Grant's conflating and confusing several ideas: You mean North American players. For those outside the country, the fact that the US has just one league is not that big a factor. If they are looking to play abroad and can get a work permit in the US, the odds are pretty high the can get a work permit in a number of similarly high paying leagues Nonsensical statement with no basis. What defines an "above average" product. A competitive game? Big Named players'? National team level players? Even many La Liga and EPL games are going to fail on a least on of those fronts. If these leagues frequently fail, how do you think the 100+ other professional leagues are going to hold up? No clue at what this is supposed to mean so I can't really comment. Largely devoid of reality. Very few high school boys (girls sports are different) play more than one sport at a high level. The main exceptions are low skill combinations like football and track or highly similar soccer/kicker, or distance/cross country. Since soccer is a highly skilled sport, kids that play at an elite level focus before they are teens. The only kid I knew that had high level D1 offers in two sports (soccer/Football) actually had the best natural physical ability in baseball. His youth baseball coach said he was on the radar of two of the top 3 D1 SoCal baseball head coaches when he was 12. Kid didn't care that he could potentially make a couple more zero's playing baseball, He quit baseball to play soccer and basketball because he said baseball was boring. Kids don't to actuary analysis. They do what they find fun and exciting. Now if you changed your statement to state that some parents looking to cash in on their kid would be more more interested in steering their kid to a sport for money, you'd at least have a plausible argument. While plausible, it wouldn't be very strong, because potential incomes as a professional is about reason number 50 as to why US parents put their child in one youth sport over another. Where lower salaries do make a difference is whether professional level players want to keep at it or not. I know more than a few high level players that choose to stop playing soccer because the opportunity cost was too high relative to the potential reward. I even know one parent of an MLS player who wishes is son would quit.
Most likely, though, teams will use the TAM (or trade it to someone who will), because it is use-or-lose, and it's basically pre-paid. (I'm not counting the Discretionary TAM they added this season to that.) It's almost like a second, higher salary cap.
A kid I grew up with coming out of high school was the top rated football quarterback in the state. Had scholarship offers, all that. He was also drafted as a catcher in baseball. He chose to play baseball in college. Now, this was the early 80's, so that was an unusual choice in itself. Played 4 years of college ball and went on to play 15 years in major league baseball.
So, I'm not sure what of the DP, allocation money, and player allocation rules are part of the CBA. So, I guess I could use a little education. What I do know is that this system seems overly complicated. I don't think you see those types of complications in the CBAs for other US pro leagues. I guess what I would like to see is more local control by the teams, and a significantly higher salary cap. That, in and of itself should help simplify the system, less need to count DPs if the league average salary approaches current DP salary levels - or are in line with the salary a player could get internationally for their position.
That's true, but kids also know that LeBron James and Tom Brady make more than the top MLS players. No matter how good you are, it's impossible for an athlete at high school age or younger to make a guess close to his career earnings in a sport, but he could still know that he has a 90 percent chance at making more money in another sport than at soccer.
Have you seen the rumors of Atlanta United going after Pity Martinez in what could be one of the highest transfer fees of MLS? A player that is playing for Argentina as Messi's replacement won't be a TAM level player. This is the difference between a teams/owners that is willing to take MLS to the next level yet some are trying to hold teams like this back. Now, we can say Arthur Blank is loaded with money and it won't be fair for the rest of the teams. But that is not true. Everyone operates under the same restrictive rules it just so happens some maximize it while others don't. Isn't the owner of Colorado Rapids the majority owner of Arsenal and other sport franchises? I don't see him investing like that with the Rapids. Same thing with NE Revs and NE Patriots. And there are several more. They could also use the rules to maximize their team yet they refuse to do so and or do it very conservative. Taking away the 3rd DP is just a way to stop teams from setting themselves apart from the rest of the pack. Toronto FC set the example by how it is done. Use all 3 DPs on great players (some will debate whether Bradley and/or Jozy are "great") along with a decent middle of the roster line up and you can achieve a record setting season. By simply adding more TAM to the rules that are in place now, it will only make those type of teams better while the rest will still try to be cheap. The option should always be there to catch up or stay behind. Not the other way around.
