Lately there have been many posts about how meaningless/dull regular-season MLS games are. Here's an idea: Because of the single-entity concept, MLS in effect pays all the players salaries. Under this plan, a certain amount of money would be retained by MLS and paid to the winning team players after each regular-season game. Let's say each player on the winning side gets $1,000. Losers get zilch. Maybe players in ties get $250 each. Obviously, there are details to work out. How do you pay subs, players who get red-carded, players who never get in the game? Maybe they would get a percentage based on minutes played. Would this motivate the players to try to win? Each player on a team that wins 20 regular-season games would make an extra $20,000. If that doesn't motivate them, raise it to $1,500 a game, or $2,000, while dropping their base (guaranteed) salaries proportionately. This is similar to golf or tennis, where money is won based on performance. What do y'all think?
For most leagues, match-fixing would be a serious problem. But what about MLS? We might even make SportsCenter occasionally.
Two teams arrange to swap wins, rather than potentially drawing both games. Or... A goalkeeper for one team arranges with another team to let in a shot or two, in exchange for a cut of their win bonuses. It's not too tough to think of a few more scenarios. If it's enough money to allegedly motivate players to take each match more seriously, it's enough money to make players consider cheating the system to line their pockets. Hell, they already cheat for a lot less. The only way to have incentive bonuses that aren't open to corruption is to make them dependent on season performance, not individual games.
I have to disagree. We have a bonus system in almost all leagues and we haven't seen even a hint of rampant match fixing. And it is much more likely and much more lucrative to do it in other leagues. No one is going to fix a match to get a couple grand when he could dropped from a squad and lose tens of thousands for being an unreliable player.