News: Inside the confidential 2016 study that provided the blueprint for MLS’s modern era

The better question is how do most owners of growing businesses think? Are you better off investing and losing money to grow an enormous company or have much smaller one with a modest profit?

 

@scoachd1 it doesn’t make sense to me to use the first year Opara overachieved to argue he was underpaid. Every player in every sport in the world is underpaid in his breakout year. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakout year. It would just be a year.

 

This is the crux of the current CBA negotiations. And it cuts both ways.

The players don't like TAM/GAM because they represent a pool of money that they cannot access. The players are limited to negotiating within the roughly $4 million salary budget, but another $4 million is being spent, just not on them.

So they figure if they can break that wall then - exactly as you suggest - that money can then be spread out among the current guys, kind of like one big Oprah show: you get $200K! and YOU get $200k!

The problem is, it's tough to see how that benefits either the owners or the quality of play. The player's wives will drive nicer cars maybe, but that won't help with TV ratings much.

But the players -like everybody else - need to be careful what they wish for. Back when the salary floor was under $20k, getting the league to double it was a long ways from what it took to entice foreign players with much better skills.

But with current salary levels - one looks down the posted numbers and can only shake your head at some of the plow horses getting $200-300k for sullying the good name of the game all across the fruited plain.

But double that, or a bit more, and suddenly they're paying salaries that are so far out of whack with what some of those guys are worth on the open (ie..world) market that nobody is going to be willing to pay them. Not when, for $400-600k, you can be a very attractive alternative for a lot of second-tier South Americans and Europeans.

At which point a bunch of domestic players may discover that the going rate for their services is going down, not up.

Better, I think, they negotiate a decent upgrade in the salary budget, get the charter flight thing and pray that the league doesn't decide to loosen up on the international roster spots. THAT is a "restrictive policy" they somehow never get around to complaining about. Odd.

 

@superdave @Ismitje, @JasonMa and @jaykoz3 (or anyone for that matter who thinks these players get paid for the value the provide) I think you all are so used to MLS underpaying domestic players relative to their performance that you have lost all perspective and have no idea as to what "sense" is. You all have years of experience posting, strength in number and have access the Google, Bing and other search engines. So go ahead and prove that I'm wrong and I'll rep your post. Heck I'll even rep a good failed attempt as I enjoy a good challenge and learning something new.

Provide me an example, male of female, who's been in the any league or sport (EPL, Serie A, Liga MX, MFL, NFL, CFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, PGA, WPGA, MLB, NPB, NRL, IPL, ...) where a person who is acknowledged to be the best at what that person does and close to 50 people make more the following season (Opera was named Defender of the year in 2017 and there close to 50 defenders who made more than him the following year in 2018). If you somehow manage to find a remotely similar situation, for extra bonus points to show me how completely wrong I am, provide an example where that same person had even more people make more when he or she was again acknowledged to again be the best 2 year later (55 players listed as defenders made more that Opara in 2019 - not including defenders like Zusi or Jungworth who were also listed as midfielders). I'll accept the possibility of a young, new player or a situation decades ago where this might be true so that might be a good place to look.

 

@Bill Archer add you to this list as you have no idea either. Why don't you take a look at objective data and see if MLS players should be as worried as you think. When you do, let me know what you find. I had a list of whoscored data from 2018. How do you think that ranks rank with pay?

 

What in the thundering f*ck does any of that mean?

 

I don’t know how I got drawn into this but I’ll throw one name out there. The year he won the Super Bowl Russell Wilson was the lowest paid QB on his team and one of, if not the, lowest paid starting QBs in the league. And that didn’t change for another couple of years after that, by which point he had played in a second Super Bowl.

But in general you’re associating me to an argument I’m not making.

 

Hey, why am I not on the list?

Ike Opara's actually an interesting case. He signed with the league in 2010 so he should be on his third contract now.

I can't find anything about his first contract renewal, but here

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mls/sporting-kc/article194361824.html

it said that his contract was up in 2018 and he signed a two year extension with KC.

Now at Minnesota he has a new new contract

https://www.thebluetestament.com/20...t-with-minnesota-united-sporting-kc-trade-mls

I don't know what his value is in the world market. There are a lot of good players out there. But if considered himself wildly underpaid, he's had several opportunities to try the market and find out.

People are underpaid and overpaid, it happens. Every agent should tell their players that unless they are willing to play overseas, they have a good chance of ending up underpaid. Are we really that concerned about players who have to temporarily move to Europe in order to get paid $300k more per year (if they really are worth more) but won't?

