Loose Pass: Saracens saga leaves a sour taste

Adam Kyriacou

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the rules, although refreshingly, not the ones on the field…

A truly superb piece of juxtaposition is currently to be found on a British national newspaper’s website at the moment. At the top of the page is the headline: ‘Saracens docked 35 points and fined £5 million for salary cap breaches’. One block below is a review of Saracens’ European Cup triumph in May, entitled: ‘Saracens set the template for what a top-notch rugby club should be’. You couldn’t make it up.

Nigel Wray’s impassioned defence of the club’s circumnavigation of Premier Rugby’s salary cap holds no water with this column. So many things the club has done right over the years, so many times they have indeed set that template. They’ve created competitive advantage and excelled in so many aspects of running a rugby club.

But when the foundation of it all is a clear breach of the rules designed to ensure fair competition between all rather than to allow rich people to buy success, then there is no more advantage any more. Nor is there a template. There’s nothing but a sour taste. The sourest of all in fact. For if the findings of the judiciary stand up to appeal, this is institutionalised cheating of the worst kind.

And it doesn’t look good. Wray is protesting about his principles, philanthropic ones such as looking after players and ensuring they have futures after rugby and such, but this is an investigation into facts, not principles. And the facts stand pretty clear when you take the amount of the fine into question: three pounds for every one pound over the cap, so that means Sarries have been over the cap by some 1.78m per season.

Also pretty clear is that Wray’s investments into players’ businesses are almost bound to count as incentives to anybody’s mind. Philanthropic and useful and such they may be, but if you were a player choosing between two clubs, both offering half a mill a year but with one offering to set you up a business and plough a load of start-up capital into it for you, which club would you choose?

And finally, it can’t be as if they didn’t expect something to come. Both Saracens and Bath were dealt with in 2015 behind closed doors by Premier Rugby – as murky a handling of a similar situation as there could be – and the fine covers pretty much the whole time since then. You have to assume at least some of this ground was covered back then, yet Wray just carried on, through whatever loophole he thought he could find.

Saracens are expected to argue at the appeal that the salary cap itself is anti-competitive, while the plea also insists that there has been openness and honesty all along the way so why suddenly punish now? Except, of course, the ‘administrative oversight’ that led to some of the information not being disclosed, nor the non-disclosure of the investments into businesses with Owen Farrell, the Vunipola brothers and Richard Wigglesworth.

For the large Saracens contingent returning from the excellent World Cup campaign, this must have been a hammer blow, however. It’s as ill-timed for them as it is for rugby as a whole. And Premier Rugby does not come out of it smelling of roses; questions arise there too.

Such as: was there no way, if Saracens have been open with so many of these investments all along, to have stopped this before it started? Furthermore – and perhaps more pertinent in this case, should clubs with more productive academies creating more home-grown players not be rewarded with some kind of leeway?

As Maro Itoje, for example, shot to prominence, his salary possibilities must have shot up with him. Should a club be ‘forced’ to cheat to accommodate his new superstar salary or are we to descend into NFL culture, where one’s increased salary is the brutal, sudden end of another’s contract?

And finally, if Saracens really had been cheating like this for three seasons, why, harsh though this judgement is, has it not become the ultimate sanction, which would be to strip the club of its titles won by dishonest means? Does this represent a lack of conviction in the verdict?

But among this all is one very pertinent question: what about the players? Saracens are renowned for their solidarity and both soundbites and performance at Gloucester on Saturday back this up. But long-term, some of those players are going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time with Wray working out how to curtail their salaries to suit the cap.

Which begs one final question: We don’t think Wray has done a bad thing ensuring that well-serving players have something to fall into when the playing days are over. But wouldn’t it simply have been easier to help them on their way the day they stopped playing, so the salary cap would have stayed intact?

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan

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