A young Samoan I’d never heard of until a week ago, Sonny Bill Williams (SBW), has just played his first match for Toulon. He’s now a rugby union player in Europe having bunked off from a five-year contract with NRL side Canterbury Bulldogs.

By all accounts he could make quite an impact in union, but by turning out in France, he is now in contempt of court in New South Wales – surely a new precedent in either rugby code. Contempt of court is something you can do without, whatever your walk of life is.

The measures taken by the NRL and the Bulldogs to pursue the legal avenue surely confirm just how high the stakes really are. The expenditure to date in this case is sizeable. It seems now to be a sort of Mexican stand-off where the NRL/Bulldogs are playing the game of obligation while SBW and his advocates hope to string this out until it’s not viable for the Bulldogs/NRL to continue it any longer. What happens next will determine how future cases are handled. It is looking like a seminal battle in the war of the rugby wallets.

Whether a contract like the one SBW signed with Bulldogs is binding, flexible, negotiable or anything else one cares to conjure seems to depend on who did your negotiating at the time (ie. who you can get to represent you) and how the movers and shakers in the game rate you. Jerry Collins had only minimal resistance to altering ‘binding’ contracts. I don’t do contract law but I know full well that it keeps a great many people in full-time employment.

What concerns me more is that not too long ago a certain code pilfered union players by exploiting their financial insecurity and, in doing so, damaged rugby union. League broke up teams and even national sides, all in the cause of the wallet. We were all not only critical; we found this sabotage of rugby union repulsive. At one point Wales lost 18 union internationals in a two-year period. See the similarity?

It is the same process but this time around union has the bigger cheque book. The Sonny Bill Williams case is not about a young athlete’s freedom of choice. No functional sports franchise or club wants a player that does not want be there and his departure from the Bulldogs would have been inevitable.

It’s about rugby union, the formerly injured party, displaying a certain amnesiac quality coupled with a moral flexibility that leads to it damaging another code. The relationship with rugby league is many things but, as with a divorcee, a plaintiff, any adversary you care to name, it is always better to have a working, functional relationship. What it boils down to is damage limitation.

SBW is here. He will play in the Top 14, a European competition, and has expressed a desire to play for the All Blacks. He is here, in union, in Europe and thus we have a choice to make now before this process of plunder and exploitation becomes the norm – be part of the problem or part of the solution.

The solution means applying some probity to the business of rugby. It is time to ask just what values we hold and whether to stick with them or the power of the wallet. I say for a start that players under contract must be off limits.