I don't think the salary mechanisms and rules are all that complicated for the actual teams. For executives who do this for a living the TAM and GAM and salary budget are probably not all that hard to follow (insert joke about Mike Burns). Yes, for fans and writers it would be nice to just have a simple publicly available cap number to discuss but I don't think the needs of the fans are given much consideration in CBA negotiations. Front offices do still seem to struggle a bit with discovery lists and defining a homegrown player though to be fair MLS seems to make these rules up as they go along. What is strangest about MLS CBA negotiations, is I get the impression the owners are the ones who want to raise the salary cap. In other US pro leagues the threat to strike and most of the animosity comes from players wanting higher salaries and the owners wanting to keep the cap where it is or even lower it. In the last CBA the players made it pretty clear they aren't going to fight too hard for a higher salary cap. Unlike other US pro leagues, a higher cap in MLS doesn't mean the current players get more money. Instead it usually means that some of the current players lose their jobs and get replaced by more expensive imports. It does seem, though, that since the last CBA there are more American players like a Besler or Wondo who would benefit from a higher salary cap and subsequent inflation of salaries. Obviously if MLS suddenly starts spending like the EPL then most of the current players are out of a job, but even doubling the salary cap would still see guys like Besler or Wondo or Arriola with jobs in the league, just with better salaries. So maybe there will be a larger segment of the union that puts salary ahead of other issues. I would hope that MLS HQ sees that full free agency is pretty close to inevitable. We seem to have entered a stage in MLS where owners acknowledge that the league is going to be part of the global soccer marketplace. There might always be rules in place that limit how much MLS teams compete with each other for the services of a player or at least create a formal process for competing over free agents, but I don't think it is sustainable in the long term to have a system where foreign players are able to come into the league and pick the team they want to play for while young American players have to put in several years with whatever team drafts them or wins them in a weighted lottery before they can control their careers. I would expect more talented young players to follow something like Arriola did and play a few years in Mexico and then come back to play for whatever MLS team they want that offers them the most money.
I agree, the first part changes the nature of the negotiations significantly. Also given the structure of MLS rules, we will also see divisions among owners not only about whether to expand the cap, but how best to do it. Arriola was more of an in-between situation. He could only negotiate with one MLS team and DC had to pay the Galaxy for the rights to negotiate with him.
The key difference here is that MLS is not the top league in its sport.. Heck, it isn’t even the top league in its sport in its country. For MLS, raising the cap means it is more competitive with the other leagues broadcast here and that means growth and, in theory, more money for them. For the other leagues, they already have the best players on their team and people are already watching them. As a result, raising the salary cap is just a cost to them...
I was going to say something about the MLS team salaries needing to, long term anyway, be in line with median EPL salaries, but chose not to as I wasn't sure how to frame it. I think I saw an article listing team salaries from 2017/8 that show a median of just under £70 million, or $100 million. My understanding is that number is about 3 times the current top MLS team salary. I do like league parity in that games are more competitive. I also like a sense of fairness in player distribution. So onto the individual player salary issue... Could part of the problem be the fact that salaries for US players are low domestically, therefore the player is not valued as much internationally?
Good point. I don't know if MLS will ever do away totally with things like rights to negotiate, but some of the US sports league standards don't translate well when you aren't the top league in your sport.
