I think that might be a contentious issue this time. I guess another 5 year term would mean the CBA would be up before the 2025 season. I suppose that could be far enough removed from the 2026 world cup to be ok. My thinking is just that it might add to the players leverage as the owners would be extra averse to a strike leading up to this huge opportunity to materially grow the sport/league in the country.
Surely the players will use length of contact as leverage to get other things they want. For example, maybe they'd agree to a contract through 2026 if the league agrees to the rest of their demands.
The reverse could also be true. And I think the date everyone is looking toward is the TV contracts after 2022. That's the big pot of money the players are fighting to make sure they share in.
Fighting, I think you've nailed the elephant here. Unless the players and owners agree on the likely TV contract parameters, this has potential to be a nightmare. Of course, this is a solved problem. Other pro leagues in this country align on a reasonably comprehensive definition of league revenue (aka not what Denver does), and then they argue over the split in percentage terms. I don't see how you get from here to there in one contract, so I assume there will be a lot of conditional clauses (e.g., cap moves by A if X, moves by B if Y) ...
Sure, but of course MLS is different than those sports in a variety of ways. One big thing is that the CBA's in the MLB and NBA especially really tamp down the ability of the very best players to get paid like it. MLS players that become elite stars can just leave. I tend to take the MLSPA at their word that they are looking to continue the rate of salary growth that we've already seen, just with better working conditions and more freedom of movement for players. Because the other thing they know is that if there is a rapid enough salary budget increase, the benefits will ultimately flow to foreign talent stealing their jobs. It seems like a more favorable climate for a deal than it was in 2015. And even then they managed to get it done. We'll see.
I have a slightly different take on this. When the last CBA was signed everyone on this board was extremely pessimistic because they felt that the owners could afford to spend more, and the salary cap barely moved up. And then the owners - on their own - invented TAM, and salary spending has risen dramatically since then. If I am a player, this tells me that, unlike in other North American sports leagues, owners will voluntarily decide to spend more on players if the money is there. The percentage of players who were raised in the US/Canada continues to drop, and so more and more players come to MLS through a MLS team offering them a deal they found fair. As salary spending increases, this will only get more true. As you mentioned more money means newer, better players replacing those currently here, and realistically the better the players the more options they have going abroad to better leagues, so any ability the owners have to suppress their wages diminishes. So if I am a player, I would think to myself "owners will spend on salaries if they have the money, I will fight for things they aren't going to do on their own", which is travel and free agency. I am curious if the just lump TAM in with the salary budget (at least the TAM that isn't purchased by teams). I don't see why they wouldn't.
Unless you're talking about the WNBA, I don't know what leagues you're referring to that would be relevant to the last five years of MLS. Hell, roughly ten years ago, the entire MLS player budget was roughly 1 to 1.5 NHL teams (out of 30). The "Big 4" are still massively larger in scale than where MLS is. Both in a business revenue sense and in a player expenditure sense. MLS is still in a growth mode, and locking in spending is a tricky prospect. The league isn't to a point where, like the NBA and NHL players and/or owners put money into escrow and depending on the end of year CBA agreed upon financial measures the actual player payouts are increased or some money is refunded to owners. In the NBA there is a set portion of defined revenues that must be paid out. NHL teams have both a Salary Cap and a Salary Floor. Those don't work in the MLS at this point, and probably for a decade or two down the road as the business turnover of the teams and the league is still relatively small and growing with regards to the fixed costs. In the Big 4 mature leagues, fixed costs are basically fixed - and a small percentage of turnover. In MLS, fixed costs are still a huge portion of costs and obligations. Discretionary costs (including player payroll) don't completely swamp the fixed costs, so any percentages set now, may be inconsequential if the 2022 broadcast revenues explode. Additionally, CBAs are voted on by all the players in the league. While a few stars may be thinking "show me the money", the vast majority of players are still focused on quality of life issues like health insurance for their families, retirement planning, moving expenses, year around housing and income. If you look at the main gains of the last few CBAs, we've seen minimum salaries go from $12k to $50k. We've seen gains in health insurance coverage and housing and road hotels. The big push this time seems to be charter flights. These things affect all of the players. Until the minimum league salary hits six digits, I don't really expect to see the MLSPA get too aggressive with things that primarily only help a few players per team.
This isn't really true any more. MLS looks a lot more like the NHL right now than it does the WNBA. It's a few billion behind, but no longer an order of magnitude the way it was a decade ago. I don't think it's ready yet to be arguing for a percentage of revenue, but it's also not a date filler for bigger arenas (mostly). I bet this new CBA reflects that reality.
