SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - JUNE 03: Daly Cherry-Evans of the Sea Eagles speaks at a Manly Sea Eagles NRL press conference at Sydney Academy of Sport on June 3, 2015 in Sydney, Australia. Cherry-Evans has signed a life-time NRL deal with the Manly Sea Eagles after reneging on a contract with the Gold Coast Titans. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
While some fans may have forgotten the dreaded round 13 rule and the havoc it caused amongst NRL club’s up until 2015, the repercussions of this questionable rule are still being felt in the NRL to this day.
To put it briefly, what the round 13 rule allowed players to do was allow any player that had signed a contract with another club for the following season to renege on their commitment and instead re-sign with their current club prior to the round 13 deadline.
First implemented in 2008, the controversial ruling was scrapped in mid-2015 following the now infamous Daly Cherry-Evans saga, after Cherry-Evans backed out of his four-year contract with the Gold Coast Titans to instead re-sign on a lifetime deal with the Sea Eagles worth roughly $1.3 million annually.
Here are the top five contract backflips in the NRL era.
Unbeknownst to most, Luke Lewis was actually the first player to exploit the NRL’s round 13 rule back in 2008.
After being offered a four-year, $350,000 per season deal by the Rabbitohs to leave his junior club, Lewis agreed to terms and signed on the dotted line with the Bunnies.
After initially offering him a contract worth roughly half of what the Rabbitohs put on the table, the Panthers sensationally came back to the table offering Lewis the same financial terms.
While he admitted that he did “feel a bit guilty” about going back on his word, the idea of leaving the Panthers and his family was too much for the Penrith junior.
After making a name for himself as a dynamic and bruising second rower over the first two seasons of his career in the nation’s capital, Josh Papalii shocked the NRL when he declared that “I want to play under Ricky Stuart” and signed a three-year deal with the Parramatta Eels in late February of 2013.
Still only 20-years-old at the time and with reservations about leaving his family and friends in Canberra, rumours of Papalii getting cold feet about his new deal to leave the Raiders began circulating almost immediately.
Only two weeks after the ink dried on his Eels contract, Papalii announced that he would instead be remaining at the Raiders thanks to a new contract tying him down until the end of 2016, reneging on his contract with the blue and gold.
Funnily enough, Papalii ended up playing under Ricky Stuart only a year later, when Stuart was released from the remaining two years of his contract with Parramatta in order to continue his coaching career at his beloved Raiders.
After suffering consistent injuries over the first two years of his career but showing great promise, the Canberra Raiders took a leap of faith in late May 2014. Having only played 25 NRL games to date, the Raiders signed James Tedesco to a huge three-year, $650,000 per season deal.
Having benefitted from the round 13 rule thanks to Josh Papalii’s decision to backflip on a deal with the Eels and remain with the Raiders the year previously, the Raiders would not be so lucky this time.
Only a week after signing for the green machine, Tedesco informed Raiders officials that he would instead be staying at the Tigers, sacrificing nearly $500,000 over the course of his three-year deal in order to remain at his junior club.
Tedesco is said to have been swayed by club captain Robbie Farah as well as finding it hard to walk away from the extremely strong bond he had developed with fellow stars, Luke Brooks and Aaron Woods.
When the notion of backflipping on contracts is discussed, the name Daly Cherry-Evans almost always follows suit. While he may not have performed the most significant backflip in the NRL, DCE can stake the dishonourable claim to be the reason behind the scrapping of the round 13 rule.
After making a name for himself as one of the NRL’s premier halfbacks over the first four years of his career, Cherry-Evans signed the biggest contract in the game’s history in March of 2015, a four-year, $4 million deal with perennial battlers the Gold Coast Titans.
Facing the prospect of losing both Cherry-Evans and his halves partner Kieran Foran after committing to a deal with the Parramatta Eels, the Sea Eagles came to the table with the biggest contract in NRL history.
Two months after committing his future to the struggling Titans, DCE and the Sea Eagles announced on the 3rd of June that he would be “at Manly for the rest of his career” signing an eight-year, $1.3 million per year deal with the silvertails.
Having admitted at his re-signing press conference with the Sea Eagles that he was never fully intent on joining the Titans, saying that he “definitely left the door open for this speculation to continue because, to be honest, I was always curious to know what offer was going to be on the table from Manly”, Cherry-Evans comments put the nail in the coffin of the controversial round 13 rule.
After the Melbourne Storm’s dirty laundry was aired for all to see in 2010 in the form of their disgraceful salary cap cheating, Melbourne had to release some of their biggest earners to become salary cap compliant.
Subsequently, Greg Inglis announced that he would be joining the Brisbane Broncos after agreeing to a handshake deal in August 2010.
While originally firmly committed to joining the Broncos, Inglis had a change of heart after a delay in signing the official documents thanks to an examination of the third-party deal’s associated with his new contract.
The now Souths legend later signed with the Rabbitohs on a three-year, $1.8 million deal. Inglis is said to have been heavily influenced by Rabbitohs owner Russell Crowe as well as the great connection between the Rabbitohs and their indigenous community.
Unbeknownst to most, while waiting for his Rabbitohs contract to be registered with the NRL following substantial delays due to the Bunnies being over the salary cap following the acquisition of Inglis, he almost signed for cross-code rivals the Essendon Bombers in the AFL after a meeting with coach James Hird.
Inglis later said that he had “pretty much put a deadline on it, saying if it’s not done on Christmas Day then I’ll be walking away”, luckily for rugby league fans everywhere the documents were registered on Christmas Eve, and Inglis went onto become the legend we now know.