Exactly. But I think if each MLS team finds an average of 1 player per team to promote from a dev contract to a full salary the following year, then it would be considered a success in my mind.
If there is one thing we can glean from from this long, convoluted thread, it's that the team reps, and probably the rank and file players on the senior rosters, really don't give a shit what the Dev Contract players are making.
It might be, if the percentage of guys who move up vs. those who move out is high. And I believe it was. The thing is, the developmental thing and the adidas reserve league are both too new for us to have any meaningful data about how much actual "development" is going on. If a guy goes from $12,900 and gets a bunch of minutes in the reserve league and is contributing to the first team two years later, that's not bad at all. But you need time for all that to settle for such a study to be meaningful. In some respects, yeah. And they're also like seat-fillers at the Oscars. And the guest players who are brought in for the weekend to make up numbers for a reserve league game are even lower than that.
And here's the other thing: Labor always wants wages to be as high as possible for as many of its workers as possible. Management always wants costs to be as low as possible to maximize potential profit. Those two things are often at odds. Wages don't go up out of the goodness of management's heart, they go up when they're forced up by the free market forces. As long as there are those willing to play for $12,900, the minimum wage won't go much above that (except for cost-of-living or inflationary increases). Workers of the world unite.
What would good development look like? If Ajax gets a couple first team players a year from its youth teams, I'd imagine you'd call that pretty successful development. If MLS gets a few first team players a year from the developmental players, wouldn't that also be successful development (notwithstanding the fact that the players in MLS will generally be inferior, top to bottom, to Ajax's players)? But maybe, despite the fact that a few Dev players end up making waves every year, maybe there are some ways to explain that fact without assuming that MLS is doing a good job of developing players. I can see a couple of other possibilities: (1) there's such a small gap between the senior MLS rosters and the dev players that it's not necessary to do any development in order to produce senior team players. I think this is probably wrong, simply because so few dev players ever make it, so the gap between the senior team and reserves is probably pretty big. So a more plausible explanation is (2) a few guys are overlooked by scouting, and are actually senior roster-caliber players, but unfortunately get stuck of dev rosters initially. There might be some truth to this: Chris Rolfe and Bobby Boswell were almost immediately impact players. I'm not sure you can call their immediate success a result of MLS development. But is that really the case for every single dev player? Have none of them improved because of MLS training? Lombardo, for example, looked awful to me early on, but I thought he really improved over the course of the year. If nothing else, the developmental roster spots give MLS teams a few extra spots to take risks on players that haven't been properly identified through scouting. The spots seem useful regardless of whether there's any development going on.
Especially if they're going to continue to ask MLS teams to deal with multiple tournaments and national team callups during the course of the season. They simply can't get by without more bodies.
The U.S has always ********ed people over with a bad minimum wage. It needs to change. Do developmental players have their housing paid for by the club? Do they all live together? Nobody can live off $12,900 a year if they're paying rent and bills.
Like I said, it'll change when change is forced, not because you say or I say it should change. You guys are capitalist, too, right? I mean, the free market works over there, too, right? No, yes, and apparently they can for a while, because there is no lack of guys willing to try.
Typically they have another source of income, usually a second job. They are not full time soccer players.
And they are union workers. Its up to their union to negotiate with management on behalf of all their members. Currently I expect "Dev" status to be a major point of contention during the next collective bargaining talks. Another thing to remember, is when the last CBA was negtiated, there were about 3 owners, and AEG owned hafl the league. It wasnt about to fold, but they were running a very tight budgetary ship. Now its looking like instead of worrying about wether their members will even have jobs 4 years in the future, they can start thinking about what fair compensation is.
Many of your questions have extensive answers that have been discussed in previous versions of this thread.
I think that is setting the bar too low. There is nothing wrong with having guys who are capable of challenging players already on the roster. However we need players who can challenge players at the top a lot more than we ned players who can challenge the footsoldiers. At present pace we are simply acquiring cheaper footsoldiers (with some notable exceptions).
None of this matters to me as a ticket buyer. Its one thing to say "Yay, the league is finding good economic solutions that help the bottom line." as a person who wants to see the game succeed here. But I am not that excited about players who are simply more of the same or only marginally better. As a person who wants to see better soccer I just can't get that excited about the idea that part of the plan is to find the cheapest players possible with only token attention given to making those players better. I grasp all the economic arguments just fine though. I just find it really hard to understand why other people think its "great" (or similar terms) that the league can do this.
