LONDON: English Premiership clubs will have an additional £500,000 ($820,578, 606,730 euros) to spend on players next season after agreeing an increase in the salary cap, it was announced yesterday.
Premiership Rugby’s board voted to increase the salary cap from £4.26m to £4.76m but officials insisted the move had nothing to do with trying to prevent players leaving England for offers from wealthy French clubs in particular.
And with academy credit ‘add-ons’, clubs will be able to spend up to £5m without breaching the salary cap.
The first £30,000 of any club academy graduate, up to a limit of eight players, can be added on to the £4.76m ‘limit’.
Meanwhile, Premiership clubs will still have the option of signing an “excluded player”, allowing them to spend an unlimited amount on one star name whose pay falls outside the salary cap structure.
Recently, Leicester and England fly-half Toby Flood announced he would be playing in France next season, following a lucrative path already trodden by England great Jonny Wilkinson and several other players.
Japanese clubs have also been keen to ‘splash the cash’ on marquee foreign players in a bid to raise the standard of their game ahead of the country’s staging of the 2019 World Cup.
But the Premiership’s director of rugby, Phil Winstanley, insisted the salary cap rise was not a defensive measure but a response to rising broadcast and sponsorship income from satellite channel BT and main backer Aviva, an insurance company.
“A lot of people will reach their own conclusions that we’re trying to combat the French or Japanese market,” Winstanley said. “And that’s very much not the case.
Goodell says extra point may get the boot
New York: The NFL could eliminate the extra point as part of its scoring system as the kick has become virtually “automatic”, Commissioner Roger Goodell has told NFL Network.
In an interview, Goodell said the NFL’s Competition Committee was looking at proposals to get rid of the short kick that automatically follows a touchdown.
“The extra point is almost automatic,” Goodell told the NFL Network. “I believe we had five missed extra points this year out of 1,200 some odd (attempts). So it’s a very small fraction of the play, and you want to add excitement with every play.”
One option could be to award seven points for a touchdown instead of six, Goodell said.
He did not specify the likelihood of changes to the scoring system or provide a timeline for such a move Reuters
