That will probably be a big factor. But I wonder if a bigger factor might be top level players seeing how great Messi is after several years in MLS. I mentioned this in another thread, but Vinicius has really suffered from racism in Spain, and also has complained that the Spanish FA isn’t doing enough about it. Imagine LAFC making a pitch to him when his contract runs out, hey, come live in LA. We don’t have fans making monkey noises. And you can still play for the Selecao. Now, the Vinicius class is at the very top of world football. But if even players at that level can excel in the damn World Cup like Messi has, MLS can make the argument that signing here won’t diminish your international career. It might even enhance it. (This argument probably works much, much better for South Americans than Europeans. Fortunately, South Americans are pretty good at this soccer thing. ). How many top Colombians and Ecuadoreans etc might consider MLS now who wouldn’t have 2 months ago? And if I may really extend this thought experiment, this would be of a piece with the continuing integration of CONCACAF and CONMEBOL. Hell, it might even push integration of club competitions too.
Also the kind of player USMNT fans would be upset about signing with MLS regardless of salary structure.
Why would it squeeze the players since they set the number? They can just change both as they make up the rules.
MLS can change roster designations. But to date, the league hasn't changed one thing about how DPs count against the salary budget in the current CBA. The maximum salary budget charge amount (the DP threshold, if you will), the fact that it's remained 12.5% of the base salary budget for each DP, those annual team salary budget numbers, the base budget, GAM and TAM numbers per team, hasn't changed a penny from what it was negotiated to be in 2020. Regardless, all of these big rules changes will happen related to the new CBA, not before.
But the CBA expires in 2027, and the subject of the thread is major changes going into 2028. Maybe there's a divergence here between people thinking about changes to the existing CBA and people thinking about an entirely new CBA starting in 2027/28.
Could be. Thing is, the first group emerges every year, expecting big changes to the rules based on offhand comments by Garber et al, but it never happens. MLS isn’t going to unilaterally blow up a CBA that suppresses or at least contains player salary growth. The complicating factor now, however (which I know you’re fully aware of) is the calendar switch and ‘sprint season’ preceding it next year. The current CBA expires in January 2028, and isn’t structured to define playing, say, a sprint season. And it makes zero sense for MLS to enter a 2027-28 season with a CBA that would expire halfway through the season. It feels as though MLS has painted itself into a corner to an extent. It’s announced a calendar switch that it can’t enact without MLSPA agreement. It doesn’t have that agreement yet and it can’t just upend the entire league scheduling structure under the terms of the existing, about to expire, CBA. Or so it seems to me. All that said, I don’t get a sense that the players are against the schedule change, so that might not be a huge obstacle to overcome. Which leads to the entirely new CBA that would take effect before the current one is set to expire. Personally, I can’t see MLS being able to start a 2027-28 season without one. Maybe they could come to some handshake agreement with the union regarding the sprint season. Who knows. In any event, to me, the ‘big changes’ to the leagues rules have always been hardwired to the new CBA.
I just can't see them starting the 2027/28 without a new CBA, then switching to a new CBA mid-season. The 2020 CBA was extended because of the revenue impact of COVID. Since then revenue has doubled from $1.2 billion in 2019 to $2.5 billion in 2025. The players deserve a share.
The problem with this is that NT coaches don't value MLS. Look at Bielsa. Even Aguirre doesn't value MLS. Any Brazilian coach wouldn't value MLS either. Not saying all NT coaches do. But other than that if any MLS team were to convince Vini to come here regardless of a NT call up that would be huge!
National team coaches at this World Cup disagree with you. @gogorath found this handy chart and posted it in another thread. This is showing minutes played in all stages (through the round of 16) this Cup, organized by league. The numbers in this one are a little confusing--they represent 90-minute player-games. So, for example, players in France's Ligue Un played the equivalent of 39 full 90-minute matches in the first game of the group stage (GS1). It's useful to note that most of the minutes from MLS players in this tournament are NOT from the USMNT.
If it's still Carlo, he likely wouldn't care. He brought Neymar and he has barely played in the Saudi league for two plus seasons now.
Neymar was more pressure from Brazilian media/people to take him. He had no legit reason to take him other than to give him a farewell.
If the max cap hit goes down say $200,000, that’s going to lower by $200K how much a team can pay a “regular” player, a player not taking up a DP slot. It wouldn’t by itself. That was a different way of making DPs less of a cap burden.
That’s true now. I’m suggesting it will change in light of Messi’s performance. How much will it change? We shall see.
