Great article linked in MLS's reddit on CBA, Free Agency and Single-Entity: http://americansoccernow.com/articles/mls-single-entity-status-driving-free-agency-battle From it, I came with some ideas, maybe silly, maybe not, I bring them for your consideration. Here, my comments there: MLS and MLSPA would need to come with some legal fiction that would grant players more mobility, while leaving the league's single-entity status alone. That is not easy, if feasible! A sort of solution seems to be establishing a sort of multilayered budget cap system, where MLS pays up to a certain amount, than the subsidiaries can pay extra for FA players up to another amount, and DPs would have no cap whatsoever. The limit on FA players one team could hire would be established by the cap, and the limit of the salary of a FA would be limited to the threshold of becoming a DP. Players ultimately would all still be hired by MLS. To appease the players, and keeping the single-entity intact, there could be, short after the MLS Cup, a kind of blind auction; a reverse-draft of some sort: the Player's Free-Agency Draft (PFAD). It would work like this: (a) Players after a certain amount of years in the league, whose contract has ended, and have refused a Qualifying Offer (FA level) from the team they are playing, would become a Free-Agent and could participate in PFAD; (b) In PFAD, all players would be ranked in accordance with the interest of teams, and that would be the picking order; (c) teams would be allowed to deliver the players an envelope with a biding proposals - a copy of all proposals would also be sent to the league; (d) than, players would select the team that interest them the most. How nice this event would be?! The proposals set by the teams would have a scale, depending on how PFAD goes, for instance: "if you are the first to pick us, the proposal is $X; if you are the second, the proposal is $Y; we won't be able to hire you if two players have already been hired by us." The RED could be held after a FA window, in the middle of january, but with salaries already established by the league (a non-rookie minimum). Players without contract, by entering RED, would agree to play for a certain amount to any team that would pick them.
If there's a legal fiction that solves this dispute, it's not going to be something that can be simply explained in a forum post.
Actually, many around here would probably be able to do it. There is always tons of pages full of bs that could be ignored. The main features can usually be limited to what I did above.
To us non-lawyer types jargon = details we don't understand When we are burned on a contract that jargon turns into details we wish we understood.
(Ignoring for a moment the fact that someone used "great article" and "americansoccernow.com" in the same sentence...) Every. Single. League. Ever. (That I can think of, at least, of any consequence) has said that free agency would ruin it. Baseball's lords fought hard for the reserve clause, claiming the very existence of the sport would be compromised if it were done away with. Art Modell was just one of football's people who claimed "there is no scenario under which free agency would work." If I'm MLS, I completely understand the reasons you don't want free agency. Some of them may even be valid, given our sport and our league are still more fragile than the others, recent gains notwithstanding. If I'm the MLSPU, I completely understand wanting the same free agency rights within the league that other sports - and other American workers - already have. I'm not sure either side's position is worth dying for, though. If the players are going to be hard-liners and insist they won't play come March without free agency, and the owners are going to be hard-liners and insist they won't budge on free agency, someone's gotta blink. In baseball, the players' union wins every single time. In football, basketball and hockey, the owners win every single time. (The players see gains, but they don't just win like baseball players do.) I am not sure MLS players can win this one. I don't think the sky will fall if MLS goes through a work stoppage. I think it will be short if there is one because ( a ) the players simply can't afford it and ( b ) the league itself can't really afford a protracted fight. I think it's going to get solved, and the players will get something. They'll have to give up something else, though, and they may not like the tradeoff, at least initially.
Without disagreeing with anything in the overall post, I do have one potential hang up. No league has had MLS's business structure and I wonder if free agency would be a risk to that structure.. Not saying that MLS would collapse into a pile of goo without single entity, nor that I'm sure single entity would suffer if free agency existed, but just wondering if it is an issue that maybe separates MLS from the other leagues that implemented free agency.
Single Entity leaves the owners very vulnerable to any class action law suit from the aggrieved players on the grounds of collision. That is precisely why Alan Rothenberg set it up as the SEM. Let's not forget that Rothenberg was an aide to Peter Ueberroth during the 1984 Olympics and Ueberroth did not do too well in those collision cases - meaning he lost them and soon lost his job - when he was the Commissioner of Baseball. As to strike, MLS will find it very easy to find replacement players.
No expert here. But if this goes to court, the key decision point will be whether or not the league is, in fact, a single entity. Personally, I don't think it is. But the courts have thought otherwise in the past, no reason to be sure they wouldn't again. Still, aside for labor contracts, MLS looks a lot more like a traditional N American league than the 3-owner league MLS was 15 years ago.