The Road from Here

And this is the part where the real dilution happens.

 

Oh. I must have misunderstoood. I`ve seen them before of course. ^^ I thought some user here had made calculations that went into more detail. My bad. Kind of interested in finding out what MLS uses money on.
Guess that remains a secret. Thanks though.

 

That's a statement that even Don Garber wouldn't admit to (if he were under hypnosis).

The improvement in MLS is related to two main factors -

1) The relaxation of the foreign players rule.

1a) the US immigration laws which allow foreign players to receive the permanent right to work, which takes them off the "foreign players" status and allows the MLS teams to recruit more foreign players. As I have mentioned many times before, this is a nearly identical recirculation of imports that takes place in Spain and its "Queen Isabel" rules - a Brazilian is only a Brazilian for two (three?) years until he qualifies for the Spanish passport. As he becomes a citizen, a new Latin American player is brought in. At least, in Spain, the max number of non-EU players ( not counting those from Africa and the Caribbean who qualify as "locals" under the Cotonou Agreement) is set at three, so an imported player's failure to adjust to the league has a cost to it. MLS own rules and the US immigration laws are set differently, thereby making the ability to field a largely foreign born roster far more attainable. On the USMNT boards, several posters frequently mention how some teams field so few "US eligible" players. This is why.

2) Increase in teams payroll. It's obviously a "duh" remark, but one has to remember that prior to the Beckham Rule implementation, your average MLS team had ~ $2.5M worth of annual salaries. With the rule and the gradual cap increase, the payrolls vastly expanded. In fact, if one compared the CONCACAF MLS vs. Liga MX matchups, it's
highly likely that the LA Galaxy had roughly double the total player payroll of Tijuana Xolos, though Cruz Azul did probably have a two-three time advantage over Sporting KC.

Where MLS did not or barely improve was its ability to produce high quality international players. In this instance, the paucity of transfers out of MLS indicates a drop not only in the total number of the international quality produced by MLS but their individual values as well. That is clearly the result of rather poor tactical and technical coaching on behalf of the majority of MLS coaches. In a mathematical euphemism, if MLS used to be a 4 - 2 for coaches + 2 for players - and it became a 6, it became a 6 because players have became a 4. Coaches still remained at 2.

And that's exactly where the road forward must start. It must start with better coaching because getting increasing team payrolls is not in the offing*.

* This doesn't mean the payrolls can't be structured differently. Someone like Joe Roth should understand that a product, such as a motion picture, really needs only one star. A star is your franchise player. Paying three per team is idiotic both in terms of marketing and in terms of quality on the field in a cap limited league. Additionally, paying DP wages to someone with no marketing power is triply idiotic. The attendance - if it peaks at all - peaks early and drops in subsequent seasons as the initial attraction to the "name" player wanes with time. Meanwhile, the lowest sustainable quality is still poor because the vast portion of the cap is invested into one-two-three of the twenty - or, at worst, fifteen to seventeen - eligible players.

 

By the way, I would take the profit/loss estimates with a bucket of salt (and since I don't eat salt, I can't accept the estimates either). A far better estimate is in the expansion fees paid. They will obviously reflect several factors such as the profitability, cash flow and the projected revenue growth. The way Garber - that guy really needs to be examined under sodium thiopental and a lie detector at once - explains it, the league is bleeding red.

 

1. Most MLS teams don't maximize international slots with quality players. There are plenty of international players only being used as roster filler in MLS. So...I don't see how point #1 applies to MLS.
2. I generally agree that $ translates to better players but I think you're a little off in your assessment of MLS payrolls. The payrolls are top heavy. Most estimates I have heard put the top Liga MX payrolls around $30 mil (unfortunately their payroll numbers are murky). I will tell you this, the traffic of talented young players and 2013's golden boot winner in MLS are going south. This is certainly due to greater Liga MX payrolls and better academies. The Galaxy have lost a handful of their top prospects to Xolos in the past couple years.

I do agree with your thoughts about MLS' academies and general US coaching.

 

Actually I think it's too early to make a judgment on the academies as an empirical matter. They haven't been around for long and the only MLS USL team has been around for three months. On the other hand, it's hard to see how giving players more competition and more structure is going to be a bad thing.