 

Christian Yelich, NL MVP 2018, runner up 2019, and on "only" 12.5 million a year, nowhere near the top, and only third on his own small market team. Seriously, baseball is littered with examples of pre-free agent players who win awards, but don't come near what their older peers make.

 

Yeah, we can go on and on. You’ll see it a lot, I’ll bet, in the NFL, where your draft position pretty much dictates your salary. I mean, I’ll bet there were 50 inferior defensive linemen making more than Aaron Donald when he was on his rookie contract. I wonder how early Mike Trout stacked up in outfielder pay.

 

No kidding. It's the nature of contracts. A club will want to keep their cheap players on cheap contracts for as long as possible, especially if they're playing amazing. Yordan Alvarez just won RotY for the Astros and you can bet they'll keep him on his cheap deal for another couple years before pushing to sign him to a new deal at market value.

That's just business.

Want out of your contract? Drum up demand elsewhere to force a move. For MLS players, that can be other teams or overseas. Just like everyone else. That's what agents are for.

 

Other leagues don't have players' unions that publish salaries but if an English Championship player makes £10,000 a week and he's named Player of the Season, he gets a new contract or he'll continue to make £10,000 a week until his contract runs out, or his team sells him for a 7 figure sum.

Unrelated: I believe there were only four senior roster players on minimum salary in 2019.

 

So....Tom Brady is arguably the greatest QB of all time (ugh...as a Bills fan I just threw up in my mouth....) and is not even close to the highest paid QB in the NFL. nor has he been, there are currently TWELVE (12??!!!?!?!?!) QB's paid higher salaries then the 6 time Super Bowl Winner....

I need to go rinse my mouth out now

Oh and how in the F am I on this poster's list anyway?

 

MLB has an ongoing service time manipulation issue whereby young players are not called up as early as they should, based on their performance in the minor leagues, so that their MLB service time falls short of allowing them to be free agents and gives their team an extra year of a cheaper salary. Here's an example:

https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/cubs/kris-bryant-mlbs-service-time-manipulation-awful

 

Yeah, but it helps when he can give that money back because his wife makes like 10 times what he does even if he was paid at the rate he's earned. Gisele is worth 10 times what Russell Wilson is now worth, and he signed the richest QB deal in league history recently.

 

And here's another example of how this played out in MLS about 15 years ago, when the Revs were a good team. Much of the core of that team (Taylor Twellman, Shalrie Joseph, Clint Dempsey, Andy Dorman) started out on really low contracts. It became obvious that these guys were worth more, so they were offered significant raises--but with a catch--adding more years to the length of the contracts.

Joseph and Twellman signed the extensions and were each making somewhere in the neighborhood of $350-$400,000 each. Dorman did not, and continued to make no more than $45,000 (and live with a host family) until his contract expired,and he signed with Hearts for more than what the MLS maximum salary was at the time. Dempsey was in the middle, and was making like $125,000. The Revs kept trying to lock him up for more years, but he publicly said he wouldn't sign for "even Landon Donovan money," which was ~$850,000/year. He left for Fulham, and the Revs never replaced him (not that they would have been competent enough to get a player half as good, even if they had tried).

Joseph and Twellman each had the chance to quadruple their salaries with Celtic and Preston North End, but the Revs turned down their offers. (Totally unscientific theory, but the resentment on Twellman's part may be why he will barely publicly acknowledge that he ever played for the Revs). I felt bad for the players, but as a fan, I knew that there was no way they'd ever get guys who were even remotely comparable to those two, or that they'd even try. When criticized that he hadn't brought in Dempsey's replacement, Mike Burns said with a straight face that Andy Dorman was his replacement--a guy who was already on the team!

So yeah, guys are underpaid all the time,and some are overpaid. It's tough on the pioneers of the league who made it all possible. I just hope that some day when MLS players, even the rookie/bench warmers, are making serious money that they fund the pension plan for the guys who played in the 90s and early 00s for cheap and never got the chance to make good money. Unlike the NBA players, who dissed all the old players who made the modern NBA possible...

 

As a fellow Bills fan, you should know Brady is being paid under the table.

 

True, and that goes for @superdave as well.

But as the latter noted, there is a contractually agreed to rookie salary structure. If Joe Montana stumbled into the Fountain of Youth and showed up as a 24 year old ready to play, the same deal would apply. The Union and the NFL agreed to stop the utter nonsense wherein guys who six months earlier were puking their lungs out at fraternity keggers and who had never played a down were getting 20,30,40 million dollar deals.

