Originally Posted by archibalduk

That seems to support my estimates. It's difficult to find details of the current salary cap, but people in the know about the financial side of the EIHL have suggested it's approx £7,000 - £7,300 per week. So that's the equivalent of £364,000 - £379,600 per annum. That is of course based on a 52 week year whereas I believe most/all hockey players are not paid during parts of the off-season.

It was "common knowledge" that when Stevie Lyle was at Basingstoke (when they were still in the EIHL in 2007) that he was earning about £850 - £900 per week. So that's about £46,800 per annum.

Apparently the top British players (i.e. those on the top two lines at the richer clubs) earn about £1,000+ per week. So that's £50,000+ per annum. The imports in fact earn less (but they get the various other benefits we've mentioned before).

Additional things we need to take into account are:

* The various extras that players get (e.g. rent and tuition fees). Tuition fees for UK students are now about £9,000 per year depending on the university - it's normally even higher for foreigners (I remember in 2002 foreign students at my uni were paying nearly £20,000 per annum compared to about the £3,000 I was paying). Depending on the size of the player's family (and whether they come to live in the UK from North America, etc), rent could be a fair bit - particularly seeing as most teams are in a city centre (certainly the richer teams are). So this probably brings the imports up to the same sort of salary as the top British players if you were to put a monetary value on these sorts of benefits (at the richer clubs at least).

* The richer clubs (e.g. Nottingham, Sheffield, etc) have a reputation for having salary bills above the salary cap. The cap is never enforced by the EIHL as far as I'm aware.

* There is a huge divergence in the salaries offered by different teams because there is a huge divergence in wealth.

So this is why I'm thinking we should initially be set the maximum salary at about £60,000 per annum and we see how that looks in game. How does that match up with the French maximum salary?

DISCLAIMER: All of the above is based on hearsay from others (either having read online or having spoken to people). The league and teams keep all of this stuff private and so it's difficult to know what's right and what's wrong.