The Million-Pound Deal the Rulebook Won't Let Henry Pollock Have

Eddie Hearn says his client Henry Pollock will be asking Northampton for £1m a season. The number is not the problem. The problem is a rulebook that was written, quite deliberately, to make deals like that almost impossible to sign — and nothing in it currently bends in Pollock's favour.

£6.4m, split across an entire squad

Start with the simple version, because everything that follows is a variation on it. Every Prem club has £6.4m to spend on player salaries. Not per player, not per position group — the whole squad, added up, has to land at or under that line.

A £1m salary therefore eats roughly one sixth of a club's entire wage budget on a single 21-year-old back row. It is not illegal. It is simply arithmetic that very few squads can survive.

Reading the most recent published cap report, from 2024-25, only Newcastle looked like they had that kind of daylight. That data is now out of date in the most dramatic way possible: since the Red Bull takeover they have been signing — Raffi Quirke and Hoskins Sotutu among them — and nobody outside the club knows what is left.

The 2026-27 season also introduces the other end of the rule: a salary cap floor of £5.4m, a minimum clubs must spend. That sounds like it should help a player chasing a big number. It does the opposite. It narrows the usable band to £1m across an entire squad, which is precisely the amount Pollock's agent is asking one club to hand to one man.

Northampton's version of the maths

If Pollock wants to stay at Franklin's Gardens — and there is no indication he does not — the cap space for a £1m deal is not there.

There is a theoretical route: cut everyone else. Several of Pollock's team-mates are up for renegotiation this year, and if the club drove those numbers down hard enough, the room would appear. It is also a fast way to gut a dressing room that reached the top of the English game, and no serious sporting director treats it as a plan.

The excluded player: rugby's escape hatch, and its lock

Every cap has a release valve. In the Prem it is the excluded player — the marquee man, in older language — whose salary sits outside the £6.4m. One obvious answer, then: make Pollock the excluded player.

Regulation 3.26 closes that door immediately. To be nominated, a player must have "been a player of that club for at least two full salary cap years prior to the salary cap year in which they are nominated". Pollock cannot become Northampton's excluded player next season. He can only be declared as one further down the line.

The reason is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It stops clubs poaching each other's stars with an instant cap exemption, and it stops back-loaded contracts — a trick the league watched play out during the pandemic, when clubs agreed inflated future pay before the reduced cap regulations landed, so the money would never count against it.

One more thing worth knowing before we go further: a Prem player moving to another Prem club is not treated the same as a player arriving from outside the league. So the obvious comparison — Finn Russell at Bath — is the wrong template. Different rules, different route in.

"Averaging": the rule that quietly kills the £1m

Assume, for a moment, that the two-year wait is served and Pollock is duly nominated. He still does not get a clean £1m outside the cap, because of a mechanism called averaging, buried in regulation 3.28.2.

The regulation itself is long and unlovely. The principle is not: what protects the club is the player's average pay over three years, and anything above that average comes straight back inside the cap.

That is the whole trap. The exemption is real, but it is anchored to what the player was already being paid — so it rewards long-serving squad men on a gradual climb, not a young forward whose market value has exploded in a single season. It also blocks the cynical version outright: you cannot pay a star £5m in year one and £100 in years two and three, then rotate a new name through the slot every summer.

The slot may already be taken — and nobody has to say

There is a final complication, and it is a strange one. The identity of excluded players is confidential. In the regulations' own words, "a club is not entitled to know the identity of the excluded players of other clubs". You can guess, you can assume, you can even ask the player directly. No club is obliged to confirm anything.

Which means the scenario nobody can rule out is the likeliest one: Northampton may already have someone nominated in that slot. Moving it to Pollock would mean unpicking years of cap calculations that were built around a different name.

Why the league defends a system that looks broken

From the outside this reads as an artificially rigged market — a 21-year-old with genuine global appeal told the ceiling is the ceiling. From the inside it is a survival mechanism. Wasps, Worcester and London Irish are the argument, and it is not a theoretical one.

The league's counter-numbers are healthy. Prem Rugby says it is forecast to post record revenues of more than £200m this year, with growth expected again after that. And with six different champions in seven seasons, competitiveness is hard to argue with.

The pressure to lift the cap is nonetheless building. Saracens have argued for higher limits for years, and with promotion and relegation now removed, the league's stability is settled enough for that debate to become the next one. Prem Rugby's line is that any structural change "would always go through a full club consultation" before the men's professional Rugby Board — while framing the scrapping of relegation as a separate strategic call, one aimed at investment certainty and already visible in Red Bull at Newcastle, Black Knight Rugby at Exeter and Sir James Dyson's money at Bath.

The million is out there — just not on a club contract

Here is the part the cap has no jurisdiction over. Commercial income sits entirely outside it, and for the sport's genuine crossover names it dwarfs the playing salary. Ilona Maher, Siya Kolisi and Ellie Kildunne are the current proof.

Pollock — 21, England international, already one of the most marketable figures in the English game — belongs in that conversation. If a seven-figure year arrives, the likeliest source is not a club's payroll department.