News: Adidas extends Major League Soccer sponsorship for 6 years, $700 million

The "Salary Budget" is a hard figure. Somewhere around $4mm. Not one penny more.

The Salary Budget covers all spending up to the "Maximum Salary" for the 18-20 player Senior Roster with the exception of DP spending and GAM/TAM spending.

Homegrown and Generation Adidas players are not on the 18-20 Senior Roster and their salaries are not covered by the Budget. Nor are the other "Development" roster slots. I believe there are 10 DEV (inclusive of HG/GA) spots per team with a total of 28-30 "first team" spots. Most of the DEV players are loaned out to the USL affiliates, leaving most teams with 22-24 active players.

The GAM/TAM/DP/HG/GA/DEV spending puts most teams in the 5-7mm range.

But the "Salary Budget" is a hard number

 

TL;DR: not Hispanics, not Latinos. There's not really a super-category that applies to all four of these places.

Now, that's an interesting set of places. But the common thread between them is that they were oriented towards the Caribbean territories of England, France, and the Netherlands, rather than connected to the mainland culture and economy. Consequently, they are often included as part of the Caribbean rather than South America (e.g. CONCACAF, CARICOM).

The Guianas are often grouped together, but their current residents usually aren't; I guess they can all be called Guianan or Guyanan, but it isn't a thing. I don't know the area well enough to say why, but my speculation is that there's no history of political unity and there are significant language barriers which keep them from seeing themselves collectively.

There are some who define Latin America and Latino in such a way that it includes French Guiana and the French holdings of the Caribbean, because it's a Romance language, because the term itself was created by the French (Amerique Latine) to justify their government attempting to become the hegemon of the region in the early post-imperial period. But the French portions of the Americas don't have the shared threads that Hispanic and Lusitanian areas do.

 

Hispanic is a culture. All of the Spanish speaking countries (hispanoamerica) from Mexico to Argentina have significant cultural interchange. Most would include Spain as part of that cultural interchange. Brazil also has a lot of interchange and is included when using the term latinoamerica.

Belize, Suriname and the Guyanas aren't really a part of the above. Caribbean might be their term.

 

I tried this in another thread with WatchESPN vs. ESPN3 and got told by the person they would use the terms however they pleased.

 

Because feelings? Words no longer have defined meanings?

 

It is a weird response when someone points out you are using terms wrong then gives you proof and you say "nah, I am going to keep using them the way I want." The person I pointed it out to got very defensive and acted as if I was the one making the mistake. Silly people.

 

sigh

 

The increases in TAM and the rise of academy graduates in the first teams of sides like Toronto might have gradually already eroded that factor despite recent changes to the CCL, however it is nice to know that a team like Toronto will get the chance to compete with the best that they have to offer.

 

HGs can be senior roster players. GAs are always on the supplemental roster.

18-20 Senior Roster spots with a 65k min. DP and TAM/GAM all apply here. 3 levels of off budget players. Supplemental roster (4 spots): 65k min, GAs must be here. Reserve roster (4 spots): 53k min (I think), 24 or younger in season; + 2 spots reserved for HGs.

 

The weak point in this line is that the league successfully channeled the vast majority of this new money to players who were not in the union's membership at the time of the vote. Not all of it, but probably 90%. In the short run, the union membership did leave money on the table for an extremely restrictive kind of free agency.

In the long run, the pinky toe they got in the door of free agency is likely to become a foot, a leg, basically the whole body. But how long is the long run, is it a Keynesian amount of time? (And it's not a controlled experiment. Would the players, by taking more money now, have really hurt their quest for free agency in the long run? The counterargument there is that the players are likely to 'win' a CBA at some point, because the fans will see the players as the primary driver of the league, the way they do in the Big 4. When MLS's individual players become popular enough, so that thinking goes, the players are going to win free agency anyway.)

Why yes, yes I can. https://www.thescore.com/mls/news/908786

The reason the players might not have been louder than they were is that the players need at this point in the league's evolution to be seen as being on the side of the fan. The fan wants new talent coming into the league, the union can't be seen as standing in the way.

In context of the purpose of TAM, that's actually the same complaint.

 

I would love to just sit in on the strategy meetings in this one....for both sides.

With the bigger leagues it's always been pretty much straight forward over these last 30-40 years or so. The only one that fascinated me was the NHL player meltdown 15 (?) years ago.
Talk about misreading/ignoring every possible indicator out there.....still shocking to me all this time later.

