What price do you put on loyalty to your favourite sporting team? Surely loyalty is priceless?

As a fan, you're with them through the good times, the great times and the terrifyingly awful times. Through thick and thin.

You hope your favourite players feel the same, and there's plenty of respect for players who spend their entire career with the one club.

We don't blame professional athletes who take the opportunity to join a club which offers the chance to dominate and collect trophies, or a club which offers a compelling pay day.

But what happens when you're playing for the Country Rugby League's Group 4 Premiership?

When your hometown team assembles a star-studded roster of former professionals and talented amateurs to join local players, it's a great year for the club.

But what if your hometown team misses out on the premiership? Do the players then walk away to join the next best opportunity?

The fancy new player points system proposed by NSW Rugby League aims to balance the scales so each club has a decent chance of making finals and hopefully ending that Premiership drought.

It's not unusual for cashed-up clubs to pay big dollars for talent to play. By assigning players points and giving each club a limit on the number of points they can use, organisers hope to put an end to players jumping ship at year's end.

The chairman of Group 10, the competition based in Orange and Bathurst in NSW's Central West, Linore Zamparini sees this as an incentive for clubs to focus on developing their junior players.

"If those juniors don't come through and get developed, then you have to bring in people from outside, and it's going to cost you a lot more and a lot more points," he said.

Out at Griffith in the NSW Riverina, one Group 20 club president is worried the points system will mean clubs have to work harder to retain their current players (subscribers to The Area News can read about that here).

"But the onus seems to be on the clubs to do a lot of work. I can see why they have done it because players are changing clubs every second season for an extra dollar," Griffith Black and Whites president Craig O'Keefe said.

In the neighbouring town of Yenda, the Blueheelers' president Sam Panarello said young players saw the lack of loyalty from some professionals and it filtered down, eventually creating a bidding war small clubs could ill-afford.

There's clubs which are backed with a huge supporter base which feed the club's coffers. Some have big sponsors and others use volunteers to arrange huge fundraising events to support their clubs.

But there are questions about who determines the points clubs get, what a player is worth and how a the sliding scale applies when a club wins that Premiership or the dreaded wooden spoon.

Keeping country footy competitive is in the interest of clubs no matter the competition.

If using a points system to put downward pressure on player payments succeeds and leads to better football, that's a win for the punters on the sidelines.

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