There is a good chance Sonny Bill Williams may not realise it now in the middle of his excellent adventure to Europe, but he is just the unwilling actor in the drama that goes past him and any sport he may choose to play. With Sonny Bill’s decision to break a contract with the Bulldogs and attempt to negotiate a contract with French rugby union club Toulon, we have all the ingredients for a tale of globalisation. There is the quick getaway and movement over space and time by jet, transnational corporate interest, questions of trade and media ethics and influence.

The truth is, if it wasn’t Sonny Bill, it would have been someone else being driven to the airport by Anthony Mundine.

Let us not for a second entertain the thought Sonny Bill is alone in his actions. For a few years now, in other sports such as cricket, we have seen the worth of contracts questioned with the creation of new markets in other parts of the world. It was not too long ago Cricket Australia was being asked whether it would ban or punish players from joining one of the new Twenty20 leagues that had been established in India. In the end, players got their way and took part in the officially sanctioned Indian Premier League, as well as the Indian Cricket League.

Why was Cricket Australia being asked about contracts? Because players, even the best Test cricketers, were seriously considering joining the Twenty20 leagues in India with or without official permission from current world cricket authorities. Yes, they were breaking their contracts.

In Sonny Bill’s case, we have the increasingly well operated and remunerated French rugby union becoming aware of highly skilled workers in a distant part of the world. In effect, they have discovered a new market of fit and tough rugby league footballers, who because of technological and strategic advances in their game [as most sports have experienced], are flexible enough to adapt their skills to the game of rugby. This includes serial boofheads such as Mark Gasnier.

In football, where notions of free agency have most actively been pursued, there have been amendments to European Union law allowing footballers to buy the remainder of their contracts, in effect making most players only contracted to a certain club for two years. Club managers such as Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger have bemoaned the situation, claiming agents have made players mercenaries who have too much power to break contracts. Is this not what league officials such as National Rugby League [NRL] CEO David Gallop fear with Sonny Bill’s departure?

As much as the likes of Gallop and Wenger may complain, the blame does not lie with footballers such as Sonny Bill or Emmanuel Adebayor, but moreso with clubs and the corporations that run professional football competitions. In Europe, the most financially secure clubs had for years threatened to form their own competition, with or without official FIFA or UEFA sanction. This organisation of football clubs, the G14, was only disbanded earlier this year after FIFA agreed to pay compensation to clubs whose players had suffered injuries during international matches.

Let us also not forget the Super League war which almost ruined rugby league only a decade or so ago. Not only did players break their contracts, but entire clubs followed suit by moving themselves off to an apparently more lucrative competition run by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation without the expressed permission of the ARL. Does this sound like the behaviour of always honourable organisations who never break contracts when the prospect of more income comes floating by? The reality is players are only aping their paymasters, one of whom Gallop was a chief lawyer for Super League.

This brings us to and important queation - what role exactly did News Corp play in the departure of Sonny Bill from the NRL? Gallop, in a fiery interview with Phil Gould on Triple M this week, suggested there were rumours of Sonny Bill having “had enough”.

What Gallop conveniently forgot to mention was the constant intrusion of privacy into Sonny Bill’s life by the Daily Telegraph. This was the newspaper which thought it in the public interest to publish some perverted opportunist’s camera phone picture of Sonny Bill in a drunkenly intimate moment with wannabe celebrity and sometime ironwoman Candace Falzon.

It is also a newspaper operated by News Corp, the same corporation which partly owns the NRL. The treatment of Sonny Bill only got worse when he showed off his new best friends, boxer Anthony Mundine and agent Khoder Nasser earlier this year. The pair have long been enemies of the NRL and News Corporation media outlets, with Mundine especially delighting in fanning the flames this week by declaring young, upcoming stars to look after themselves and not show any loyalty to rugby league clubs who he says show no loyalty to them. It is no wonder the Daily Telegraph has wrung its hands in fury declaring severe punishment should Sonny Bill claim restraint of trade. The tabloid media has always loved a scapegoat even in situations when they themselves are to blame.

Any punishment though will be a result of juvenile indignation. If average Penrith TAB dwelling wingers such as Luke Rooney can earn more in a competition while doing less, it is only fair and expected that better NRL footballers such as Sonny Bill and Gasnier will wonder whether they are earning their true worth playing in the NRL. One of the first rules of capitalism is that all wealth is seen as relative. That explains why a footballer earning $500,000 can feel unworthy with the knowledge someone seemingly less talented than them, can collect more money just by standing on the wing during a rugby match.

No, we shouldn’t blame Sonny Bill. Rugby league has always been a sport of challenging trade restraints. It is how it developed in England in 1895, and Australia a decade later when another famous New Zealand international footballer, George William Smith of the All Blacks, went about with entrepreneurial zeal to introduce the new sport to this fair country. It is supremely ironic that just over a century later another Kiwi star is causing a ripple murmuring right into the heart of rugby league.

Photo by: pfala

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