News: Drunken, Promiscuous College Roommate of Other MLS Teams' News Thread

To follow up my post, I think it's better for good U.S. players to be big fish in a small pond than small fish in a big pond.

 

This is the lesson the Freddy Adus and Danny Szetelas should have learned long ago, but that siren's call of Europe seems to be too much for them at times. The lesson needs to be that if you go abroad, you have to be pretty much top 1% to get both the money AND the playing time. You can get the money but expect to ride the pine. If you stay in MLS you can get the playing time but maybe not as much money. It is almost the same as kids leaving college football/basketball early for the pros and then being washed up because they never had enough seasoning.

 

MLS is not a sports league. It's a corporation whose product resembles professional soccer. Huge difference.

 

Either way, they seem to be doing it right. I haven't heard anything from the soccer bashers in a while. The whole "MLS won't be around in a few years and Crew Stadium will be ___________" comments have died down drastically since the league's investors were committed to funding the league for five years, circa 2001.

When was the last time anyone in the media referred to MLS as a "fledgling" league?

 

From the Twitter feed from the MLS Draft, this is what caught my eye the most.

Grant Wahl ‏@GrantWahl2h
Don Garber getting ready for CBA talks: "The league is losing between $75 and $100 million a year."

That means with 20 teams, each team on average is losing $5 million a year. That is just crazy.

 

Lies. lol

 

Something has to be turning a profit by now. I imagine that Soccer United Marketing is raking in dough. MLS owners have to be making cash in separate venture or something that has no legally binding ties to MLS in order to claim that they are still losing money.

 

New TV deal: "The league is doing great!"
New CBA: "We're doomed if we give the players any more money!"

 

DOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!

 

Exactly. Between stadium naming rights and jersey sponsors, these guys aren't taking hits like that. Especially if Crew are sold for $70 mill.

I'm a bit worried that the players are going to see this growth and ask for some salary increase (rightly so IMO) and MLS might not go for it. This will be an interesting CBA for sure.

 

Where is the money going? League revenues are about 500 mil per year on an operating basis. Supposedly the expansion fees are paying for the league to acquire Dempsey and Bradley. The players salaries are less than 20% of revenues. Travel expenses can't be that much of the total. A few teams have bad leases but most have their own stadiums now. Sounds like stadium lease payments chicanery to have the teams lose money while the stadium makes it.

 

Ding Ding Ding!!!! There is no reason to make money if others are bleeding it. I imagine Crew Stadium makes money but is a separate entity from Columbus Crew. Hair splitting for some but huge difference legally.

Edit: Forgot to mention creative accounting. It's financial speak for turning Aimer into Maria Kililenko and vice versa depending on your goals.

 

Ugh. This better not mean fewer parties in the tent. They're already a complete shell of what they used to be. IIRC, even LTA stopped coming by as much.

 

hmmm...

Exactly what I thought. With all the groundbreaking (by MLS standards) deals being signed and transfer fees being paid by the league, if this is true, then Garber should be fired for allowing control of the league just disintegrate.

 

Posturing for contract negotiations.

 

I'm sure that travel costs are substantial. But they're also fairly static. That is, until the day comes when clubs take charter flights (and I hope it comes quickly), clubs know pretty far in advance what it'll cost them to travel each year. As a cost of doing business, there's not much the league can do.

The clubs themselves can continue to raise more revenue, and we know what that means here in Columbus; stadium naming rights, sponsorship, attendance, local TV deal, etc. But it seems to me that the last pillar that the league's ownership can hide behind when it comes time to sit down with the players and negotiate a new CBA, is that national TV ratings still suck. I mean, they suck bad, always have. The new ESPN/Fox deal is better than what the league had with NBC, which is great. But at some point, ratings need to go up, or those TV deal numbers will stagnate.

The real advantage MLS has going for it is that, via SUM, they own some (not all) of the rights to US and Mexican national team games. That is effing huge. But for the link, I can't imagine MLS would be getting much traction from major networks; the league can piggyback on the products that networks really want access to. The irony here, of course is that non-MLS soccer ratings have shown huge growth potential. So it's hard to argue anymore that Americans won''t watch the sport on TV. They're just cool on MLS. Until and unless the league can ramp up the quality of play and promise a televised atmosphere that each week looks at least marginally like this:



it's hard to see those ratings improving too much, IMHO.

 

As pointed out in the MLS N&A thread, the league is apparently using SUM to skim off the tv money. It's distributed to SUM's owners (25% to a private equity firm, the rest to MLS owner-operators), with USSF also getting a cut. But the tv revenue from MLS games isn't credited to MLS or its teams under the league's accounting. Of course the players won't buy that during CBA negotiations but that seems to be what Garber is relying on with his false claims about huge losses.

 

As I recall, the league lets each team take a charter flight once per year. Perhaps someone else has more recent info. I'm sure costs are high (I was a travel agent for a while back in the day). My point is that I don't think that MLS players have particularly cushy per diems or stay in a lot of five star hotels. It isn't minor league baseball, of course. But I can't imagine the league can squeeze a lot more out of the current structure. I also assume that the league's investors have a pretty good idea of what thee costs are ahead of time. I mean, sure costs cost go up. But not so much as, say, what the league has started spending for top level DP talent compared to what it did a decade ago.

Anyway, as per usual, I'm sure the CBA negotiations will be a laugh a minute.

 

Probably the biggest factor in the upcoming CBA negotiations doesn't start until June.

 

The league should be able to get good prices on travel and accommodations. They know well in advance how many seats/rooms they will need. I don't know who currently is the official hotel of the Crew but assumed part of the deal was a discount on rooms for visiting teams.

 

They'll leave the light on...

 

It used to be the Adams Mark, then I think the Hyatt on Capitol Square. In any event not a budget place.

 

Montreal drafted Balki yesterday! Good for him. He's been needing work.

http://www.mlssoccer.com/superdraft...id-philadelphia-union-win-2014-mls-superdraft