I am sorry but not its not because that is simply setting the bar at the lowest most comfortable level. That is a wonderful formula for staying at your relative level forever. If you want to get better (like we should assume MLS wants to get better) you have to set higher standards for yourself otherwise the gap never close over time. I can't see anywhere else in any walk of life where this addiction to mediocrity is attractive for people. MLS doesn't even need to produce the same caliber of player as AJAX for the gap to go be eroded. They simply need to set the bar much higher than it is now. You can't draw any conclusions at all because the quality level of these dev players team to team year to year is so inconsistent. If you have Chris Rolfe or Gonzalo Segares as dev players the gap looks small if you have some other players it looks huge. What little scouting there is not that effective unless you develop a network of contacts who believe you will take what they say seriously (a la Steve Nichol) I am willing to say every single one of them improved, whether they were good enough to play first team or not. Its just about impossoble not to improve. But thats not the issue. This issue is whether or some of these gusy should even be around these teams in the first place and what kind of identification is taking place of what areas these players need to improve in what plan is put in place to make sure they reach the minimum standards. That is what these great talent producing nations do. They don't have any special formula for producing superstars since there is none. They simply ensure that all players above a certain age group are able to achieve certain minimum standards as it relates to skillset and then they give them the stage on which to perfrom. MLS already does the latter but is having real difficulty with the former. When people get excited about the ability to pay bottom tier players peanuts just because we can I don't see how we are moving in the right direction in that regard.
Therein lies part of the problem. We don't need more "bodies" we need more "player". I think you hit it on the head though. The dev player program is primarily about finding more "bodies". This is why I rarely complain about what they get paid but always complain about the implications of what they get paid.
Ok-- then the issue isn't that there's no "development" (which is what some folks were saying earlier)-- it's that there isn't development far beyond the current standard of the league. That's a bigger issue. Given that nearly all of them fail, I'd say it's pretty easy to draw a conclusion, despite a few outliers. Simply providing a stage does ensure that we'll find more of the guys who are able to achieve minimum standards. Larger rosters give more guys a chance and can partially compensate for the under/ineffective scouting of US players. Does that replace a coherent system like you're suggesting? Of course not.
That's a good point. It's not even close to a comprehensive system. I don't ever want to see a point where MLS isn't paying some dev players 12k (or something like that). Why? Just for the sake of illustration, assume there are 100 MLS or better caliber young players who leave school each year. 2 will be worth $500,000 a year. These are guys that could step in and play in Europe. Think Benny or poor old Cory Gibbs. 3 will be worth $200,000 a year-- a potential MLS superstar. Think Edu. 10 will be worth $100,000 a year-- solid MLS players. Say, Esky. 15 will be worth $50,000 a year. Say Clarence Goodson. 30 will be worth $30,000 a year. Like Condoul. But around 40 will be worth very little, at least at the time they are scouted. But some of them will be guys like Boswell, or Segares, or Rolfe. MLS teams won't pay them $30k because they just don't seem worth it. Given a platform, some of these guys will perform. Without a platform, they will leave the business. They will not have a platform with a higher minimum salary. The point of the dev program should not be to say "Well, we're offering lots of players the opportunity to play at 12k a year." Those 12k a year players should only be a part of the entire program-- but they should always be a part of the program.
Yeah, you may be right! But I would bet that a very talented High Schooler (Bad Grades)/Junior College (Non Scholarship) player would be happy to stay home for 30K. Heck! 1. My brother would grab his boots out the closet for 25K right now . . . but not for 13K 2. I would honestly like to know how many kids are looking elsewhere (Europe, USL, etc.) vs The kids that would love to play at home, not learn a new language, not adjust to weird food and drive on the "RIGHT" side of the street. Just curious?
i wonder what the numbers would look like if you divide them all by 20 . . . I mean how a 16K salary would compare to the final numbers (revenue) of the D-Rays. Anyone know where we can find these type of stats.
The free market doesn't really work that well, does it? But that's another complex argument that nobody wants to hear. But yeah, forced. That's an odd word. You do realise that you and I saying something and loads of other people saying something, and then us doing something does force change, or weren't you paying attention in history class? Though obviously people demonstrating on the wage of developmental soccer players isn't top of the list.
Would it be possible for people to go back and check the previous pages of this thread? This reads like a rehash.
1) Very talented HS/JC Player = not likely to be good enough for the worst MLS Dev slot. 2) What happens in 3-5 years when said player pops a knee, or just gets passed by and doesn't have an education capable of supporting himself, let alone a spouse or child? I'm betting your brother, on his best day, isn't good enough to run with any of the current dev contract players. Few have the opportunity to look at Europe. It takes either getting lucky to get noticed at some sort of tournament or get scouted or have the money to put together a tape and shoot it to a bunch of 3rd/4th division teams and the money to get yourself to Europe. Contrast that with the fact that is very hard for some to grasp that soccer just isn't popular enough in the US to allow the same # of people to get paid to play it as compared to the A - AA - AAA - MLB system & Non-Affiliated baseball leagues. So while some clowns, me included would have loved to play soccer for a few years after college, it's ultimately not in most people's best interest to pursue that when you could be getting an education or training that's going to allow you enough money to feed yourself when you're 50
Oklahoma I work in my church's assistance ministry and see people that are able to survive on 6,000 to 7,000 dollars. Is it a great life, no. But then, none of them are 18-22 year old athletes either that have the opportunity for further education, or in the case of most of the development players, the safety net of both their recently completed education and a supportive family that allows them the ability take a year or two off before they have to get a real job or develop themselves/show they were a late bloomer and make a roster