I'm not sure what you mean by this I have a fundamental disagreement about this, and I think I'm in the minority (at least with my reasoning). Sports teams in general, and particularly MLS teams who exist in a less table state, should be pretty close to self-sufficient. I'm not saying they need to be profitable, investment to grow the club is good, but there's a difference between investing wisely beyond what you currently support to grow the long-term value and spending wildly. Just because Kroenke is rich doesn't mean we should expect him to keep up with Atlanta and Toronto by dumping a bunch of his money into the Rapids. The Rapids need to make moves that make sense for their market. They simply cannot afford to lay down the type of DP money teams like the big spenders do. They can't raise ticket prices far enough fast enough to cover those costs. The Rapids have about 550K in capacity a season. If they brought in a player with a $5 million salary that means raising ticket prices by $10 across the board, roughly 33%, to cover the salary. Lets say sponsorships covers half of that (which is about how much they're getting out of the TransAmerica sponsorship to cover Howard's salary). That's still $5 a ticket/ 15-20% increase, to fund one player. (Obviously this is simplified, jersey sales, increased concessions, etc. factor in). The Rapids simply can't do that for one player, much less 2 or 3. There has to be a way for teams like the Rapids to compete in this league without having to "keep up with the Joneses" in spending like that. The league will always have teams that can spend significantly less than others in a free market and that has to be taken into account. (None of this is an excuse for letting KSE off the hook for the crap job they've done running the team or their lack of even moderate spending at times, just reasoning why they can't spend like the big teams)
Really? What is the top soccer league in this country if it isn't MLS? The NASL? Sure the Mexican League and the Premiership are popular on TV, but they are not really in this country. And besides, neither one of them can hold a candle to the Cosmos. Did you know Pele once played for them?
The International Champions Cup? Oh wait....maybe La Liga? Since they are rumored to be playing a league game in Miami.
You mean the local or the national TV contract? Locally will be limited by population. Even with Altitude stretched across the mountain region that's a lot less viewers (so a lot less value in TV rights) than a TFC or NY team.
Spend some time trying to understand the NBA salary cap, with all of its "exceptions" (Larry Bird, mid-level, bi-annual, non-Bird, rookie, etc.) and MLS doesn't seem that much more complicated.
I suspect that the players will get a lot more out of this negotiations than they have during previous years because they finally have something that MLS wants, namely their agreeing to training and/or solidarity fees. As I understand it---and please correct me if I am wrong on this, as this is hardly an area of expertise---because there is no agreement right now between MLS and the player's association, MLS cannot collect any fees on youth players that come up through their system who decide to go overseas/south of the border. I know there is some question as to the legality of it anyway under US law, but I imagine that a labor agreement on the subject would not run afoul of the laws (i.e., the difference between requirement and agreement). The player's association has wisely been publicly against the fees. The fees in no way benefit them, so that is one reason, but perhaps even more so, it gives them a significant bargaining chip with MLS. This may be the last time that the players have such a bargaining chip (other than the ever-present threat of a delayed or cancelled season), and they most certainly will extract all they can from MLS in exchange.
I get your point but trying to hold back the growth of the league by reducing a DP spot from the teams that could afford it is certainly not a way to go about it. Sure, there are many ways a team gets better than by simply just dumping money into buying players. There are academies too which teams can use to bring up players and not spend much. It just so happens that the same person you mentioned (and there are others in the same boat too) aren't even spending on that either or not even trying. So it goes back to holding back certain teams from separating themselves from the pack. And that is only one issue among the league. You also have to consider that MLS competes at an international level against other leagues that have no such thing as a salary cap or that they have to deal with 2 or 3 DPs. If MLS, as an entire league, wants to grow and be able to compete at an international level whether it be among its own league, CCL, CWC, Campeones Cup, Libertadores or Sudamericana (these last two could maybe one day be a possibility) it will need to loose its salary budget rules in order for any MLS team to be competitive and represent the league as improving.