MLS player wages are, at best, 15-20% of the NHL's on a team by team basis, and the top MLS team is still less than half of the NHL Salary Floor? 2019-20 NHL Salary Floor is US$60.2mm and Salary Cap is US$81.5mm. In 2018-19 13.5% of wages were put in escrow. The last year for which the escrow was paid out was the 2015-16 season where 17% was escrowed, and 3.2% (of total wages being paid out and 13.8% returned to the teams). The multi-year delay is due to finally closing the books. Since the 12-13 season, the large majority of the escrow amounts have been refunded, normally around 10% of total wages, so 60/82 may end up being closer to 55/75 when all is said and done. MLS teams average around US$8mm in player wages with the occasional 3 big-time DP teams topping US$20mm
Eh, the thing about TAM/GAM is, it's designed to be money that does not flow to the guys who were sitting in that room in 2015. The owners will spend more money, but not on the existing talent pool. No MLS team was lower than $8MM in 2019, and only one was below $8.5MM. The median was around $10-11MM. But yeah, still on a much smaller scale than the NHL.
This is not surprising for trends I discussed on the last CBA negotiations. On one hand the players have no direct leverage as the owners could field very capable scab teams in about 2 seconds. On the other hand the owners have increasingly little to gain by trying to continue to screw the domestic players. As the league continues to push in the upper tier, the league has to exist in a world market which makes MLS negotiations markedly different than other US based professional leagues. Most of their player costs are going to come from the top tier players who for all intents an purposes are completely free agents. Yet soccer is a weak link sport. So you can easily lose dollars pinching a few pennies from the increasingly fewer players the league has a huge amount of leverage over. Clubs that treat players right, regardless of leverage will have a recruiting advantage. Disgruntled players can also turn into a locker room cancer and turn off the fans. As the league becomes more integrated with the world market, the world also market also gets more familiar with MLS players. Whether it was posters on old big soccer threads or actual scouts and coaches there was a lack of knowledge on how good some players really were. Some soccer people were arrogantly ignorant while most others were afraid of the risk in advocating for relatively unknown product. Now with more foreign coaches directly involved in the league and increasing amounts of comparison data against known quantities, the ignorance and risk is drastically decreasing. Even a US coach like Marsch was able to get a job on a high profile team in a relatively good league. A final thing that will significant undermine the leagues leverage to screw players is their Academy investment. If a player know the league is going to tamp down wages by limited their freedom they will not sign. If they won't sign, you lose leverage on your best people. As more players come directly from academy or with minimal college experience the Kraft old Kraft model makes increasingly little sense.
The focus always has been of freedom of movement as league has always had a big disparity between the value players produce on the field vs what they were paid. In previous CBA, countless posters wrote about how existing players were afraid of higher wages because they would lose their jobs. The reality is the players knew it was pointless to negotiate for wages as they could see the league was using their leverage minimize payments to anyone in the league with limited regard to how they performed and instead were directing all their resources outside the league where they had to compete. Countless people were pessimistic on the low cap because they simply didn't understand they dynamics of the market. If the players know the owners want to significantly raise the profile of the league and the only way to raise the profile would be by significantly raising wages, why would they negotiate for something the owners will do anyway instead of a negotiating for ways they could get paid for what they produced?
Do a search. You'll see it was not everyone. The one thing that surprises me about this negotiation is the complete lack of discussion on training compensation. This should be a huge issue for the owners. My guess is one of two things. The first is that it is an issue for the courts so it is off the table in the collective bargaining negotiations. The second might be the players are silently using this in negotiations to work with the owners to trade negotiation leverage for future young academy players in return for getting freedom of movement for existing players.
And yet the solution arrived at was the freedom of movement without the attendant paycheck. Maybe, all along, it was the quality of life issue the players claimed it was, rather than simply being about money. Or, to be fair, maybe the players felt that once they wedged that door open even slightly, the payment would come in future negotiations. Of course as pointed out, the real money was spent on devices that were designed not to benefit the incumbents, though again in fairness, pay has risen across the board at a rate higher than what's going on in the rest of the economy. If a new CBA was adopted that doubled the salary of the 9th best starter overnight, MLS teams would do their level best to react by replacing that guy. They probably wouldn't be able to do it right away, just due to things like player limits, leading to some inflation, but that phase probably wouldn't last long. And what the owners really want is for the very best players to be miles better than the 9th best starter, so that those guys can generate more highlights and sell more shirts. The 9th best starter on the team is as likely to bring the goals rate down as up. In practice, the biggest limiting factor to this approach is that some of the players the league wants to bring in as the #1 starters on teams won't come because the overall standard of play caused by starving the 9th best guy means that coming to MLS is often seen as an NT career-killer and an ignominious retreat from 'real leagues.' Someone like Chicharito might have otherwise signed for the league years ago, where he could plausibly win championships and be closer to home, rather than going to a place like West Ham to grind it out on rainy Wednesdays in Stoke. But then again, does it still make economic sense for MLS to throw 8 figures at him if it is also required spending 3 million more on the bottom third of the starting line-up and bench, an expense that would likely only reduce the number of goals he would score?