I agree about the inconsistency of coaching and on the Galaxy board I've been complaining about how insular Galaxy hiring is. On the other hand, I watched the Galaxy academy team play a Chivas Guad team and the style of play was better than I associate with "traditional US soccer". I didn't see the Fluminse game, but someone who did said that the Galaxy was clearly outclassed, so there's still a long way to go.

 

Don't want any specific information about the kid, but is there a sense about which part is the main problem? When Paul Arriola left for Tijuana there was a discussion on the Galaxy board about why it happened. He gave the reason that he could get game time in the reserves there. But there also could have been an issue of money or coaching or being traded and I'm just not sure how important any of those things are. They are different problems with different solutions.

 

I'm a believer that the parity model hurts development, from the youth restrictions to the draft. An important aspect of development to a young player is to have options. The ability to choose the club/system/coach which best fits a player's strengths. Look at a guy like Junior Flores for example who now highlights Dortmund's U19 squad. He weighed Liverpool/PSG/Dortmund, among other opportunities/choices abroad against the choices here, signing with LAG and waiting for 1st team action whenever that comes along, and playing at the USL-Pro level until then or sign a GA contract and go through the lottery and end up any number of places. And, that's a common situation among many of our prospects who go abroad. And that doesn't get into what happens if you end up not being in your MLS team's plans going forward. Then at that point you can again end up just about anywhere with little say, whereas abroad they're generally much more willing to release you and send you on your way where you one again have options.

Then we get into the draft doing the opposite of giving teams an incentive to improve their academies. Some teams concentrate on their academies anyway, but there's some such as SJ, in a hotbed area of young talent in this country, who practically ignore their academy as they know 2-3 prospects are dropping into their lap every year in the draft. There's also the draft completely limiting choices of where you end up aside from very special circumstances like Luis Gil, where after signing a GA deal with the league he was put in the weighted lottery and could have ended up a number of places but was one of the few who had enough leverage to essentially force MLS to conduct a trade between KC and RSL. That's not the norm though. Coming out of the NCAA you practically have no choice though. And while the draft obviously works for leagues like the NBA or NFL, a huge part of that is the NCAA level is the top feeder league in the world for both those leagues. All players entering the NBA/NFL draft chose which college program to develop/play in and as it should be, the top players gravitate to the top programs under the top coaches to continue their development. Soccer being a global game however and NCAA soccer not being anywhere near a decent feeder league/level stacked up against football/basketball, the draft makes far less sense in this sport as the other two sports operate much more in a closed system and the top prospects worldwide for the most part are coming through the NCAA.

Coaching is also an enormous issue and one the league and American system as well has ignored more than just about any other aspect of our soccer landscape. It's a red flag for me, and scouts have said this too, that we have a far superior setup and resources as a league compared to 5, 8 or 10 years ago but are producing less top end talent. The average player has gotten better without a doubt but the U20 squads from 99/01/03/05/07, with far fewer resources produced more top end players than we've seen with the 09/11/13 squads. While some disagree for various reasons, foreign interest/bids do represent confidence in our talent and there's very little interest in the current crop of 23-28 yr olds we've developed here and that generation in general. Those that have tried their hand abroad, especially attacking talent have largely flopped when moving abroad. A guy like Shea was an MLS MVP candidate at 20/21 and received more interest abroad than any MLS developed attacker recently and can't even make the bench at Stoke. The other largely developed American attacker with regular foreign interest was Agudelo, who's not exactly having an easy transition at a poor Ered club. Years ago with much less infrastructure we produced Landon who was signed by a UCL Bund club and was outstanding as a young player on the international scene, DMB getting bought and starting for a UCL Ered club in his early 20's, Clint leaving at 23/24 and within a year being an impact player at Fulham, Jozy getting a 10M transfer at 18, Bradley getting bought as a teen and at 18/19 making an immediate impact at Heerenveen and breaking the at the time US record for scoring goals in a foreign league. Even our defenders, guys like Gooch/Chero/Boca had club careers where they were regular starters in top leagues, even a captain like Chero in the Bund. Compare that to Omar who looks shell shocked against Xolos and the prospect of Brad Evans playing RB for us in Brasil, along with hoping a 33 yr old DMB, a LW by trade, can man the LB spot for us in Brasil.

