Reading about some of the recent contract negotiations (Twellman and Balboa, in specific), the deals are structured so that players get a smallish base salary but can gain much more in incentives - games played, goals scored, national team appearances, league and media honors, etc. How do incentive-laden contracts work in regards to salary cap? Is only the base salary included? Or the highest possible payout? Maybe an anticipated bottom line value, with base salary and some incentives? Is it just accounted for in the following year's cap? The Metros are talking about signing Balboa to a base salary of $100K to get under the cap, with the opportunity to make much more through incentives. This makes me think the figure on the cap is closer to the $100K - but I would think that there must be some kind of mechanism to limit incentives or else all teams would abuse them, signing many players to small base salaries and offering them the opportunity to gain much more through incentives. Hypothetically, what would stop a team from signing 18 players to $90,000 contracts with a $150,000 incentive for playing at least 1 game?
Based on reading trial testimony (don't have the URL on this system), incentives do not count in the cap, but can greatly affect the guy's base salary for the following season. Several times in testimony, MLS people were very clear that there was a big difference in what a guy's salary was and what his W-2 said. The player's lawyers kept tryng to attack the salaries, while MLS kept saying guys had lots of opportunities to make more money by simply meeting performance bonuses. I think they said then that if guys hit a certain amount of bonuses, they got a bigger automatic raise and stuff. Maybe someone has the link. I know Ihave it on my home system.
if you play great and reach your incentives, you send your team way over the salary cap, and they're forced to trade you next season for a 5th round draft pick and a Landon Donovan National Team bobblehead. just kidding.
<a href="http://home.martnet.com/~jgoodwin/case.zip">The same</a> (mirrored as a zip file, about 1 Meg) Geocities sites tend to get shut off temporarily when they receive a lot of hits, so this might be more convenient for some people.