Premiership Rugby out of Heineken Cup?

irishbucsfan wrote: »

From counting the first team profiles on the websites?

Edit: Just had a look at the Quins profiles there... So where is Kyle Sinckler, or Sam Twomey? Are you serious here?

If you add in academy players then you get what's on the PRL website. I preferred to take what the club called senior players and discounted academy players as (1) they get a cash benefit from playing them and (2) they cost a lot less.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Oh right, so you didn't choose to discount any Exeter players then?

You realise some of those cost the exact same as the Quins guys while also earning the same credit?

Also, they don't get a cash benefit from paying them.

No discussion is complete without a table
Northampton don't give exact numbers for their academy but they say they have over 100 from under age up.

Club|Senior Squad|Academy|PRL Squad|Turnover 2012
Exeter|49|11|49|8.3m
Wasps|43|17|44|8.4m
Saracens|41|8|44|7.6m
Leicester|41|38|45|19.5m
Bath|41|9|46|9.6m
Sale|40|8|43|8m
Gloucester|39|14|42|11.3m
Newcastle|38|12|39|6m
Northampton|36|?|41|13.2m
Worcester|36|13|42|7.6m
London Irish|35|8|40|8.2m
Harlequins|34|11|42|12.3m


The word I used was 'playing' not paying, but nevertheless, there's a benefit to clubs from having an academy and it's a cash benefit:

PRL wrote:

Clubs are also encouraged to develop home grown talent by accessing up to eight £30,000 Academy Credits (£240,000), they can provide an unlimited education (academic or vocational) fund to their Players, and can replace long term injured players without impacting on their Salary Cap ceiling. There is also an Academy Salary Cap of £200,000, meaning the total available to clubs is £4.7m (plus the excluded player and injury replacement provisions), a significant increase from the original £1.2m in 1999.

The table above is made up of what the clubs themselves publish and what's on the PRL website. The academy players are separate to the senior squads, they are not double counted. So you add academy to senior to get total players. The PRL figures are a mishmash of both and I'm not bored enough to compare the lists to see who's missing/added/out of date. I've added the turnover figures to give some context to the numbers.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

But anyway, as you can see, there is no gap in squad sizes of 50% like you claimed. And the biggest gap is between Newcastle (Dean Richards is old school and they're newly promoted) and Exeter (who have a pretty large squad without any particular big names).

There is if you discount senior squad players and since academies have a separate salary cap, that's a valid distinction to make.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

No, academies don't gave a seperate salary cap

£200,000 according to PRL.

http://www.premiershiprugby.com/premiership/structure/salary_cap.php#.UmFohttOO6o

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Ah crossed wires, those aren't the same thing at all. Guys like Kyle Sinckler don't come out of that, it's a level below. It is confusing though because every club has a very different academy structure unlike the Provinces so they have the same names for different things.

Not really confusing at all once you realise that clubs have effectively two academies. One is for junior players (usually under 18) and the other is the one referred to in the premiership salary cap article I quoted. Harlequins has that structure and most of the other clubs do too. This is why generally they contain very close to the eight players that receive the thirty grand credit.

The idea that one club has a playing squad 50% larger than another is simply incorrect though. It doesn't exist anywhere. If you say Quins have a squad of 34 players then you are excluding guys who play for Quins regularly. You can't just count pictures on a website and claim that's their squad.

Yes you can. If a club says they have X number of senior players and Y number of academy players then that's what I'm going to count. Especially when you look at the squad list on the premiership site and see that some of the squad is made up of what the club classifies as academy players who are usually around 20 years of age (the maximum age is 24) and have a very small number of senior caps. In Harlequins case only two of their Academy players have more than 10 caps (11 and 13) and the rest either 0 or 5 or less. That's pretty much exactly how it is in the Provincial academies.

Just to make it even clearer; the difference between what the Harlequins website classify as senior players and what the premiership call their squad is exactly the number of academy players that have senior caps: 8 (The max that can attract the credit). The total number of senior caps these eight players have is 38 which is an average of less than 5 senior appearances. Take out the two with more than ten caps and the remaining six have an average of 2.3 caps each.

These are clearly the guys who attract the thirty grand credit and who's salary is only counted over thirty grand (i.e an academy player who earns forty grand only has ten grand of that counted in the main salary cap). So when comparing squads within the main salary cap, this is a perfectly valid distinction to make. Adding them to the main squad is fudging the picture.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Sorry but you're just twisting the numbers to suit your argument which was completely incorrect.

No I'm not, that's what you do.

Interesting to see that premiershiprugby.com do include Sinckler and Walker. So the number they have is probably a lot closer to being accurate.

Yes they do, have another look.

My point is made, I'm not trying to persuade you since you have a complete blind spot where PRL are concerned, my posts are there for others to see.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

So what is your point then? Because no one's squad is 50% bigger than anyone else's. That's what you said.

Also interesting to see how many players among those pictures you counted on the Exeter site are elligible for that credit.

So do you concede that my number of senior players for Harlequins is the correct figure with regard to the salary cap?

A simple yes or no will suffice.