CBA Thread III: The sneakers don't seem that much cheaper

We shall overcome...refusing to take a pay cut

 

Good thing you're not one of the union's negotiators.

 

And this is a crucial thing that the player are over looking, the timing of their proposed strike. 10% of this country is unemployed and hundreds of thousands are underemployed or have had to take pay cuts or alter their lifestyles from just a few previous years to a more modest and sustainable level.

In mid 2002, as I recall, and someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but the MLB players were talking about walking out before the end of the season and to a lesser degree the owners locking out. I recall a lot of people, particularly the voices in the media being greatly upset that these billionaires and millionaires were talking about this with the 1st anniversary of 9/11 coming up and the hate was palpable. Long story short, the deal got done.

The problem now is that soccer still doesn't have the place in the national consciousness to draw attention of the press to this issue, so the players really aren't getting to hear just how stupid their claims of poverty/slavery/mistreatment sound to a nation of people that have had their jobs shipped overseas, their savings take a massive hit and many have lost their homes through no fault of their own.

The players really in an echo chamber at this point.

 

Perhaps instead of appoaching this as "free agency" in regards to waived players like Hartman, maybe the players should look to extend the waiver period to 1 or 2 weeks which gives a player a chance to call around and set up a trial with another MLS team. If no team is interested after 2 weeks, said player has bigger problems.

The real problem is with a player out of contract, there's no way around that without recognizing some form of free agency.

 

The players are probably aware of it. No doubt some of their relatives are living through it just like everybody else's. No doubt some of them have upside-down mortgages.

But they're also aware that this is the year the CBA is up for agreement. If they don't push hard now, they'll have to wait several more years.

I don't understand why the owners would look any better than the players if there were a strike. They should look a lot better. When MLB players strike, it's multimillionaires striking against richer multimillionaires. When MLS players strike it's thousandaires striking against multimillionaires. If anything, the players would be much more likely to come out looking like average Joes trying to get fair treatment.

That's especially true when you read the savvier players' and reps' expressing grievances about the lack of, say, guaranteed contracts. They're saying, "Okay, they might keep their salaries at the same level (if they're lucky), but they're being forced to pack up and move, and they don't get reimbursed for the move. They don't get help getting out of their leases and getting their deposit back. So whenever they get traded, they lose thousands of dollars. Which is a lot of money to a guy earning what a lot of these players earn." That sort of stuff plays well.

And let's not lose track of the fact that a lot of the players (say, those earning in the bottom 40-50% of league salary), especially those in expensive markets, probably only managed to avoid going upside down on their mortgage because they couldn't afford a mortgage in the first place. (See, "Lease, Screwed on" above.) Even after the real estate bubble burst, the median home price in LA is around $500k.

 

If it weren't for unions striking for better working conditions since the 19th century, most Americans might still be working six days a week, ten hours a day in order to earn subsistence wages. Less than a century ago, companies could respond to worker strikes by bringing in hired guns to forcibly load strikers onto box cars and send them across state lines. Or hire Pinkertons to bash in their heads. It only sounds goofy to consider unions as part of a civil rights movement because the unions won about a century of pretty nasty labor battles.

Of course, since the 1970s, the tide's been going the other way. So in a couple more decades, unions might go back to sounding a lot more like defenders of civil rights than they do now.

 

Thanks. Line no one here has ever had a history course, Mr. Debs

Most of us don't really see playing soccer for a career choice (or any other sport for that matter) as a "civil right"

 

Does anyone here have any idea how much money MLS has made off expansion fees in the last three/4 years? I heard that Portland and Vancouver both had to pay something like 40 million??

 

A lot of people act as if they hadn't, tho'.

Understood. My point is that these disputes can only be made to seem comical because earlier unions fought a lot of very nasty battles for things that most of us would see as civil rights (e.g., the right to be paid in money rather than company scrip). So, sure, none of the MLS players will ever have or deserve the same respect that Rosa Parks did. But that doesn't mean that a strike would somehow be laughable or selfish. Lots of unions strike for reasonable benefits that don't involve "civil rights." A lot of those end up working for the civic good (e.g., workers who can own homes and buy cars).

 

For me, if a team waives a player they lose any and all rights to him, even if he had league options on his contract. If he clears waivers, then he can either negotiate with any MLS club he chooses for a new contract or walk.

In my mind, players who are out of contract should be able to trial/train with any team in MLS w/o their previous MLS club being entitled to any compensation.

 

Together, their expansion fees are about 15% to 20% of what the owners before Toronto/Seattle joined the league invested to get the league to a sustainable point in both expenditures for league operations and infrastructure (stadiums).

 

I'm afraid sir you mistake me for an Ayn Rand slurping right winger. That isn't the case. I was mainly responding to the laughable comment about enslaved athletes like Kevin Hartman (ala Larry Johnson's "We're just a bunch of run away slaves!" or Latrell Sprewell's "I need to feed my family")

The MLS players do have legitimate grievances. However, unlike the owners in MLB, the NFL, NBA, and even the NHL, MLS isn't really all that profitable of an entity and these guys for the most part have had to absorb losses. I think certain concessions could be made, but ultimately the league investors have had to take a multimillion dollar hit (for their long term benefit admittedly). In 10 years when MLS is hopefully somewhat more profitable, the player's union would be in a much stronger and more sympathetic position.

 

Most of us agree on this. However, most of us are not the owners, who see it differently.

 

Hartman's problem is that he wasn't waived. Waivers are for players under contract that a team wants to dump. Hartman's contract expired, KC gave him some kind of new contract offer, which is all it had to do to retain his rights, and they couldn't come to a deal.

