I thought MLS Rules were in place to prevent "the NASL scenario"

Absolutely.

 

Which is why anyone who says that a free and unfettered market for player services wouldn't result in salary inflation - potentially devastating salary inflation - doesn't know what they're talking about. To put it mildly.

 

Here is where it is different: the DP rule has a cap hit, and other provisions, that make it more complicated than simply "spend more money, get better team." This year, teams had a $2.8 million budget, and signing three DPs used up just over $1 million of that money. This means that "spending five times the money" doesn't give the same benefit it would in a no-cap system. It also, more importantly for the NASL comparison, doesn't significantly affect the market values of the league's other domestic players. So far, it seems to be working fairly well: signing DPs can give a team an advantage, but not such an advantage that non-DP teams can't compete with them.

Without a cap, individual teams would improve, but the league would not.

As with almost every soccer league, most players in the league are domestic (American) players. Raising the salary cap is not going to significantly improve the pool of American players available, simply because there aren't that many Americans playing abroad--about 100 total, a fair number of whom are MLS washouts.

Instead, what you'd be likely to see would be teams that could afford it bidding for the best American players. The main effect would not be to bring Clint Dempsey back to New York; it would be to make Kyle Beckerman more expensive. (This assumes you're talking about the end of single entity in addition to the end of salary caps--it would be hard to see how the league would operate as an uncapped single entity league).

So Los Angeles and Seattle and a few others spend more money on good players from within the league, and probably become more competitive internationally. Everyone else pays their current players more and becomes less competitive. The league gets less competitive and the rosters get more expensive without the overall level of play improving, and fans in most cities never see the playoffs or a Champions League berth again. Where's the benefit?

 

True. In fact, this was the great debate in other professional sports both before and after the peak of the NASL. Owners in other leagues didn't abandon the reserve clause willingly -- it was either by judicial action, or feared judicial action, that caused them to accept free agency.

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

Both sides fought hard in every league over the issue, and they did so because they certainly expected player costs to rise, which they did.

 

Cosmo_Kid would be happier. Duh.

Isn't that what we all want?

But, seriously, your argument above (with which I agree) is somewhat related to the old "raise everybody's salary" argument, as if paying Kelly Gray more money was going to somehow make him a better player.

(Also, the percentage of American players - both by roster spots and adjusted for minutes - has, I believe, been declining recently in MLS, though it's still far above what it was back in the NASL days, when Americans couldn't get on the field without quotas, and weren't happy about it.)

 

The ones that were able to collectively bargain it were at least able to get something in return. What's funny is that NFL players - who were bound and determined to get free agency - got it, but the owners got the cap and a continuation of the draft and a system that ultimately ended up squeezing the mid-range player.

 

They still all made a lot of money though. The first NFL salary cap was $34.6M in 1994, and it was $120.6M last year. The players never would have done as well under the old system IMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary_cap#Salary_cap_in_the_NFL

 

Oh, the players in aggregate, absolutely.

But the middle class gets squeezed. The stars get theirs, and the rookies do far better than rookies in the distant past. Guys in the middle get squeezed. They're concerned about it happening in the NHL, too. (The NHL used to be a hockey league, for the uninitiated.)

 

They were bad businessmen and they were greedy. You probably know a lot more about what happened to NASL than I do, but didn't the league folding have much more to do having no plan for the post-Pele league than overspending? They saw the money was drying up and they just got out. They weren't soccer fans.

The soccer ecosystem is different now anyway. Globalization has integrated the soccer player market. Closed markets like MLB and NBA are volatile because you have a small number of teams going after a small number of players. With soccer, a players value is set by the international market. There would be no bidding wars for players like Kyle Beckerman. They are hundreds of players like Kyle Beckerman.

I don't see how if MLS had a hard cap of no more than 5 international players per team and then got rid of the salary cap, how that would cause clubs to overspend and would create this huge gap in parity. What it would do is allow clubs to field a balanced team rather than be restricted to overpaying 2 players and then pairing them with a team of lesser quality players.

 

I know that's been reported, but I'm not sure I buy that. I've told this story before, so forgive me for repeating it, but in the 1960s my grandparents lived in Green Bay in a modest brick ranch house just down the block from Packer Linebacker (and future hall of famer) Ray Nitschke. We kids would stand on the sidewalk in awe just to watch him cut his grass (wearing sleveless white t shirt). Again, this wasn't a poor neighborhood by any means, but it was working class modest. My grandfather was a salesman most of his life, and I remember him saying many Packers worked part time jobs in sales during the off season to supplment their incomes.