Nobody is going to end up getting paid less money. The max salary (or max cap hit) isn't going to go down.
I agree completely. Recall, the original CBA agreed to just before Covid arrived was considered a win for the players. They gave up a lot in the CBA that’s currently in effect. They know it and the owners know it. A CBA battle isn’t in the interests of anyone. I think that they’ll be able to negotiate a new agreement in advance of the next full season, 2027-28. But it’ll be complicated. I do think the league and the players both want MLS to evolve. It’s just going to take a long time to work through all of those details.
MLS: the league has decided to open up more revenue to pay players more money by making DP players no longer count against the budget. MLSPA:How dare you!
Brazil has several WC squads worth of players in the 5 leagues that have had more representation than MLS in this WC, so this would be no surprise at all. They're deciding between players in the top 20 clubs in the world, generally.
I maintain that to the extent MLS is still looked down upon and is a detriment to NT careers, it's mostly an issue of roster balance (that is, the best players are pretty good, but the worst ones aren't good enough) and that it's well within MLS's financial ability to fix the problem. (There's a somewhat separate issue among European NTs of pure physical distance that isn't as straightforward, but I'm putting that aside for now.) I expect them to address it to one extent or another with the coming rules reforms, though I'm sure that like most of the things the league puts out, it will be a careful and fairly risk-averse measure that will leave some disappointed (it's left a lot of folks disappointed already, merely because it didn't happen years ago, which I get).
One challenge for the league is that team ownership no longer has a unified vision of what it wants the league to become. Perhaps it never did. But n the past, when CBAs were being negotiated, there did seem to be a universally held commitment to maintaining the general, single entity, structure of the league in a manner that was rooted in a common set of principals, such as rules that made it virtually impossible for teams to get into bidding wars over players and, in so doing, inflate player compensation. While there seems to be a general agreement that MLS needs to invest more in on-pitch talent in order to improve the on-pitch product and, hopefully, attract more fans to the league, there's clearly no consensus on how to do that. A modest number of teams want to be allowed to spend gobs of cash on acquiring stars from other league; other teams want to invest in academies and MLSNP in order to develop talent from within; others seem to want to, perhaps, spend more, but not go all-in on lots of DP-level acquisitions (with their huge transfer fees) but, instead, develop rosters built upon a higher median average salary so the gap between the best players on the roster and the worst is a lot smaller than exists today. Then you have a few owners like Saputo who probably don't want to spend another penny than they do already. Sop I share your concern, since it appears as thought MLS is going to need to try and thread the needle on this next CBA. If it were just the owners negotiating among themselves, that would be tricky. But there's the MLSPA to contend with, of course. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. I do think most owners are committed to spending more on rosters, so the gap to close in that regard with the players might not be that big of a challenge. Both sides are incentivized to get a deal done. But just because CBA gets done doesn't mean it'll work in practice to further enhance quality of play and draw in more fans.
The fact its a single entity isn't that relevant. The Premier League decides things by majority vote. It's the reason the Premier League broke away from the Football League, because Southport and Hartlepool had as much say as Arsenal and Manchester United. Of course it's pretty easy for the big six to get their way. The other 14 ask "why?" and the big six say "have more money", "OK!". History is more of a factor. The EPL started with a handful of teams wanting to spend bucket loads of money and the rest went along for the ride. MLS started with no money and people invested with the expectation of things being run prudently.
Yeah, there's one way to do this that benefits the Union, which would be greater league-provided salary budget and maybe some HG benefits; there's one way that would benefit Inter Miami, which would be more exceptions for the owners to use their own money that they would benefit from more than other teams; and then there's something between that. My guess as to what a compromise would look like is a bump up of the initial salary budget, and then some more freedom for middle-tier players. My personal suggestion, which is one I don't think the league will take up but I think would be fun, was an escalating luxury tax, one that gets bigger the more years you've been over the cap. So that Miami could spend everything the league currently allows, and then they could throw 20 million of their own money if they wanted to at winning ConcaChamps. This wouldn't cost them that much tax in year one, but if they kept it up into year three or four, it would start to really bite down. This way you might get superteams, but they'd be temporary superteams. They also somewhat paradoxically had more revenue sharing than their continental counterparts, so that when the big clubs spent, everyone benefitted to some degree. Now the 15th biggest team in the EPL is also about the 30th biggest in the world, because of that big TV check.
Leicester City received £35 million in Premier League TV money last season despite finishing 43rd. Luton Town did it the previous season.