The cap is live, so there is no cap year as such.

I think this is right. Westerman was always going imo and we knew.

I wonder why the RFL salary cap regulations on their website, which refers to the cap being "live",
also has the phrase "Salary Cap Year" mentioned more than 100 times?

My guess is that it means that at any given time what club is spending on the wages of the top 25 registered earners, extrapolated over a year, does no exceed the cap. That year starts whenever the calculation is made, and those calculations are ongoing throughout the calendar year.

The cap needs to be expressed as money/time, and a year is sensible unit. It could be the cap month, week or even minute. The cap limit is about £3.53 per minute; same thing, just expressed differently and not so easy to understand.

I think the year thing is simply to do with when contracts of players start. We may have signed Pritchard whenever but clearly was not suddenly on the cap at that point.

When contracts start/end will be when players start/stop counting, so there'll be big changes on the day standard contracts come in to force.

But there are adjustments across the year. If a team signs a player on month's loan in April for £5000 for that month, he will count as £60k on the 'salary cap year', but only for a month. It may be that the club was already at the cap. My suspicion is that if the loanee is coming in to replace an injured fed-trained player earning £60k per annum or more, for example, that injured player can be de-registered, and then when the loanee goes back to the parent club, can be re-registered. The club never exceeds the cap, despite spending an extra £5000. Variations on this scenario could answer a lot of the 'how come...?' questions about the cap.

I've seen one or two sensible objections to this theory, but none of them are compelling IMO. On the other hand nobody has ever asked the question, so far as I know.

AP in we are at cap limit shocker, so for all those that derided me about us not having cap space and that we didn't need to sell westerman as I stated to stay under the cap, where are your chiding voices now?
IF and that's a big if, we were to sign Lee Smith that would undermine everything the club has being selling/telling us, i just hope it isn't so, i wouldn't take him if he was playing for nowt.
I find it interesting that mention/rumours of interest in a big name signings when clearly we never had any scope to do so came right at the time of the push to sell passes/memberships

I'm thinking that you are right on this one and we've been mis sold or decieved in order to sell passes whatever the real reason we i feel have not been told the truth and it's all a case of smoke and mirrors with Pearson.
I bought a pass on the strength of the Pritchard signing alone but all this talk of signing Carney or a n other top strike player but then the next be told we are at full cap and are happy with what with have well someone's telling us porkies and having us over.
And as if the case with the cap why sign players we don't need in Washbrook and take Smith on loan?

The point that I was making (labouring ) above, is that you could possibly both be at the cap limit and have room for another signing (by allocating your cap differently). It's a little misleading, but not necessarily untrue.

This would (if true) allow clubs who spend a bit more to down-play this and assign more of their success to developing youngsters, investing in infrastructure and other things considered virtuous. It would also allow clubs who spend less, to be able to say they are at the cap and resist demand to splash more cash from success-hungry fans.

Because it offers most value if you have top-tier, high-earning fed-trained players in your squad, it'd also be another reason why the best british players tend to congregate at a handful of the wealthiest clubs, with the most expensive-looking squads.

AP also said "We are always looking to add one more". Best to speak about the full answer he gave, rather than just one part of it, put's it into context (despite the statement being somewhat ambiguous).

People rightly derided you because you put forward opinion as fact (see your last sentence for example) without the slightest hint of humility. You throw enough mud at a wall some of it will stick as the saying goes.

None of us know what's happened or how it was done, how much space we do or don't have, it's all guesswork. Hopefully someone can ask the right question at the forum and get a clearer answer.