I do think we're in a general down-generation of talent and the next two cycles will provide considerably more talent, but even then, it's foreign prospects Brooks/Mix/AJ/Green/Zelalem? who, aside from Yedlin are generally considered our top prospects. I think it's a good exercise, to see our true state of recent development, to look at our current player pool without the foreign developed players. Take Jones/Fabian/Chandler/Mix/AJ/Brooks/Boyd/Green out of our current player pool, then consider recent development without the 30 or older Clint/Landon/DMB, and that's a true look at the type of player we've produced the last 5-7 years and it doesn't given much confidence currently looking at those from about 23-29 years old. We are extremely dependent right now on the foreign contributions and hoping Clint/Landon can help carry us. The other two who are younger and top players for us, products of that 07 U20 cycle, the last U20 cycle to really produce top end talent for us are Bradley and Jozy, who both by coincidence left MLS as teens.

That's a true look at our recent development, dropping all the foreign developed players and 30+ yr olds and we're basically left with Bradley and Jozy, both who left the league early. We're then looking at pretty good MLS players who we hope can hang at the level we'll face in Brasil but are largely unproven at anything approaching that level, guys like Omar/Besler/Zusi/Evans/Wondo. And that's not meant to slam development, we are doing good things, our infrastructure has improved greatly, we have much improved talent coming down the pipeline although much of the top prospects on our youth NT's are moving abroad, but it boils down to IMO, coaching being the thing which is holding us back the most. Our coaches are producing less top talent now with far more resources than coaches had 6-10+ years ago.

P.S. Another red flag in terms of the desire to improve coaching or the lack there of is the case of Tom Byer. He's an American coach who's won awards across Asia for development, was a large part of Japan re-tooling their structure and making huge strides, wants to work back home here in the states yet has no interest and instead after all he did in Japan, took on the project of doing the same in China. That not a single team in MLS brought him in is simply not a good sign. We don't have an equivalent here with anything approaching his resume/experience yet not a single MLS team apparently made bringing him on a priority. That can be said for USSF as well.

https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/...nd-why-it-isn’t-happening-in-the-u-s.2001796/

https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/threads/the-case-for-tom-byer.2000013/

 

I see where you and Jond are coming from, and I’m not trying to be an MLS apologist, but I still wonder what MLS should do. The problems seem mostly unsolvable to me given the current situation.

We are not producing the number of top-level talent we did before.

I think there’s a good chance that this is just a result of a small sample and chance. It’s not uncommon for a country to have a “golden generation” and ours just came back then. But if you want to argue that it’s not chance, then what were we doing differently then? Was it better when Bradenton was more important than it is now?

Junior Flores chooses Dortmund over the Galaxy

Wouldn’t you pick Liverpool/PSG/Dortmund over the Galaxy? The senior teams are better, I expect the facilities are better and I’m sure the academies are better. We don’t compete with Dortmund for players and were going to lose the competition for academy players too.

The academies are losing players to the Colleges

Again, sure, if it were my kid I push for the college scholarship unless he was so good he could go to a top academy, and that wouldn’t be in the US.


It’s why I’m asking where we think the problem is:

If it’s money, then the situation will improve in time, but slowly.

If it’s the fear of getting traded to DC, then guarantee their contract for four years and add a condition that you can’t be traded. This is doable.

If it’s the restricted territories, then I want to know how much it matters. Let’s pick on Atlanta since they’re new. Say that the Atlanta academy is terrible. The only thing MLS is preventing a player in Atlanta from doing is moving to a new city in order to play for an MLS academy rather than a non-MLS academy in Atlanta. How many kids are we talking about? Now maybe if every kid started leaving Atlanta it would embarrass the team so much that they would fix the academy, but I doubt it.

If it’s the lack of opportunity to play after age 18, then that’s being fixed now (again, slowly)

If it’s the coaches, then it gets complicated. MLS probably doesn’t pay enough money to get good coaches. I’m not familiar with Tom Byer but I’m guessing he’s doing pretty well. But there are deeper problems. If the current senior coaches are not any good, how do we expect them to be able to pick good youth coaches? But yeah, I think there are real problems. I look at the Galaxy youth coaches and it doesn’t make me happy, but I don’t know how much of that is that we don’t spend a lot of money, how much is that we don’t know any better and how much is that we just don’t care.


I agree 100% that parity hurts youth development. But parity helps the league survive, so there’s a tradeoff. Of course, people differ on how much, but MLS seems to put a high value on it so I don’t think they’re being stupid, just practical (at least from their point of view). The whole youth system is ridiculously kludgy but if you start taking one piece out, it’s all going to fall apart. It probably will anyway one day, but I’m not sure now is the time to do it. This is going to be a huge political battle and right now there are bigger fish to fry.

