The Welsh Rugby Union may block Cardiff from offloading Wales pair Josh Adams and Liam Williams.
Adams is the primary recruitment target of French club Lyon, who are prepared to pay a transfer fee, while Williams is on the shopping list of numerous sides in Japan.
Welsh rugby is in the throes of a financial crisis, with wages set to be aggressively pushed down next season along with the playing budget. This inevitably means the regions may have to explore the possibility of getting some of their more expensive players off the wage bill, with Adams and Williams falling into that bracket.
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“Players are looking at options elsewhere but we have had no formal approaches from any clubs for our players to date,” Cardiff director of rugby Dai Young told a press conference on Thursday.
“It would need to be a tri-party agreement anyway with the player, his region and the WRU if someone wanted to leave. Even if we said we were happy to release a player, the WRU would have to agree to it as well if they were a national squad member.”
Moving forward, the regions will have to honour the existing contracts of NS38 players (players of interest to the senior Wales squad) without the WRU effectively paying 80% of their wages, which they do now, meaning meaning there will be very little money left to contract others.
This makes the prospect of a transfer fee from a French or Japanese club attractive to a club like Cardiff, especially considering they will hardly see their front-line Wales players next season due to the Rugby World Cup. However, as part of the new Welsh rugby agreement about to be signed, a region could lose funding if they allow a player who is in the "national interest 38" move on without having made "reasonable endeavours" to retain his services.
"There is some money coming our way for one season for our National Squad 38 players," said Young. "If they are contracted for the season after, there is no extra contribution.
"These are players who were valued by the WRU, and we had no dealing in setting their pay. We then put our hand up if we were interested. We did that on the basis we were going to pay only 20%.
"There would be an argument for getting those players off our books before we have to pay the full amount for them, but there will be stipulations attached to the money we are getting off the WRU.
"There is no way we would get funding from them if we just let all our international players go. There are guard rails to stop that happening to try to stop every national player to leave to play elsewhere. As part of the funding agreement, we have to have so many national squad members in our squad."
Next season Young will have to operate with a squad which has had £2million slashed off its playing budget and still has 21 players left in contract. That has left the former Wales prop with £400,000 to spend on around 15 players to complete his squad for 2023-24.
“Next year is a case of re-setting the whole system. It is going to be difficult, but I’m confident that after that we can put plans in place to start moving forward,” said Young. “We were spending £7m+ and now we can only afford £5.2m. The game can’t sustain the levels of spending.
“We’ve seen what’s happened in England and all these decisions have been taken on the basis of making the game sustainable, so we don’t get a Wasps or Worcester Warriors scenario.
“The actual budget we are having isn’t sufficient to put a decent squad together, let alone to have one that can take us forward. We’ve got to make the best out of what we’ve got and try to put on the field a squad that can be as competitive as possible.
“After next season you would like to think we can look forward. This is better than possibly losing a region, but only as long as there is a plan to get out of it. That’s the biggest thing. If next season is a re-set year with a plan to move forward, then it will be worthwhile, but this isn’t something we could do every year.”
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