Tuesday 23 July 2019

This is an interesting case with perhaps much broader implications.

For training compensation purposes, FIFA has established categories for every league in the world and every team within based on revenue. This is (obviously) because if a player is transferring to a small club in a financially modest league, the target team can't be asked to pay what, say, Chelsea or Barca would.

MLS and USSF say that Columbus Crew - and the rest of MLS - is category 4, the lowest, meaning Motherwell isnt owed anything as training compensation for Cadden ( or possibly $ 2000 per year. It's not entirely clear)

Motherwell, where Cadden has trained since he was 9, says that MLS is a category 2 league, meaning that they are owed $40,000 for every year Cadden trained with the club.

Cadden, a Scotland international, has been pursued by other teams, like Sunderland, which would net them !almost $300,000 in TC instead of, well, nothing.

For anyone interested, here's FIFA's breakdown of how the system works:

https://resources.fifa.com/mm/docum...registrationperiodsandeligibility_neutral.pdf

Reportedly MLS asked the SFA for Caddens ITC sometime yesterday. Meanwhile, Cadden is out of contract and Motherwell cant stop the transfer either way. The SFA could, theoretically, but USSF would almost certainly take it straight to FIFA's Disputes and Resolutions Board.

But if the two associations cant agree on MLS' income category, FIFA will have to make a ruling. This will entail FIFA looking at the books and deciding whether MLS makes money and how much.

 

FIFA has already decreed US teams fit into categories 2-4. Do they distinguish between teams in a league or do all the teams pay the same? Man City is obviously category 1, is Burnley?

Anyway, it's hard to see how even a lower revenue MLS side comes out at category 4, the same as a USL-1 team. Either all of MLS is category 2 or maybe the bottom revenue teams are in cat 3.

 

In other areas of FIFA (mainly dealing with transfers/loans) FIFA treats MLS as one team due to single-entity and the fact that MLS holds all the ITC's since all the players work for MLS, not the individual teams. I wonder if the same thing is happening here. Since MLs isn't profitable none of its teams are considered to be profitable.

 

How Sam Vines has grown into a crucial piece of the Colorado Rapids' future
https://www.prosoccerusa.com/mls/colorado-rapids/sam-vines-colorado-rapids-mls-homegrown-game/

Talks about how he's mentored by the now retired Bobby Burling. And shock! Conor Casey talks about watching a game after hours.

 

Garber or Sunil convinced FIFA that MLS isn't profitable? By that measure Real Madrid loses money too so they should be category 4.

 

The regulations - see the pdf I linked to - assigns each federation the job of deciding what category any given team within their national league should be assigned to.

The fed - USSF in the case of MLS - is required to file a statement (every year, I think) stating the categories their various teams fall into.

So putting every MLS team in Category 4 is something USSF did, beginning in 2017. Nobody has challenged it until now and unless FIFA changes the rules and takes that authority away from the federations - ALL the federations - then the Category 4 designation should stand.

I'd only note that this puts the Charleston Battery and Hartford Athletic in exactly the same financial category as LAFC and FC Atlanta.

In other words, it's ridiculous. But in theory, USSF gets to make that call.

 

This thread so far has been an interesting window into the minutiae of what actually happens inside USSF aside from event planning and secretly plotting to keep your favorite foreign-based U-20 player off the field.

 

There's no "convincing"to be done.

USSF submits a form assigning each professional team a Category. FIFA files it away.

That is the entire process.

 

Aside from determining training compensation per year, what else does a club's listed category affect?

 

As far as I can tell, nothing. The sole purpose of the classification system, which is based not on club income or assets but on how much the club spends on youth training, is for the purpose of standardizing training compensation.

Which is not to suggest that it might not have some further use down the road, such as requiring a certain level of expenditure or that spending on women's programs be equal to mens or some such.

It's easy of course to be cynical about FIFA and it's motives, but at the end of the day FIFA is a bureaucracy, and when you give bureaucracies a bunch of numbers they often find uses for them other than what was originally intended.