Former rugby union players John Eales and Michael O'Connor have slammed the NRL's decision to offer salary cap exemptions to help convince players to switch to league.

Former Wallaby captain Eales and former dual international O'Connor both criticised the NRL's policy whereby any player under the age of 21 signed from rugby union would be exempt from the salary cap.

Eales says that if a player switches from rugby union to league for the money then he doesn't have the "passion" required to play internationally, while O'Connor says the move is a "knee-jerk reaction" to Wendell Sailor and Mat Rogers' defections at the end of 2001.

"There are a lot of incentives for people to play rugby that have nothing to do with money," Eales said.

"If somebody wants to change over to rugby league, fine. That's their decision, let them go. There are a lot more people out there who want to play rugby because it's in their blood. They just love it.

"I think that if you haven't got the passion for the game when you are young, if you can be talked into playing another sport, maybe you wouldn't have made it very far anyway."

"I'll tell what this is going to do, it's going to discriminate against league kids," O'Connor said. "The NRL is saying if you play rugby, you get salary cap exemption, but if you go through the league's schoolboy system, you don't.

"So you've got less chance of being signed if you go through the league system. You're better off going to a rugby school, or just playing rugby. It isn't fair to the young kids who support league from the start and really want to play league.

"On the face of it, without having seen the details, it seems like quite an extraordinary move. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction, and I'm not sure whether the NRL have thought it through."

O'Connor added that the NRL's policy is more likely to force the hand of the Australian Rugby Union into signing players when they are in their early to mid-teens, something they don't do at the moment.

"This is going to open up a hornet's nest," said O'Connor. "Rugby doesn't sign school-age kids at the moment.

"They're not in there signing up kids when they're 14 or 15. They leave it alone until the young blokes leave school. The league clubs are the ones going to carnivals now offering 14 or 15-year-old kids contracts, not rugby union.

"But now the gloves could come right off. It might mean union has to start doing the same - but I personally don't agree with doing that. I think rugby league has got it wrong."