One hypothetical non-free-agency improvement to this kind of situation make some new rules so that players in this kind of impasse would indeed be put into a waiver draft. Doesn't solve everything, as it could just end up with Hartman having a different team that holds his rights, with whom he may or may not come to a contract agreement. But creative minds should be able to work with this kind of root of an idea to come up with something. Make up some kind of penalty for teams that grab players like this off of waivers but don't sign them. Something like that.

 

Well, sure, those are pretty goofy. I'm always amazed the players can say it with straight faces. Of course, I'm always amazed that NBA owners manage to worry about profits with straight faces.

True. But, again, I'm not sure how many MLS owners really are losing money. Most MLS owners have several different companies that handle different aspects of the team-related business, and a lot of those companies are profitable. It's only the teams themselves that lose money (some of them). Since MLS owners are aggresssively non-transparent in their accounting practices, it's hard to know what to make of those losses.

 

http://thesportsbizblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/mls-expansion-fees-leagues-biggest.html

and


http://www.usatoday.com/sports/soccer/mls/2009-03-05-mls-expansion_N.htm

thank you google

 

At the very least dealing with multiple MLS teams might give Hartman and his agent a better idea on what kind of value people will pay for him. Sometimes a little bit of cold water helps.

Off topic. You weren't a Gael by any chance?

 

I hope their relatives aren't buying this slavery jazz.

Or agree to extend the current CBA 1 season or shoot for a 3 year CBA when the state of soccer and the national economy could be a lot better.

Average Joe's don't work 10 hours a week playing a sport and average 80K a year. Not to mention MLB->Popular, Soccer->getting better, but not even in the same zipcode in people's consciousness.

I really haven't heard any savvy players or reps yet.

Not to a guy who's company laid him off because the construction industry tanked. Not to mention there aren't enough of us who love soccer enough to matter.

I have a hard time feeling sorry for guys who run around in shorts playing a game versus people who spent 4+ years in college and working their way through various low paying internships, achieving professional certifications and licenses only to have their lives/careers put on hold because people wanted to do this whole "toxic asset" roulette.

Largely irrelevant

 

Why didn't you just google it in the first place, asshole?

Or are we going to follow the NHL model and rely on a never ending stream of expansion?

 

I would see it differently too if I had spent 80 million keeping the league afloat when it wasn't making money and some cocksucker named Kasey Keller who has been working in my league as a part of his retirement plan starts talking about how harsh and horrible it is compared to the rest of the world and some clown at the end of his career named Kevin starts talking about "slavery".

 

I'd figure he probably has a decent idea what the interest is, but it's rough when there's nothing he can do about it.

No, I didn't go to school around here.

 

Exactly. The Hartman situation is a bid for free agency, pure and simple. If Hartman is granted the freedom to sign with any other MLS team without compensation to the Wizards, any player could declare an impasse once their contract is up and sign with any other MLS team. That's free agency.

One can certainly argue in favor of free agency, but I've seen a lot of people misrepresent this Hartman scenario. It is not about a player being waived in the middle of his contract. It is about MLS free agency at the end of a contract term.

Players in other US leagues who have not yet reached free agency are free to withhold their signatures from contract offers. And like Hartman, they are also prohibited from playing elsewhere in the league unless/until someone trades for their rights.

(The difference, of course, is that all those other leagues have free agency at some point, so players take their figurative/relative lumps knowing that their freedom is coming down the road, so it's usually not much of an issue. There's presently no free agency at the end of the tunnel for MLS players.)

 

I'm not defending that. That's just dumb.

From a PR standpoint, that might not be a bad idea. From a business standpoint, I don't know why they should. The players aren't negotiating with the national economy. They're negotiating with MLS, and the league is doing pretty well. The owners aren't going to take a year off from trying to increase their incomes.

Which means that most people aren't living to give a rat's ass one way or the other about the strike. But those who do are more likely to be sympathetic to the players than the owners.

A lot of MLS players went to college and/or spent several years in low-paying internships to MLS. Again, in that scenario who's more sympathetic: the player making $40-100k a year, or the owner with the $150 million net worth?

And as long as we're playing the comparative sympathy game, why should the people who had a chance to go to college and get professional certifications be the standard? Why not the people who really one day hope to be able to improve their kids' lives enough so that maybe their kids can go to community college? Nobody in any of those groups is likely to weep for either the players or the owners, but that's not the point. The point is that, if anybody cares enough to look at a strike, the players would be unlikely to look like the bad guys.

 

Did Hartman call it slavery or was that Snowden? And I think it's entirely plausible that Keller has agreed to do some of this talking on behalf of the union because he's rich enough and close enough to retiring that if the league comes down on him, he can just take his toys and go home.

And, yes, if you were one of the original owners and you'd put in that $80 million (?) out of the goodness of your heart, you'd feel differently because you'd be hurt and outraged.

If you'd put in that $80 million in order to make a profit down the road, you'd be annoyed because these guys pursuing their financial interests were interfering with your pursuit of your own interests. Which is another way of saying that you'd be involved in the free market. The owners aren't obliged to be sympathetic to the players, but they're not entitled to play the martyr either.

 

Since the loss at the time of the termination of the NFLPA generated suit was 250 million, plus the funding of part or whole of several stadiums, and while the bleeding isn't as severe as it used to be, we're still a ways away from breaking even.

Irrelevant to the discussion. The MLS players don't generate that money.

I wasn't aware they gave degrees in soccer. Unless he had a gun to his head, it's a free choice. If he's good enough to displace a better paid player, he'll be better compensated, MLS has shown a history of that.

What's it like running around playing soccer for a living?