It is only strange because you don't understand the dynamics of the negotiations. The world soccer business is very different from other US leagues. World soccer is comparatively open capitalist market while US sports leagues are not. Soccer players outside of North America, with some nationality restrictions on work permits, are able to move freely from team to team. Similarly international teams are under pressure to win. In US leagues, teams that are near the bottom often purposely lose (NBA created a lottery draft to mitigate tanking) or load up on low cost inexperienced young players (MLB's version of tanking). That doesn't happen in soccer for the rest of the world, as teams at the bottom get sent to a lower much less profitable leagues while top teams get to entry into extremely lucrative inter league competitions. As a result this combination results in a relatively true market for players. Players within North America face a far different set of circumstances. In Mexico , players are generally paid well (others who follow the league can probably provide more accurate details) so they can keep Mexican players relatively happy and attract the best south Americans. But there also exists a so-called "Pacto de Caballeros", an informal agreement between Mexican clubs that restricts movement and thus reduces pay. Players such as former MLS player Omar Bravo can try to fight the system by moving abroad (he played in Spain, then when that contract was over, played in MLS) and get paid close to market wages, but if they want to go back to playing in their home in Mexico, they return to the same closed market and face retaliation for fighting the system. MLS goes one step further than the Mexican league and formalizes this market control through "single entity" and its myriad of rules designed to suppress money paid to domestic players. Unlike owners in football, basketball, baseball and to a slightly lessor extent hockey, where existing players of remotely similar quality are non-existent, MLS owners have far more ability to bring in players as good and even better as those striking for a cost. Since they can control a franchise for decades while players have a very short window of opportunity, they are much more able to ride a through a strike than their fellow US owners. From the union side, soccer players lack the same cohesiveness of unions as those from other sports. The biggest factor is that close to half the players are foreign. Most of those players are either getting paid what they are worth or at a discount they are willing to accept to live in the US (green cards and citizenship for children are quite valuable). So what is the incentive for them to lose wages or worse, potentially lose the opportunity of living in the US for the reduction in wages they already incurred? From a domestic players point of view, the league was already paying double the official bargained for rate. What is the value in striking to raise the pot of money that will be directed to foreign players anyway? So instead the union fought for things that had value such as minimum wages, free agency and working conditions. And it made perfect sense the official salary cap just went up a measly level of about $400K per team. But that number is close to meaningless as the amount of spending per team has increased by almost $5 Million and close to doubling. Similarly the amount of domestic players making the old DP level of around $450K went up from 10 if you count Jermaine Jones (I don't as I consider his roots to be in Germany). Of those 10, only the lowest paid of the 3 Besler, Zusi and Wondo didn't come back to MLS from earning market rate based abroad. By May of this year over 30 domestic players had reached this level (I include Nagbe, Movsisyan, Karmara, Blake, Dwyer, Alonzo in the group as they all established roots in the US before they started playing professional soccer in the US). The old saw that players weren't pushing for a higher cap because they were afraid of losing job has been promulgated in the CBA threads by those that really had no idea what they are talking about. The salaries have doubled since the last CBA. The owners are spending about 250% what was bargained for. In all the CBA threads, I've yet to see a single quote of frustration about this spending. Furthermore, the only people at risk of losing a job are those willing to work for less than the new minimum wage. Since the minimum wage has jumped from about $13K in the early days to over 4 times that now, it just goes to show how divorced from reality the "fear of higher wages: has been.
You are speaking of a period over 30 years ago. Currently kids are being asked to start specializing around age 11. If you are practicing academy soccer 3 times a week with up to a couple of hours of travel to get there all year, how are you going to be competent at something else? Even 10-20 years ago, I knew of very few teens playing more than one sport at a high level. In terms of soccer, past 11, I can think of one kid that played high level soccer and volleyball and a couple high level players that also played football in high school, one baseball for until high school and a couple that played basketball. In places where the weather isn't as conducive to year round play it may be slightly different, but the pressure for early specialization is intense.
The last negotiation was primarily a negotiation between owners. The players had close to zero leverage and the negotiation was between the Kraft type owners that wanted to keep costs as low as possible vs the Anshutz types that feel the value will increase more by bringing higher priced talent and reducing player discord.