I have a general salary cap question. This can be for any league with a cap, but let's use the NFL.
Is there anything preventing an owner from paying a player with a hidden account or something? For example, if a player on the open market can make $10 million and the owner says to the player, "Take $5 million as your official salary and I will give you $5 million in an offshore bank account." This saves the player money in taxes and in agent fees and it helps the team to be more competitive because it has more cap room than they normally would.
Is there anything preventing this from happening? Obviously you'd want to limit it to a few star players so word doesn't really get around and you wouldn't want the official salary to be super low or it could be suspicious.
I was just thinking about this because it seems like teams will do anything to get an advantage. We've seen with Spygate and Bountygate... this seems like an obvious one.