FIFA President says MLS system better than rest of world (sorta)...

Yes, the 12 weeks are prior to the start of the season.

Doesn't each team get $60 million in TV money before the start of the season?

 

Wow, I wish. That would be spectacular. That would be something like 40 years of transfer money for Union Berlin, and at least six years for Reading..

 

yes and no, Argentina has less money than Mexico, yet the Argentinean league is better (arguably) than Liga MX.

Local population has to do a lot with (unless you have no foreign player limit), this is one of the reasons why MLS will be better than the CSL for a long while, their local players and very straight foreign player limit makes then a lower quality (playing wise) league.

Each league/Federation sets its own date ranges right? some end right before the season starts, some others end them after a few weeks.

 

Your first point is a good one, local populations can change the equation. Still, as a general rule, would you agree that the best players like being paid as the best players, and go to the paycheck. Mexico v Argentina is an exception, perhaps, but only on the margins.
On the transfer windows, I would agree, which makes my point that MLS does a better job at it. Of course, the euro leagues I see as making my point are setting their league dates specifically to avoid what i see as an advantage.

 

How can it be when they have over 200 players playing overseas including most of their men's national team?

Most of Mexico's players overseas play in soccer third world countries like Guatemala and the USA

Seriously there are a lot of Mexicans making a living in USL.

 

I may not be getting your point here, they = Argentina?

They have great youth base, so they do replenish their ranks very quickly. But yes the Argentina saying is that the Argentina teams are full of very young players and very old players with little in between.

The pay difference between Liga MX and Ascenso MX is pretty big, shit is big in probably all countries (d1 from d2) so yes I can see players making more money in USL/China D2 than they would in Mex D2 or Argentina D2 or Spain D2.

This is probably tradition, in the USA we are used to trading deadlines during the season with teams free to deal and wheal all the time before that date.

In the top leagues in Europe, the tradition is build your team before the season, they play half a season then a month of trade opens up to try to fix what is not working then close it and finish up.

But big 4 is not the rule everywhere (even with in the B4 they have differences), many leagues actually allow registration of players after the B4 end theirs, that way they can sign up any player that was not able to make it to a 4 team.

Liga MX does this kind of, they start their semesters and teams can still fill out their rosters a few weeks into the semester.

 

Yes, I meant how can the Argentinian first division be that great when around 200 players play overseas, many of them moving at a very young age?

 

Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are factories of players. You go to any league in the world and the top teams will usually have at least one player of those nationalities.


I have not updated these since 2016, but at that point Argentina had surpassed Brazil as the top dog in Libertadores.

https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/¿deriamos-de-tener-coeficiente-en-la-libertadores.526674/page-6

 

It's not a very old tradition though, is it? Transfer windows didn't exist at all in 80s and weren't universal until 2002.

 

The French, German, Spanish and Italian summer transfer windows close on August 31st. The Premier League has just brought it forward to August 9th. There's also a loan window and free agents can be signed at any time. In the EFL I think it's still August 31st but the loan window ends later.

 

Meanwhile a counterargument is Uruguay. Great local talent but even the top teams are not very good because they pay so little. All things told, in the long run you get the player you pay for. In the case of MLS we are probably still overpaying a bit but the most important factor is that we've probably shot up in wage bill by a fair amount since that Daily Mail survey four years ago. At that point our wage bill was about half of LMX it's probably close to catching up by now. We may still be overpaying but we are overpaying a better player.

 

Uruguay does relatively well in Copa Libertadores even when being so small and sell most of their talent, so it is not a counterargument.

 

Our wage bill has gone up to where Liga MX's was then. And it wasn't all spending on high-end players, the MLS minimum salary has also doubled. But we haven't come close to catching up to Liga MX, because Liga MX wage bills have also increased by well over 50% and its international stature as a league has risen correspondingly.

 

According to Miguel Herrera, MLS has surpassed LMX economically. I don't quite believe him. He is mostly referring to the DP salaries but that has been the case for a while. The balance is being made up in the middle of the roster with the TAM and DTAM money. I am certain that in the last two years TAM money has made significant inroads to catching up to LMX and DTAM will also be significant for certain clubs.

 

Yet he supports the farce that is FFP

 

What's DTAM? I know Targeted (TAM) and General (GAM), is DTAM a separate developmental thing?
This is one thing MLS could do to improve, just call money money. I know, for instance, that there is a difference between TAM and GAM which makes $1 of GAM worth something llike $1.25 or $1.50 of TAM, but I don't see the point of that. They're like competing currencies. I get the difference on the DP thing, that salary above the max comes out of the individual club owners' pockets (even if they get it through a targeted sponsorship, which, again, is something else).
For instance, the two year TAM that clubs can use in either year but that vanishes if they don't use it at all, except some of that is on the club while most is a league distribution and on Tuesday if there are tacos for lunch, everyone gets a Croizet in their cereal (don't eat that cereal, btw (to be fair, it's early preseason but he's looking like a new, star, player)).
I suppose this is to protect the owners who don't want to spend as much but want to give off the impression that they're spending as much as they can, despite the fact that the MLSPA annual list makes the league the most transparent in any sport we've ever seen. Rant over.

 

Discretionary TAM is TAM that the club funds.