Every time I think I have a bead on it, something happens/someone brings up a point that changes my thought process a bit. More at play, and more complex/subtle possibilities that
could have more effect than they should....or I think they should.

Time to step away.....over thinking causes errors in sport, business, politics....you name it.

For me, watching this evolution has been fascinating. Rarely get a chance to watch something like this evolve, in these circumstances, from day one.

 

I'd say there's a formula where labor peace is more likely (slow, measurable, predictable growth), and two where it is less likely: a) robust growth over time (where ownership can usually find ways to hide it from labor. . . for a while, until labor gets wise and demands their piece), and b) revenue contraction (where owners will, often must, pass a lot of the loss on to labor, and labor will resist it).

The NHL was in the latter situation. In the aftermath of the Gretzky trade, there had been a bit of a 'wild ride' of expansion and an ESPN contract that was aimed at putting the NHL on a similar footing with the other Big 3. But ESPN hadn't gotten the viewership it was hoping for out of that contract and bailed on the NHL. During that time, salaries had gone as high as 105% of attendance revenue, and the owners could see the writing on the wall that with the next TV deal coming in lower, attendance couldn't pay the players, so they were going to have to take a cut. It took the players a long time to come out of denial about this, partially because the NHL been fairly successful in sort of faking being a bigger league than they were in the between time.

I will say this about that era, though. A lot of people think the NHL was hurt by all that expansion and that boom-and-bust of the TV revenues. But the NHL is, today, a league that can charge a premium ticket price and still fill most of the arenas. That was often not the case in the pre-Gretzky trade league. I don't think all the expansion choices were wise ones, and they definitely plowed too much revenue back into salaries, but the NHL is still a stronger, better league today than it was in 1982.

 

Good post Stan....yeah, the NHL players taking a while to come around is an understatement.
All the indicators were there, but yet...human nature.

I have argued that in the long run a lot of good came out of that debacle.

Pragmatic salary to revenues....returning to markets in the north that were abandoned, especially Canada. If anyone here ever visited a place like Quebec or Winnipeg, and their arenas they wood know just how amateur hour their operations were, and how small time these markets were. Even the old North Stars in Minnesota (a hockey hotbed) was run pathetically.

The lockout, change of rev and location strategy, and basically forcing these small time markets to step up in order to get their teams back (owners with liquidity who could handle it...wink, wink) helped upgrade the whole league. Funny how expansion was supposed to do that, yet the follow up, after the nuclear option, had a much greater effect IMO.

Always interesting to see how things can play out of over time.

Of course this is what MLS has battled since day one....please me now over building a solid foundation and future, but we are starting to see it come togther.

 

The way to get more money to the existing membership is to focus all your all your energy on getting minimums increases and increasing freedom of movement in order to start breaking the market restrictions the league has created in order to underpay domestic players relative to what they produce. Unless all the players had no-cut contracts,while negotiating, any increase the union negotiated could be used by the league to sign new players.

Without any negotiating leverage, the league can and does tell the existing players to go get Mexican citizenship if they want to make money down south or get am EU passport if they want to be attractive to Europe and hope you don't have a significant other than needs to live in the US to work. With no leverage the players are limited to DeRo and EJ displays of show me the money to get paid. Since it should have been extremely obvious the league needed to significantly raise payroll in order to reach its ambitions,only a fool would waste negotiating capital to get what the league was doing anyway instead of getting mechanisms to retain more of the pie for the existing membership.

Not even close. This is not a complaint about raising salaries, but instead a complaint about the way the league deals with the union. If adding more money was upsetting as you ridiculously are suggesting, wouldn't adding significantly money increase the "unrest" you seem to be imagining? .How about some bitter ex-players complaining about DP's taking their jobs as opposed to complaints about DP's who can't make the starting line-up making 5 times more than they do. [/QUOTE]

The reason they are not complaining is that they are happy as can be about a lot more more money coming into the league. Instead of getting paid a couple hundred thousand to lead the league in scoring, guys like domestic players like Morris, Dwyer, Larin, Nguyen, Meram will be making double or triple without having to leave for Europe first.

But even if it weren't as economically advantageous as it is to the players for the league increase their payroll,the vast majority would welcome more money anyway. If you know professional athletes, they are highly competitive and believe they will be the ones that come out winners so the more money the better.

 

I'm sorry you feel that way.