They were of course able to do this because no one affected by this policy was actually in the union at the time.

Doesn't matter; point is, it's not the market at work, it's a cabal making a deal with a closed labor union

 

For another name, Richard Sherman is on a contract with an absurdly low guaranteed money number but a ton of escalation clauses. He was coming off injury when the Seahawks (stupidly) released him and he signed with the Nines but he could have easily gotten a deal with more guaranteed money in it elsewhere.

 

Would that be a massage table?

The Jamarcus Russell Clause

 

Mike Trout won the AL MVP in 2014. During 2014 95 outfielders made more than him. After he won he got a pretty sizable raise, however in 2015, after winning the AL MVP and generally being considered a once in a generation talent by most observers, he was still earning less than 38 outfielders and 172 players overall in MLB. Even in 2016 when he again won the AL MVP he was still earning less than 51 MLB players despite being pretty universally considered the best player in the game.

https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/2014/outfield/

 

You can add this years NL MVP to the list also, Cody Bellinger made about 600k this year, and is arbitration eligible thru the 2023 season. He'll get a big raise, but would need to jump to around 18 mil to get near the top 50 in salary. He won't become a free agent until 2024.

 

I wish my boss would come up to me and say "I'm gonna give you a big raise because you are going to do amazing on this project we have not started yet".

The only place that I see raises mid performace in sport is in Europe and that is largely due to transfer fee and pettiness. A player would have maximum leverage near the end of his contract. The next point is at the end of the season while on contract.

 

You keep bringing up that MLS underpays based on performance and that domestic players have a higher value. However, the open market isn't saying that. When these players come up to the end of their contract they aren't getting gobbled up bu foreign leagues at some cut rate. A typical top domestic MLS player used to head to somewhere like Sweden because they were paid better than MLS could pay and were able to be starters in that league. Now those roles have flipped as MLS can pay more than pretty much all of the teams there. And for the most part a Swedish league player comes in at a salary that is comparable with a domestic player in MLS. Jannson (290k), Tinnerholm (547k), Lundqvist (300k), and Qwiberg (167k) all were defenders that came from Sweden in the past few years and, with the exception of Qwiberg, were all D1 starters. Go outside of defense and you have Svensson (600k), Blomberg (250k), and Eriksson (450k). The two players that make above max salary? Both have gotten multiple call-ups to the Swedish national team this year. How about non-Swedish players brought in from Sweden. Yotun (600k), Somi (425k), and Schuller (300k).

Go through some of the rosters and look at what players are getting. Zavaleta (TFC) - 297k, Morrow (TFC) - 330k, Besler (SKC) - 675k, Lennon (RSL) - 243k, Glad (RSL) - 367k, Gaddis (PHI) - 190k, Elliott (PHI) - 265k, Sweat (NYCFC) - 200k, Farrell (NER) - 294k, Zimmerman (LAFC) - 600k, DeLaGarza (HOU) - 254k, Hedges (FCD) - 575k, and Williams (CLB) - 215k. Domestic players showed that their market value was at least at the level that Swedish teams could and would pay for starters. So MLS has jumped up to pay players in that range to keep them (and grab players from Sweden as well). Once domestic players start being taken by other leagues at higher salary points then the pay will jump to reflect that. But it is going to take one of the big 5 leagues to start poaching a bunch of talent for that to happen. All of the defenders from Vitesse so far (Buttner may change that) are on around 600k. The players brought in from other places like Dalamea (Slovenia) - 425k and Barath (Hungary) - 297k show that other places in Europe don't necessarily pay more than MLS does.

But are you going to have players that end up being paid less than an established international player coming from a bigger European league? Hell yes. And that isn't going to change. However, those higher priced payers are quicker to be shown the door. Fabian (PHI), Horta (LAFC), Demidov (MNUFC), and likely Skeljvik (LAG) are examples of that. And the pay in just the last few years has changed dramatically even for domestic players. Go look at the 2016 salaries and look at defenders. Jack Elliott (while not domestic per se is a 4th round draft pick from 2017) on 265k would have been among the highest paid non-international signing center backs in the league. Besler, Goodson, Marshall, and Parkhurst might have been the only ones above that. And except for Besler those players maxed out around 340k.

 

Speaking of spending lots of money on foreign defenders, the Revs paid Michael Mancienne about [Dr. Evil]ONE MILLION DOLLARS[/Dr. Evil]. The guy was no better than average, when he wasn't injured.