 

If I had a team I would hire Klinsmann as a consultant. Ha.

 

They don't max the foreign slot because they run into cap problems and most non-US educated foreign players are not roster fillers but among the top fifteen players on a given team.

Last night, Galaxy had Keane, Ishizaki, Juninho, Sarvas, Husidic, Leonardo and Penedo as starters while Vancouver had Mattocks, Miller, Morales, Koffie, Laba, O'Brien and Ousted. These are heavily non-American rosters and most lineups have a similar composition.

Two more points - Husidic was deemed less than mediocre for a midtable club in the Swedish second division (Hammarby) and yet here he is, starting for the Galaxy.

And I am not against teams laden with the foreign players. Twenty years into its existence, if MLS can't coach its youth to contribute at this level, someone has to step in and fill the available slots.

Top Mexican teams have TOTAL payrolls/revenues of $30M, including the coaching staff, youth teams, administrations, etc., but there is a huge difference between the richest clubs like America, Cruz Azul, Monterrey, Chivas de G and the lowest tier clubs like Tijuana. And even top Mexican clubs don't pay their top performers anywhere close to what MLS pays. The last time, some info squeaked out of there, (the late) Edgar "Chucho" Benitez (a failure at Birmingham City, I might add) and Chupete Suazo were leading the pack at $3M each. Marco Fabian, a top player at Blue Cross - on loan from Chivas - was making $1.5M. Now, do the rough estimate and you get the starting lineup at Cruz Azul of about $8M-$10M.

Triplet1 mentioned Transfermarkt. Check out the Liga MX player movement both to and fro. These blokes aren't going to the EPL of the world (and, except Chicharito, others have failed there anyway). The majority comes and goes to the relatively poor South American leagues (meaning all besides Brazil) or Middle and Far East. Tijuana is filled with the over-the-hill Mexicans like Arce and Saucedo, a few mid-priced imports from Argentina and a bunch of US-Mex dual citizens like Edgar Castillo, Greg Garza, Joe Corona, Paul Arriola, et al. The dual nationals are probably in the low six digits - sans Castillo, who probably makes in the mid-sixes - and yet still get a ton of game time.

 

How about a historical reference from far away and long in the past?

I was watching a (Putin approved) documentary on Russia of 1913 (the last peaceful year before before the Great War). The Tzarist Russia was undergoing great transformation at that time. Ninety percent of the populace was illiterate and living on farms while only the top two percent could be considered intelligentsia (i.e., well educated and mostly well mannered). Yet the Russian economy was expanding at a 5% annual rate (and no MLS/Hollywood style accounting gimmicks there ... the Imperial ruble was backed by real gold) and the average living standards achieved fifty percent of the American (they are about a quarter to a third now, with the median to a median being closer to a quarter). So, how did the Imperial Russia manage to do this?

Well, they brought in the "intelligentsia" from abroad. The hired brains mainly spoke German and were handsomely compensated for this trait. A top engineering import in 1913 could make as much as $2M/Y (inflation adjusted) to set up and run a manufacturing facility. The local dimwits greatly resented that, frequently refusing to work for a fer'ner. To placate the gray and definitely unwashed masses, the Russian bosses often appointed a native figurehead while the Germans still ran the whole show behind the scene.

If you think the parallels to the US soccer are far too eerie, let me declare right away that I do not favor German soccer coaches over the Dutch or the Brazilian or the Spanish or the Yugoslavian but I do favor the intelligentsia over the gray unwashed masses.

A Brazilian-American friend of mine emailed me this a few days ago. A worthwhile read from an ESPN soccer blog.

http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/worldcupcentral/id/3617?cc=5901

There's a fairly simple explanation for this. A decade to a decade and a half ago, most players who needed to make a living knew that they had to leave for Europe and then succeed in Europe. Some broke through, some didn't but they were motivated to go because MLS paid very little on the whole. Sometime in the mid-late naughties, MLS began to pay more to the marginal US teamers like Marvell Wynne, Justin Mapp, Brian Ching, et al (before it was fairly selective whom it paid and whom it didn't ... even Eddie Pope was not showered with largesse and, even when he was paid well by MLS standards, he was moved from team to team precisely because of the cap). This made the decision to go or not to go abroad far more complicated - bird in hand and so forth - and many players with potential stayed and, when they stayed, they stagnated and then the stagnated players got old and nearly useless. Now, clearly, some guys were more internally motivated than others and some weren't even motivated abroad (ya, looking at you, Cletus) but that's the nature of the beast. You need numbers for some to sip through to the USMNT.

