“The cap is there for a reason,” Richard Cockerill, the Leicester director of rugby, said. “It is a good thing because it keeps the league competitive. For sides like ourselves, Gloucester and [Northampton] Saints who pay our own bills and have a robust financial structure then we spend what we can afford to spend. That is a good model to be part of. You would like it to be loosened in bits to compete in Europe. There is no point having one or two sides who can spend £15 million and the rest £5 million or £6 million because that makes the league pretty uneven domestically. We can only afford to spend what we’ve got. We are a plc. We are not in debt and at this point that is exactly how we want to stay.”