Well, supposedly the lawyers are working on it. It's a painstaking, effort-intensive, boring pain in the ass, allegedly, which is why neither side could be bothered to do the work five years ago. I would give them at least a month from when the deal (i.e. the memorandum of understanding) was signed. So we can start bitching in three weeks if nothing has been posted by then. ------RM
Does anyone know what the new salary cap is, or in true MLS form were the financial terms not disclosed?
Where did you see that? The only hints that have been dropped are 15%-ish percent over last year, which would be $3.5M-ish.
sorry, my sarcasm was too Kaufman-esque. it's really $8 million, because of the DP depreciation cash calls.
I don't know if this number had been reported before…. I was at a Revolution season ticket holder event last night, and during a Q&A the GM Mike Burns confirmed that the roster size in the new CBA was now 28 players instead of 30. There are still 'senior' and 'supplemental' spots on the roster but he did not mention what the breakdown between them is.
it was first reported here but always good to see it confirmed http://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2015/03/06/mls-cba-deal-players-union-bob-foose-todd-dunivant
I've yet to see if the difference between the 15% bump year one (and 5% escalators) reported early on, and the 20% bump year one (and 7% annual escalators) that Dunivant mentions is the inclusion of allocation money in the salary budget. Obviously, allocation money existed prior in prior CBAs, but it was in addition to the capped portion of the salary budget, not equalized and included as part of the budget. So is the allocation money still out there and is this some new pot of allocation money? Has this been clarified by anyone involved in the negotiations?
Orlando City Soccer ticket sales surpass expectations WESH Orlando an interesting quote from this article: so a bit of quick math, let's say they average 1/3 of the 62,500 for the rest of the 16 games at the CB (about 21,000 a game, very doable since they seem to have upped the cap for this next game to 30k). and for the sake of easy math let's round the concession revenue for the opening game to 750.000, making the projected concession revenue 250,000 for the remaining 16 games. 250k x 16 = 4m + 750k = $4,750,000 in just concession revenue ... now they have to share some of that with the CB venue operating company but still ... not tickets, not parking, not merch ... just in concessions alone OCSC could rake in some 2M+ (assuming 50/50 split) in concession revenue. so yeah, i buy that mls is "losing" $100m a year ...
I would be very hestitant to extrapolate concessions earnings from the first match a team ever plays. Presumably many fans bought merchandise (scarves, etc) who won't bet getting those every week. If anything I would remove the 1st week data point and look what the per attendee average is taking that out. Also, I think the DC United Stadium study had information on the typical concessions/attendee in MLS matches. This isn't to say a sports league doesn't dramatically overstate its losses when CBA time comes around. They all definitely do that, and you don't sell franchises for $100 million when you are losing $100 million/year.
you understand of course that concessions sales (food and bev) are not the same thing as merchandise sales (jerseys/tshirts/scarves) right? i'd say that people weren't likely to have eaten or drank more or less than usual just because it was the inaugural game and the average concession per person in this case was somewhere between $11-12. from the study you mentioned (pg 26): but thank you for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you including a year's supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat.
In other words, there was already vastly better information than anything Orlando City's opener could've told us. Any CBA news?
It would be interesting to learn how Bob Foos reacted to the Heineman qoute in the Howler piece on Miami.
I see people say this all the time but never justify it. People invest millions in businesses that are losing money all the time. A significant portion of IPOs have no profit. Twitter raised over $2 billion in their IPO despite never turning a profit. Early-stage venture capital funds routinely invest millions in companies that have no revenue, let alone profit. Someone is willing to invest money in a non-profitable business if they believe that it will become profitable in the future or that the value will increase enough to pay for the annual losses when they sell. While MLS may be inflating their loses for CBA negotiation purposes, the fact that people are still investing in it is not very good evidence of that.
What you don't see is people throwing huge amounts of money at businesses that have been operating for more than 20 years and has have always been net losers for the whole time. Yes it is, if you look a little more carefully. A generic (in the sense of having no particular track record other than the league's) MLS franchise was worth about $5 million in 1996. It was worth <name your own price> in 2001 (when the league could not find a buyer for most of them, other than its current investors, at any price). They were worth about $10 million in 2004. Comparing that to latter day expansions, you get a graph that looks about like this: Obviously, that's a bit notional, but you get the point--for the first decade of the league's existence, almost nothing; for the second, explosive growth. While it might be common for a start-up to receive an impressive amount of capital up front, on the hope it might make profit down the road, I submit you'll be looking long and hard for an analogue for what's happened here, which is a start-up existing for about a decade without being able to raise large amounts of capital, and then suddenly have capital flood in. The most straightforward explanation for this is that things began to change in a really positive way for the league somewhere in the mid 2000s.
How about the 2013 biotech boom? That industry was hobbling along for many years and then suddenly money came rushing in. But getting back to MLS' turnaround, I think the turning point was earlier than you say. Contraction happened in Jan 2002, and by spring 2004, the reported franchise fee had shot up to $10M. I don't believe anything happened to make the league profitable in that time period, but it did manage to scale back its losses without losing much if any revenue. And the 2002 World Cup may have begun to change people's minds about soccer's potential.
Maybe, but it's certainly too soon to tell whether it sustains like MLS's has, and I would say there were a lot of pre-existing companies putting a lot of R&D into that, even before stock prices shot up. I use "mid-2000s" because I actually agree with that, at least in part. The first significant turning point is 2004 as to when some new investment came to the league. Supposedly the league cut its expenses by a third between 2000 and 2004 (obviously some of that was by reducing the roster of teams by a sixth, but it went further; when guys like Etcheverry, Valderrama and Nowak retired, they weren't really replaced during this period) and attendance did not plummet, as what you had left was a core of loyal fans that weren't going to ditch easily, something you could build upon given some time. That new incestment should already be taken as a sign that large scale losses were ebbing. Jorge Vergara can be perhaps be tossed aside as misguided and naive, but Stan Kroenke doesn't like losing money and doesn't do it very often, and Dave Checketts was actually the frontman for a capital group that he had to convince would realize returns on their investment. It was a while longer before new investment kicked into high gear, but it's at about that point when MLS teams became plausible investment opportunities that were worth owning.