Very marginally. Hypothetically, one can hire an experienced foreign youth coach for very little and see a drastic change. As feeble as some of the US results may have been across the U-WC's, teams coached by Nowak, Rongen and Ramos, at least, looked more alive than their US born&bred brethren. Which was a start.

 

There are two bias problems with Transfermarket.com

1) The market is based on potential buyers. The problem with valuing MLS players is that most of the US players are not eligible to be sold in some of the richest markets due to work permit issues. For example if you look at the way they value Seattle Sounder players Stefan Frei (Swiss passport) is valued at 600€ and Kenny Cooper (UK) is valued at 650€. Meanwhile two of the valued players on the team by the team management, Chad Marshall and Ozzie Alonso, are "valued" at 500€ and 800€ respectively.

2) The other problem is familiarity. DeAndre Yedlin supposedly has no value.

 

Here is the problem with using EBITDA as the primary metric for MLS or any other sports league:

"The Dodgers place second on our [Forbes] list with a value of $2 billion." According to the LA Times former owner "Frank McCourt turned a net profit of $1.278 billion on the Dodgers sale, subtracting $460 million in tax payments and $412 million in debts assumed by Guggenheim. No other baseball team has sold for even $1 billion." Sports teams are as much collectibles as they are businesses.

 

Heh, heh. This talk about MLS academies and the competition against colleges. I think that the success rate of the academies is about par for the course for any new project. As has been noted some academies have had success and some have not. Do you think the other academies will not take note? This is no different than the SSS drive that started in 2002. It's something that will require a lot of trial and error and will take time before it's true capacity is achieved.

I'm not sure about the choice topic. Players currently have a lack of choice simply because this is an underserved market. There is a huge lack of academies. I wouldn't read much into it. A player in England has the choice of a dozen pro teams to train within easy distance. We have only 40 or so pro teams in the whole country.

 

Sure, but Liga MX would have the same work permit issues, so comparing the 2 is apples to apples.

Not that the website is the best way to compare, but is one option.

 

So the answer is to send all of our best young talent to Europe to develop and hire a bunch of foreign coaches? Not so sure that is the best way to grow the league or the game in this country. Besides, it isn't as if the league has been adverse to hiring foreign coaches in the past. Over the entire history of the league, MLS teams have hired 47 foreign born coaches and 46 coaches from the US or Canada. The US born coaches have been FAR more successful all time. The top five and six of the top seven coaches in terms of all time wins were Americans and American coaches have won 15 of 18 MLS Cups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_coaches

Personally, I think the coaching and tactics in the league have improved. Far more teams try to play attractive, possession based soccer than in years past. However, we are definitely not there yet in terms of development. I think the league was a bit late in getting academies up and running and the USSF waited too long to attempt to address skill development. However, I like the current direction. I think the league understands the issue and is attempting to address it. Things need to be tweaked for sure and you make some good points, but there is going to be a certain amount of trial and error when you start something new.

I also think it is a big, big positive that the first generation of MLS players is now moving into coaching more and more. When I was coming up and playing in the 90s there was almost a total lack of coaches who had played the game at a high level. I really don't think the importance of seeing former MLS and national team players like Ramos, Porter, Petke, Olsen, Kreis, etc., etc. move into coaching can be understated.

All that said, 22 or 24 teams are not going to be able to develop all of the talent in a country that spans 3.8 million square miles with 315 million people in it. It is just not gonna happen. We can take lessons from other countries and we can cherry pick foreign coaches, however, we can not simply copy what is done in some other country and apply it here and expect it to be successful.

 

In regards to youth coaches, it's very hard to predict who will be a good or, better yet, great youth coach from their playing resume. Pekerman, widely renowned as one of the great youth coaches, was just a journeyman pro. Likewise, Caleb Porter had a very minimal playing career. Nonetheless, he is so good that Diskerud seriously considered a move solely from the fact that Porter was there. So, if the academies are right now rather hit and miss it's because there's little else one can expect from a first try in hiring coaches.