Saracens What Next?

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Saracens Rugby Club are having talks with their players one on one this week to determine everyone's future. I am sure it will be with the players who are on extremely high salaries only though as they need to find a reported £2 Million Pounds in savings. I don't believe this though as I feel the figure is much higher. If it was easy the club would have made salary cuts already and possibly have still leaving them way short. I believe the real figure is over £10 Million as £2 Million would be fairly easy to resolve.

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Itoje uses up nearly 17% of the salary cap on his own.

The salary cap ( £ 5 Million)was put in place to prevent clubs getting into financial difficulty and to protect the entire league. We have seen with the Premier Football league what can happen especially with player salaries. This cap was designed to keep everything in check and make the clubs a viable business that could last. Remember they do not receive fat checks from the television revenue like the foot ball clubs do and it is about running a normal sensible business.

Revenue comes from normal formats like selling advertising, season tickets to supporters and hosting events that bring in much needed capital. Luckily for the clubs most of them are owned by rich businessman and these money making events help , but don't cover all the expenses. From what I have seen most of the clubs run at some type of loss or just break even.

The Gallagher Premier League that they play in doesn't offer much financial reward and is the ticket to make some extra money by qualifying for the European Cup which offers more financial rewards playing against everyone in Europe. The Gallagher premiership offers around £500 000 Pounds for all the 12 teams competing whereas the European Cup offers that for the winner.This is the equivalent of the Champions League, but for Rugby.

If you won both trophies in the two rugby tournaments you would only just make over 10 percent of your salary cap so you can see they need to make extra from all their other revenue sources. having millionaires owning these clubs has been good and bad as the clubs should be making ends meet without having to dip into someones deep pockets.

Saracens have obviously never made ends meet as it is reported that they have flouted the salary cap for at least the last 6 years now. They have two options in order to survive going forward and some thinking out of the box is now required. The first option is to reduce all the salaries of the players by probably as much as 50 percent. These players wouldn't be making those salaries playing in England so they have little choice, but to accept them.

The second choice is to keep the players and lease them out to other clubs and to possibly make another revenue stream by having some international teams play special money making games whilst they are in the second division next season. The way the England selection criteria are based they need their squad to be playing against the top players and the second division or championship is not ideal. Playing in France would currently rule them out for selection purposes as well which may need to be addressed.

The players that are selected for England get paid for being in the set up and possibly the answer is for England to cover their wage bill. Own Farrell is reported to be on £750 000 per season with Saracens and Maro Itoje £830,000 per year. Looking at just these two players suggests that Saracens are way over the £5 Million wage cap and I don't believe it is just £2 Million either and my head tells me it is more likely double. This is why they refused to let anyone look at their books as the true story would come out.

The answer for going forward is to let the players play anywhere and still be eligible for England selection. This makes sense allowing the players to play for whoever they want to not restricting them in how much they can earn.