I can't imagine any starting NFL player living in that kind of neighborhood today.

Yes, compared to the stars and rookies, the "middle" of the NFL perhaps hasn't done as well under the cap, but even adjusted for inflation I think they are much better off today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

I'm not saying they aren't. In fact, I specifically said they're doing better in the aggregate, and, no, you won't find any players who have to work in the offseason.

When I say "squeezed," I mean there is a smaller middle class than before.

Pick a team: the Chicago Bears have eight guys making $2.75M or more this year. They have 30 guys making $700k or less. The NFL system has resulted in stars getting extreme amounts of money and a lot of churn at the bottom, where young, (relatively) inexpensive players take the place of veterans who could still play, but who have priced themselves out. They're not good enough to get the absolute top star money, but they can easily be replaced by a rookie making $465,000 (which is, as you mention, still a ton of money, though far below the NFL average of nearly $2M).

 

That's fair. Either way, I agree with your point that unrestricted free agency does increase salaries, rapidly and across the board (albeit to varying degrees), which is why MLS will never, ever remove the salary cap.

 

You don't have to agree with me. It's economics, it happens naturally.

 

Because there aren't 100 American Kyle Bekcermans! There are MAYBE 30-40 Americans playing outside MLS that could be convinced to return to MLS right now and that would improve the quality of the league (and I think I'm being generous). All the other Americans are either equal in skill to current MLS players (example: Chad Barrett), MLS washouts (example: Pat Phelan), or playing at a high enough level that no amount of money would bring them to MLS right now (example: Michael Bradley).

So you open up the salary cap, limit the number of players worth attracting with that money, and what do you think is going to happen? Teams are going to bid madly for free agents causing salary inflation because its a limited pool of resources.

 

Its an extremely boring lunch break so I figured I'd feed the troll.

If you are relying on Hollywood to provide you with historically accurate information about anything at all ever, then may God have mercy on your soul.

This was already discussed at length in several threads, but there are soccer leagues outside of England....and quite a few of them use a playoff to determine their champion. For example...virtually every league in the Americas, including the Liga MX which is BY FAR the most popular soccer league in the United States.

 

Hey, I've been to Washington. People disagree about economics all the time.

 

That argument assumes MLS would limit itself to keep the restrictions on foreign players. Because you're right, if it did, with relatively few Americans at the talent level MLS aspires to, those that are that talented are suddenly going to command a lot more money . . .

. . . unless there is some player out there in CONCACAF or Eastern Europe every bit as good willing to play for less and MLS is willing to sign them instead.

For a market solution to work, you need a open market. If MLS limits its choices, the market can't work.

And that's what domestic quotas do, they limit choices and increase the price of the domestic product.

There is a philosophical discussion that perhaps a soccer league has a certain obligation to develop domestic players, and while that may or may not ring true, I do agree that if a league has agreed to certain preferences for domestic players, it isn't unreasonable to also restrict their ability to unfairly exploit those preferences financially.

I may decide to buy an American car, but even if I make my preference known, I don't have to agree to let the American car dealers charge me three times list price for it because they now think they don't have to compete with the comparable quality imports.

 

Which was a specific part of the argument the poster made;

 

Define what leagues matter. Because Australia does and Colombia doesn't? That seems to be an odd set of criteria you're using.

And of course, as GVPATS77 points out, the most popular league in this country uses playoffs Liga MX. That pretty much invalidates any argument that suggests the reason MLS isn't growing faster is due to playoffs.

 

Domestic players like Kyle Beckerman? No. Just no. IF NYRB offered Beckerman 500k what domestic player not already in MLS could RSL replace him that wouldn't cost more? Go find your Kyle Beckerman replacement and we will all wait for you to tell us. And it can't be someone in MLS because I could replace Beckerman with Brian Carroll or Amobi Okugo by giving them Beckerman money, but that would do exactly what you are saying won't happen (drive up salaries).

 

Indeed. And he's wrong, IMHO.

 

Because it can be a dangerous path to head down when one team has a payroll 10 times more than others. That's not much different than what you see in Spain's La Liga right now. The reason its not detrimental to MLS (IMO) is because the big salaries are based on popularity not the quality of players. Well... that, and $15m is still not enough to attract top talent anyway. Thus, it doesn't really hurt the parity at the moment. But that can change.

It's very easy to have a league with lots of parity when there isn't much money involved. But if NYRB and LAG reach $50m payrolls and the ratio of team payroll compared to the cheaper teams remains the same, you can kiss parity goodbye. It'll just be like La Liga (at least in terms of the negative aspects).