Richie Barnett: Now the heat goes on other clubs

Cameron Smith of the Storm warms up during a training session. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. League has been rocked to its core by Melbourne's dark deeds.

They are cheats. That much is clear. The Storm have cheated their way to two NRL titles, robbing the fans, robbing other clubs and robbing other players, while dirtying the image of their sport. Way to go, guys.

Yes, they robbed other players - Manly and Parramatta will know they should have been champions. And you can be certain the fans have been robbed, as surely as if they were paying to watch clean athletes run against drug cheats.

Melbourne have been caught taking financial steroids; loading up on crooked numbers to get an unfair head start.

The big-name players - guys like Billy Slater, Cooper Cronk, Cameron Smith and Greg Inglis - don't come cheap.

I can't recall any sports team getting punished so hard. The Storm made history with their sudden burst to success, and their downfall has been just as dramatic.

NRL chief executive David Gallop has to ask some very hard questions: How was a rort of this magnitude allowed to go on for so long? But the toughest question of all is yet to come: Are there any other clubs running two sets of books?

This puts pressure on all clubs; they will be getting audited all over again.

A lot of NRL general managers will be looking nervously at their accountants in the days ahead. I sincerely hope that this disgrace is the bottom of the well and not the harbinger of further grim revelations.

You can make a strong case for doing away with the salary cap altogether. You can argue that it prevents athletes from earning to their full potential. Personally, I'm for some form of salary cap, but I think players should be able to earn commercially outside of the cap. No other business puts such a heavy restraint of trade on its people.

The game is run in a way that looks after the owners - News Ltd and Fox - not the clubs. A lot of the clubs want News Ltd and Fox out of the game. By putting the cap in place on the clubs, it tightens up the payment that the game's owners have to make to the clubs.

They get away with paying the clubs a minimal share, compared to the revenue they take out of the game, which is somewhere around A$150 million. The clubs only see A$50 million of that. That's about A$3 million per club. And they're capped at A$4 million.

The cap is costing league big name players; you have to wonder if it's viable to keep 25 players on your books with the rate of injuries these days.

But the rules are the rules. And the Storm broke the rules. The Melbourne Storm will forever be known as league's biggest cheats.