Zavagnin looking at Europe......

Good point I never really considered that one.

Bingo.

Yep

 

That's the wrong question. The correct question is MLS appreciably worse than it currently could be under a different structure.

My argument is that MLS' payroll structure is currently inefficient. They could theoretically spend the same on player salaries and generate a perceived greater level of play simply by restructuring how they pay out salaries (the two examples I gave above). My theory is that the players being paid above their worth will be squeezed out by the competitive bidding process in which teams are forced to maximize the return they get on their payroll or receive less the following year.

If such a structure were more efficient, and this led to increased revenues, you would then be able to reinvest the increased revenues back into payroll and, importantly, it would be invested into an efficient payroll structure that generated more revenues as well. The process continues thereby creating league-wide growth.

The only thing at risk is parity, and I've yet to see any evidence to suggest the monetary worth of parity is significant, much less enough to adopt an anti-growth and strict cost-control structure like the one currently in place. Nor have I seen evidence that extreme long-term competitive imbalance is the necessary result of unequal payrolls.

I will admit that this would be a hell of a lot easier to accomplish in 1996 than it is now, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be the better system.

 

I don't think Kerry Zavagnin, Adin Brown or Ramiro Corrales but any butts in seats besides the comps they were giving to family and friends. So, in terms fo a draw, I don't think MLS loses anything.

However, where I think losing solid, building block type players like the above and others who leave on frees is that it does impact the overall quality of the league. Yeah, there are new, cheap players coming from the amateur ranks every year, but they aren't at the same level, right now, as the players whose roster spots they take.

However, where I think MLS has really goofed is not more aggressively marketing and selling its players overseas. Players are going to leave because at heart, they're capitalists. You can say there are all sorts of other reasons, but at the end of the day, folks are leaving for more cash.

We know they're leaving and that they're gonna leave. Why not try and sell more players and make a few bucks like, oh, the entire rest of the soccer playing world.

I know back in the embryonic stages of MLS Doug Logan repeatedly stated that MLS "is not a developmental league" and "not in the business of selling players" etc... because "we're not a feeder league" yada, yada, yada...



I think MLS accepted this as their philosophy and, with a few exceptions - Convey, Beasley, Howard and McBride, for instance - has stuck too it. But here's the thing - they're leaving anyway! So, while they may not want to be a feeder league, but that's what they're becoming. But, they aren't being proactive about it and thus aren't seeing the benfits.

So, rather than try and sell the likes of Corrales or Brown to Norway or Nelsen to England or KZ to wherever the ************ he's going, they let them walk on frees and get nothing for them.

That is revenue lost. Now, I realize that a lot of these players are more marketable when they are out of contract, but I refuse to believe that MLS couldn't find a market for these guys if they were more assertive about it.

MLS is losing money and yet it refuses to sell more of its players and create a revenue stream that could go back to - gasp! - player salaries and player development which would thus help raise the quality of the league and make it easier to keep the mid-tier players.

I keep thinking that if enough players leave maybe MLS will change its system but so far they seem to stay in denial.

 

Agreed but you will have a hard time convincing many people of that.

We have two real numbers to go by, attendance and tv ratings. One is controlled by MLS one is quite objective. The number controlled by MLS says we are growing while the number that is objective says the popularity (of the TV product at least) is declining.

Has there ever been a product that has grown in paid attendance while the popularity of the TV product declined? There is a misconnect somewhere.

We have gone from ABC(however briefly) to ESPN to ESPN2. That does not sound like increasing popularity.

I believe the only way to convince the league to change course is if the fans themselves force change. As it stands many people see SEM as some sort of sort of unassailable construct that simply cannot be tampered with. You won't be able to convince many people that it is holding the league back (in many ways) and without the support of a large group of fans MLS will not feel any need for change. There will be no impetus for change otherwise.

Which is the question that needs to be asked. After these stadiums are built what will be the defining event that will proel this league to heights higher than it has seen thusfar. What will be cause the league to grow beyond where it now stands.

 

Are they in denial?

As Voros has staed earlier if your fanbase is indifferent to the quality of play that presents a significant problem.

I fear that like most problems MLS has faced the one of the quality on the field will not be solved or even addressed until it becomes extreme.

 

They probably get a MUCH better TV deal.


Plus European Comeptition, etc...

 

a) With regard to competitive salaries: the Dollar to Euro ratio was 89c:1 3 years ago or so and now it's about $1.35 for 1€ and that's a huge difference.

