It is the fine line of professional sports - maintaining integrity of your rules and processes, while still allowing for your cash cows to strut their stuff.
The NRL has been frowning this week as all the fanfare about the return of "failed" rugby union convert Sam Burgess to his true home at Redfern Oval for the South Sydney Rabbitohs has reached an inconvenient truth.
Burgess, who one could argue is worth every cent to Souths after he won them the 2014 Premiership with a broken cheekbone, found some consolation for his unsuccessful 12-month sojourn to try and win the Rugby World Cup with a speculated A$1.5 million per year offer to go back to his adopted home.
As of Thursday, however, the NRL got the calculators out and blocked the deal as Souths are now over the much vaunted player salary cap - basically a restriction to pay all their talent no more than an estimated A$7.5m per club every year.
Souths were looking to turn a negative into a positive - having released troubled centre Dylan Walker after a prescription drug scandal and simply adding his salary into the Burgess pot.
Fairfax Media reported the NRL has ruled Souths must offload more talent if they want to fit under the threshold for the 2016 season.
Note the key phrase is - "offload more talent" - it's not like they're telling Souths to just give up on Burgess or ask him if they can re-negotiate for perhaps a couple of hundred thousand less.
Chris McQueen, a State of Origin player for Queensland, is rumoured to be looking at a deal with the Penrith Panthers and instead of Souths being vigorous to find a way to keep the workhorse back rower - the type to be the backbone of any premiership-calibre outfit - they may actually need to give him a gentle push out the door to accommodate their incoming star.
These moments almost always rankle and cause professional jealousy amongst young men in a competitive club environment. And professional can turn personal pretty quickly in contact sports.
How many young juniors at Souths may have to leave their home and families to ply their craft at another club in Sydney or some other part of the country because the Rabbitohs can't afford to keep them?
And, if they themselves become stars elsewhere, how much harder will they play against Souths when they meet them again, just to prove a point?
Another debate about deserved opportunity versus unfair advantage was raised on Monday as Nascar's long 36-race season came to an end with the crowning of new Sprint Cup champion Kyle Busch at the Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Busch had a horror start to 2015 when he broke his right leg and left foot in a horrific crash in a Nascar Xfinity race - the division below Sprint Cup - in January at Daytona.
To be fair, it is a great comeback story as Busch underwent a painful but determined rehabilitation and re-entered the Sprint Cup when the season was 11 races old.
Nascar granted the Toyota driver a waiver for his long absence, which would normally rule a driver ineligible for the championship, so he could make the "Chase for the Sprint Cup" at the end of the season, so long as he won a race and finished in the Top 30 of points - both which Busch obliged.
Trying to make their brand of American motorsport more exciting, Nascar has tinkered with their rules constantly over the last few years by taking their Top 16 drivers near the end of the season and putting them in a "Chase" - where four are eliminated in three race blocks and then the best finisher out of the final four wins the title at the Homestead race.
I say best finisher because all the other cars in the series - another 30 odd - just keep racing at the same time.
Under the old rules where you just add up all the points of each race for a season, rewarding consistency, Busch would not have got anywhere near the championship.
In fact, while the 30-year-old did race brilliantly to pick up five wins after his comeback, under the elimination rules for the Chase format, the season's other best drivers in terms of victories in Joey Logano (six wins) and Jimmie Johnson (five) were out of contention before Homestead.
While nervously waiting for Nascar's decision on a waiver back in May, Busch said it should have been obvious, as a part of a fulltime crew and with good sponsors, that without the injury he would have entered all 36 races.
"I think [mandatory attendance] was set up to try and keep [part-time] guys from just trying to grab a win at a road course or restrictor-plate track or something like that [to qualify]."
A lot of drivers interviewed at the time said they wanted an aggressive personality like Busch to be eligible to compete for the championship for the good of the sport.
One can't help but wonder if they all still felt the same after Homestead.