometimes by then, it’s far too late.

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