Effective way to use $1 billion for improving MLS

According to Wiki' there are 1226 billionaires. If any of them wakes up at the wrong side of the bed and decides to send 1,000,000,000 dollar "donation" to MLS, what is the best/effective way to spend this limited money?

Invest in the Academy?
Get more designated players?
Increase the salary cap?
Start MLS TV?
Invest in marketing?
Invest in infrastructure?
Expend the league?
Spend all money at once or spread it out over X number of years? If so how many?
Spend in one area or slice it into different area? If sliced at what percent per area?
Other ideas?

I'm putting together my plan and I noticed that 1,000,000,000 dollar is very easy to burn thru. Here is my short and easy plan. I will spend 1,000,000,000 dollar over 5 years that will be 200,000,000 dollar per year. I will distribute 200,000,000 dollars to each of the clubs evenly. Each club needs to spend 50% of this money in increasing salary cap. Remaining 25 percent on Academy and other 25 percent on marketing and buying up newspaper sports editors. This is probably the biggest bang for the buck MLS can get for 1 billion dollars.

20 new teams at $50 million/pop and then institute Promotion/Relegation.

Internment camp for all those wanting pro/rel. And for those that want MLS to have a 'winter' schedule.

A. This should be in YBTD forum.
B. Three postings to get PRO/REL posting... seriously?
C. I wish there was still a way to neg rep.

Spend $250 million to tear down RFK and build a privately-financed DC United stadium on a 99-year lease. Make it a showpiece stadium that can also host national team games and have a plan to expand it in the future to host a World Cup final.

Spend $125 million each as a co-investment on stadium projects in Boston and Los Angeles.

At that point, you have every team in a stable, sustainable stadium situation.

Distribute $25 million to every team but DC, New England, and Chivas, to be spent for whatever soccer-related purpose they feel it will best serve in their own market--youth academies, training facilities, stadium expansion/renovation, marketing, infrastructure, buying out Freddy Adu's contract, signing a DP, whatever that investor thinks will make the most difference in that market.

Keep the last $100 million for a rainy day. Or use it to pay off the players' union to let you get away with the rest of these line items.

Here is more or less the effect your plan would have:

2013: $2.95 million
2014: $103.1 million
2015: $103.25 million
2016: $103.4 million
2017: $103.55 million
2018: $103.7 million
2019: $3.85 million
2020: $4 million

That's a great plan if you think the Mayan apocalypse is coming in December 2018. Otherwise, it's a recipe for disaster.

If you're going to spend the money on salaries, you'd be better off raising it by $1 million per team for 50 years than $100 million per team for 5 years.

totally right

Clearly the correct answer is to sign 40 high profile DPs for and distribute them to the teams via a new DP Draft.... 20 teams, 2 DPs each.

Unlimited hookers & blow for the players and free legal representation on a as-needed basis.

move firsco stadium closer to downtown using a gravity mass device and then, when relocated, build the most beautiful roof you've ever seen on the stadium

Well...that's not exactly right. I assume those are per-team salary cap numbers?

He said distribute the $200 million evenly among teams, and then ask them to spend half on salaries, so it'd be a $5 million/year/team bump. It wouldn't be nearly as crazily catastrophic in 2019, but it would be bad -- if league revenue didn't change at all in the interim.

But maybe the extra $5 million/team would push enough eyeballs to the league that someone wouldn't mind spending $200 million/year on broadcast rights, and then you could keep the gravy train rolling. That's not totally unreasonable, I guess. 20 $8 million-salary teams would be a pretty competitive league, as long as the extra money was being spent on high-priced foreigners and not just in jacking up the incomes of current $100k salary players.

Good point--my math error.

Still, even a smaller 5 year bump is a 5 year bump, and unless you can find a way to turn $200 million in salaries into $200 million in revenues, you end up with the same problem at the end.

Sign Messi and Ronaldo as DP's. Use the remainder to buy a pack of gum.

Increasing the salary cap would be an obvious top priority, as all the other benefits would be derived from it (TV dollars, sponsorships, new fans, etc.) The better the talent, the more successful the league (generally).

You're making two assumptions.

1. That raising the salary cap by a sustainable amount would significantly increase talent levels. Since MLS rosters are mostly made up of domestic players, you'd be unlikely to get a linear increase in quality. There just aren't that many good US or green-card-holding prospects to lure away from other teams.

2. That raising the talent level by a sustainable amount would significantly increase sponsorships, attendance, or TV ratings (which drive TV rights fees).

Is the difference between a $4 million roster and a $5 million roster something the average sports fan, or the average non-MLS soccer fan, is really going to notice, especially when some of that money is going to higher wages for the same pool of domestic players?

If what you care about is attendance and ratings, I suspect DP signings would be a better investment than raising the salary cap.

Nobody would buy out Chivas USA or NE Revolution?

I am pleasantly surprise those were not the first ideas.


BTW would the donation be tax free?

1. Hopefully the bulk of the money would be spent on international players, and in luring some of the Americans back from Europe, although there aren't many of them. With an $8 million cap, most teams would probably invest in a DP-caliber player.

2. It'd be nice to know the answer to this question, though. If someone's going to throw away a billion dollars, I'd be super interested to see how it goes. But yeah, there's no guarantee it results in an equivalent yearly increase in sponsorships/broadcast fees/etc.

3. Hopefully a 2.5x increase in salary cap is enough to move the needle with the non-MLS soccer fans (again, assuming that it's done without significantly inflating salaries of current domestic crop of players). If it isn't, we should probably give up on MLS ever getting any more popular. This would be fine with me, by the way. I'm super satisfied with the league as it is.

uno billion dollares say european breakway superleague actually mls fareastern conference

!

Send it to an investment that offers 1% annual interest, then every year, it could give you $10M instead of slowly draining your money to MLS.

you should be able to get 6% on an annuity.

Anyway to calculate current MLS annual growth rate?

A billion dollars, eh? Well, here's how I'd do things:

• Budget $430 million for new stadia for DC, Chivas, and New England, (Approx. $143 million each). In DC's case, "embarrassment" is an understatement that the league's most successful team is without their own place, although the same could be said for Chivas and New England that they don't have their own venues.
• Budget the remaining $670 million (Approx. $35.26 million for each team) to use as they see fit, but encourage the enrichment of youth academies for all teams and DP slots for smaller markets.

I would invest that money outside of Soccer. Something safe that will be guaranteed to earn some interest.
Take the interest earned from that and put it into the league as allocation money divided evenly to all teams.

Maybe invest it in SUM, that seems to a profit making entity.