A €300K contract - something quite attainable in the lower tier Euro leagues and Colaship/BL2 for an average player - was worth ~ $270K, an MLS max.

Now, a €300K contract is a whole $405K. Take four players at that pay and that's your cap.

b) MLS teams may actually have a disincentive to succeed if the players contracts have performance - team or individual - related bonuses. In other words, you win and you lose against the cap but get nothing in revenues.

c) I am not sure if this's been brought up but a "major dissatisfaction with the pay scale" notion can not be ignored here either. Imagine being Kerry Z. and looking at a $66K salary while knowing that someone like Brian McBride is pulling about $2M from Fulham.

I would speculate that the league is full of Kerry Zavagnins and Davey Arnauds who would need to be approached now for a re-up in 2,006. Otherwise, most of these guys would head out of the door as soon as their contracts expire and that would create a tremendous turnover, which would be bad for the quality of the game and even worse for marketing.

 

I'll buy that-- that is ultimately the right question. It's a bit further afield from what we can talk about concretely but that's not a slam on you: I absolutely agree with your logic-- I only question just how much of an effect being more efficient with pennies will have on MLS. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be more efficient. I just think the main problem of MLS is poverty: it doesn't make enough money and incremental improvements in the quality of play aren't likely to pull in piles of additional dough.

Of course you know that it's not just "parity", it's also cost-control. Even if teams were growing at a faster rate, that's of little help to the league if they're increasing their spending at an even faster rate. In the real world, we can afford to be a little laissez faire about whether entities sink-or-swim. I'm not sure MLS can afford that. Even without enforced parity, you'd still need cost controls.

 

I didn't even incorporate exchange rates into my argument (since it would have changed it somewhat) but that is a very good point.

Are you sure he (brian) makes that much?

 

I disagree in principle, but you noticed I suggested an alternative to the current cost-controls (flat across the league) to ones indexed to individual team revenues. So the spending you can do on payroll is still capped, but it's capped as a percentage of your team's revenues, which would still allow teams to invest additional revenues it generates into the club's payroll.

I'm not really in favor of such a setup, but I'm much more in favor of it than a flat cap as it currently exists. The current structure punishes success and subsidizes failure and for a league with growth ambitions that's not going to cut it.

I'm not trying to impose any sort of laissez faire solution onto the league (though I'd bet long term it would succeed if executed properly), but MLS' model is so centralized and so anti-competitive that it could move a ton in that direction and still have a ton left to go. I'm perfectly content being a gradualist on this, and though there has been some gradual (very gradual) movement in that direction since 1996, it's been a bit too gradual for my tastes and not swift enough for the league to realize any significant gains. While I'm strongly in favor of pro/rel at some point (it's another excellent mechanism for tying on the field success with economic success), I can wait a while before we cross that bridge.

I think they probably know this, but may very well be ensnared in the SEM system to the point where it's difficult to extract themselves from it. SEM is their anti-trust exemption and currently two owners own 2/3 of the league and so if they want to open things up a bit, those are two issues they'd have to address.

 

But I think that's a different question. I'm sure they do, but they manage to do so without, I'd assume, attracting significantly more viewers.

The main reason would be that the difference between viewers of a Norwegian match in norway and whatever you might replace it with is probably much greater than the difference between an MLS match and something else you could put on there. Nevertheless, there is an indication that MLS teams can make money locally through TV contracts (you saw the contract the Galaxy and Chivas just signed, and I'd also guess that DC United and the Metrostars have net positive revenues from their local broadcasts), and also some indication that they could make a little bit of money through narrowcasting such as Fox Sports World.

And still, I think it's very much unlikely that the TV money is sufficient to make up for roughly half the attendance of an MLS team. Even MLB makes more money locally than Nationally and it has a substantial national contract. I think the reason Norwegian teams spend more on salaries is because they have more incentive to spend on salaries. They don't improve their team, they get relegated and they lose a bunch of potential revenue. Those incentives and disincentives do not exist in MLS.

 

Which is why I think it needs to restructure revenues somewhat and structure it so that additional quality will result in more money on a team-by-team basis, even if, at first, it doesn't necessarily do so on a league-wide basis.

It's not a magic bullet, but there ain't one. It does, however, set the stage for MLS teams to begin to benefit from improving the quality of their on-the-field product which I can't see as anything but a net positive going forward. The league has consistently favored cost control over revenue generation and I think that dynamic needs to shift somewhat for the league to start to realize some of its potential for growth.

