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The Rabbitohs losing superstar young gun Joseph Suaalii to the Roosters will “go down as one of the great dumb moves in South Sydney history” and an embarrassing example of salary “cap mismanagement”.
As the two fierce rivals prepare to face off this weekend in the sold-out opening fixture at the new Allianz Stadium, Suaalii will meet his old side for the first time in the NRL.
A former Souths junior, he was poached by Sydney in 2020 after contract negotiations dragged on for months – and with Rugby Australia also in the hunt for his signature.
Former Rabbitohs head of football Shane Richardson this week told News Corp the club ‘couldn’t match’ the Roosters’ offer – and didn’t want to pay up given superstar Latrell Mitchell owned the number one jersey.
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Richardson said: “And we had Latrell Mitchell. He was always going to play fullback. We would have like to have retained him but at the end of the day we felt we could use the money elsewhere to have a more rounded side.
“We didn’t want him to go but the Roosters offered him too much money and we couldn’t match it. He is a freak athlete, there is no doubt about it.”
But veteran rugby league journalist Paul Kent rubbished those claims, telling NRL 360: “I don’t get that. They’ve mismanaged their cap. There’s no way in the world you let a guy like that go. They had invested a lot of money into him, and when they finally got to a point where they are about to get a dividend on it, they let him go. They let him get poached by the Roosters of all clubs.
“It’ll go down as one of the great dumb moves in South Sydney history that they let this kid go.”
“I was shocked by that,” Braith Anasta replied.
The Daily Telegraph’s senior league journalist Paul Crawley said: “They kept players who Suaalii has passed now. He was always destined – this guy is destined for greatness. So if you can keep him at your club, you keep him … this is a guy you would have moved heaven and earth to keep.”
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While Richardson noted Mitchell was a lock in the fullback role at Souths, the Roosters had a similarly world-class player in that role in James Tedesco. Yet 19-year-old Suaalii has become a standout on the right wing as he continues his rapid rise.
Kent declared: “They’ve (Sydney) found a way to make it work … for South Sydney to sit there and offer this excuse that they had Latrell at fullback so they had nowhere else to play (him), it just doesn’t cut it.”
Dave Riccio replied: “Cap issues for sure. It has to be cap issues, cap mismanagement.”
Kent continued: “It’s mismanagement. The other part of it is, when you’ve got these players who have got gold plated futures ahead of them, you find a way to keep him at your club.
“They could have got him for unders to stay, whatever the Roosters are paying him would have been more than what South Sydney were paying him. They could have got him unders to stay, but they let him go. To get a player of similar calibre back, you’ve got to pay well above what they’re paying him now.”
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Riccio also blasted Rugby Australia’s mooted bid to poach Suaalii, a talented rugby union player at the King’s School who represented NSW Schoolboys and then the Australian Schoolboys U18 Rugby Sevens.
The Daily Telegraph today reported Suaalii is top of RA’s list of NRL stars that could become Wallabies, with the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour and the 2027 World Cup in Australia on the horizon. The report raised the prospect of a whopping $2m per year deal over five years.
But Riccio blasted the report, saying: “How embarrassing for Australian rugby union. These guys are sitting in their own nest as schoolboys. They have the opportunity to develop these players into rugby union players at that point in time.
“So now there’s discussions of offering Suaalii two million dollars a season after you’ve already had him in your back pocket as a schoolboy! It’s farcical. It’s embarrassing that the Roosters, an NRL club, are doing a better job at identifying talent than an entire code.”
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