Zig wrote:Does anyone know the new rules? As I understand it, clubs can have three marquee players but only be must be federation trained. What I am uncertain about is could a club have three federation players if they so choose?

Magic Superbeetle wrote:Yes. The only disallowed configuration of marquees is 3x non-fed. Any other combination is acceptable, including 2x non-fed leaving the third space empty. 3x home grown, 3x fed or any combination using all three status’ (home grown, Fed, non-fed).

As a practical example. Suppose Wigan has French as marquee as their only one;

You could sign Williams and Sutton from Warrington and Bulldogs respectively to give you 1x non-fed 2x HG marquees
You could sign Tom Burgess and Dom Young from South’s and Knights respectively to give you 1x non-fed 2x fed trained marquees
You could not sign To’o and Cleary from Panthers, as that would be 3x non-fed, however if you could afford to remove French as a marquee then you could continue with the signings with 2x non-fed marquees

The only difference between them is the cap cost changes. Home grown marquees offer the best deal at 50k, fed at 100k and non-fed at 150k. So conceivably you could have 3 marquees in your squad for 150k should they all be homegrown.

The_runaround wrote:what dont like about the rules are you could n theory spend 1-1.5m on 3 players which I think is crazy why not just increase the cap by 1.5m and allow for better squads and more harmony within the squads

Magic Superbeetle wrote:There is a perception amongst chairmen that increasing the cap by 1-1.5m wouldnt lead to squads which are 1-1.5m better, but simply the same squads with inflated wages. Which is bad (apparently).

It all comes back to the perception the sport has that it wants a situation where literally any club can win. Until that is removed they will continue to find ever creative ways around letting the top spend more as ineffectively as possible and claiming it’s progress whilst keeping things as depressed as possible for the clubs simple not willing or able to spend the money to be competitive.