 

But one of the assumptions being made here is that the level of talent is actually dipping because players are leaving.
The French, Turkish, Portugese, Swedish, Dutch, etc, leagues all lose a lot of players, and have for years. Yet the standard of play remains steady, occassionally increases and occassionally does dips (but rebounds).
As the MLS becomes a more steady route to higher salaried leagues elsewhere, the talent flow into the league increases, both among young US athletes making a choice of sport, and among the sizeable concacaf region.
This sounds pie in the sky, but it does work everywhere else. Lower leagues feed higher leagues. Does this mean MLS gives up on becoming a top league, no. Maybe in 20/40/60 years, that's possible.
But level of play does not affect attendence as much as other factors, atmosphere, expectation and desirablity of experience, prime among them. Level of play, in a country without a great deal of experience with the sport, is a piece of this, but not the most important piece, the owners have decided.
The league has a clear strategy, build SSS. Once MLS has a league full of teams in control of their own stadia, meaning a league full of more profitable teams, they move on to another phase.
I totally agree with the earlier statement that MLS should look to make something off the talent it developes, but free talent is the trend these days. Bottom line, no one is irreplacable, and there's always a next best thing around the corner.
The Euros among us do care about level of play in MLS, but losing KZ does not diminish that (he came from the a-league, and performed well, earned a cap, in his first year in the league).

 

But my point is there's plenty of reason to suspect that MLS has everything it needs to become a higher salaried league itself. I mean losing players to the Premiership or Bundesliga is one thing. Losing them to Denmark and Norway is something wholly other.

This is the largest economy in the world and the league already draws over 15,000 a game. The country is lousy with disposal income, has an immense population, has close to 10,000,000 kids playing the sport at the youth level and had several clubs averaging over 20,000 a game 25 years ago. The European leagues engage in protectionism against non-EU players and yet MLS still can't compete with the salary structures of leagues with half of its current attendance?

If so, the only reason could be that clearly MLS has not maximized its ability to offer competitive salaries for players. There's no reason why MLS should not be able to offer more than competitive salaries with those leagues if only it had some reason to. The current structure gives it no reason to.

MLS could start raking in 100s of millions and under the current structure there's no reason why they should spend any of it on players (other than facing a full on revolt by the players).

The only way this league spends significantly more on players is by strengthening the relationship between player quality and future revenues. SSSs won't do it. Expansion fees won't do it. Transfer fees won't do it.

Clearly an American soccer team is capable of drawing higher attendances since teams in New York, Seattle, Minnesota and Tampa have already drawn higher average attendances in a season than any MLS club has ever done. So I think it's absurd to assume that MLS is even close to maxing out its potential fan base at the moment.

 

European clubs are not investments. They are not there to make their owners money. They are there to lose their money. Many clubs are registered as non-profit organization and all the money a club makes can only be invested back in the club.

 

Well, at least it's all out in the open now, what people really think.

I'd rep you for admitting what's on your mind, but I don't like you right now.

 

Well I don't and if becoming just a development vehicle for the big leagues has the same effect on MLS as it had on minor league baseball (IE, crippled it, as the organized minors has done to minor league baseball), then count me out.

I'll never give a damn whether Nigelchester Rovers beats Blackstone Forest Wanderers so I'm not sure why I should be pleased when they take the best players from the teams I do give a damn about.

This league has plenty of room and opportunity to grow, I'm simply arguing in favor of strategies that might help it do so.

 

It's clearly a feeder league today, and will be for another 10-20 years. So, for now, I agree there is no point fighting the departure of our top players. To think otherwise would be like a baseball team in the Dominican Republic trying to keep Sammy Sosa and Pedro Martinez from coming to the USA. It would be madness. Plus, I too enjoy seeing our players give it a try in Europe.

But this is a wealthy country, and if the league keeps growing, things can change. 20-30 years is a long time. MLS may never make it to Manchester United level, but I don't think Aston Villa is too much to aspire to.

 

I agree, there is really nothing to do right now, but run the league expecting tv will never come and MLS will always be a feeder league.

I just don't think those assumptions are right. 25 years ago, the NBA finals were not even on tv. And in 25 years, MLS will have enough revenue to compete with Aston Villa on salaries.

 

I'd be surprised. That'd be a big, big change from a few years ago.