Very good points and exactly what I meant. The WNBA comparison sucks, since they are so much smaller than MLS (salary cap of just under $1 million), but MLS is only a significant fraction of the NHL, much less the other big leagues. I have stated for a while that MLS is in a really odd position for a sports league: kind of in between major and minor, and this negotiation reflects that. I would expect the players to double down on the freedom of movement thing (and charters) because they believe the owners will increase spending on their own.
And this is the players biggest beef- that they have no access to roughly half of the salary pie. But as has been endlessly pointed out, theres simply nothing in it for the owners for them to, say, double the salaries of players 7 through 16. It moves no needles, improves no league metrics and attracts no new eyeballs But like the guy who just filed a $20 million lawsuit against Derek Jeter and the Yankees because, as a light hitting shortstop in single A, he felt that the organization was unfairly blocking him from moving up because he would have been a threat to the Jeter income stream, players tend to overestimate their worth. Usually by a lot. For the most part, they see having their salary doubled as bringing them into line with what they're worth instead of thinking " boy, for that kind of dough they can get some kid in south america who's way better than me". And that says nothing of the charter flight mess, which consists - again- of asking the owners to spend huge sums for absolutely no discernable business advantage. They could probably get the travel if they were willing to take a pass on the salary bump, but that ain't gonna happen. Bottom line, MLS like every sport is sooner or later going to have a work stoppage. This time, next time, IDK but its inevitable and probably necessary that everybody feel the pain. Tends to clarify what's really important. Sadly, it also tends to harden attitudes forever, making both sides permanent adversaries instead of periodic contestants.
Ehhh, the owners would be wise to understand what a bunch of granola-munching lefties their fans are. I ain't crossing that picket line, and you can bet none of the Timbers Army and the like are either. There may be wisdom in that, but I certainly hope both sides can continue to take yes for an answer amidst a rising tide.
The saddest part is of course the fact that in the end, both sides end up with a deal they could have had 2 months before the while thing got ugly. Nobody really wins and nobody is forced to cave. They all just get tired of losing money. As for the replacement player scenario- scab is a pejorative term that takes sides - MLS may have a bunch of neckbeard progs who wont cross but if you think it goes any better for the NFL, for example, in a blue collar union town like Cleveland or Detroit you need to think again. Most often, leagues at least consider replacement games in order to not have to give their TV partners their money back. They agreed to deliver games, they did so. If half your fans wont cross, well, honestly the games usually arent worth watching anyway I do wonder though about the USL factor. More and more MLS teams have USL sides full of under-contract players, none of whom are members of MLSPA and all of whom are easily replaceable. If the owners simply moved their USL affiliate into their MLS schedule, I wonder what would happen.
From some conversations I've had, I'm guessing there's one of the current MLS center refs that probably doesn't get any Christmas or Birthday cards from any of his compatriots. As far as I can tell they're all professional when at work, but any chance at personal connections was lost when he crossed the line during the last referee walkout.
The one difference there is that the "line crossing" was never fully put to the test as the "Division 2" National Team camp ended up just being a camp as the players did return for the World Cup Qualifiers. I'd put Simms in a gray area there - and I'm a former local union (IATSE-417) officer.
This really happened? I don't follow baseball much, so I hadn't heard. If true, this is a special kind of stupid.I would assume that if the guy was even remotely major-league quality he would have gotten a chance. Pro sports is a cut-throat business, and if a team isn't always trying to bring in better players than the ones they have, they aren't doing their job. And Bingo was his name-o What are the rules now on charters, like 3 per year? There's a dubious connection between on-field success and business advantages, but being able to go directly from your own city to your next game without having to deal with the usual airport BS can definitely help with on-field performance. I remember once the Revs had to take 3 commercial flights to get to their game--and you can bet they flew in coach for all 3 of those legs. Now that Kraft has his own Patriots jet, Arena might be able to convince him to let them use it for a few trips a year that might normally have connections. The problem is if not all teams have this perk, it does become a competitive advantage. Of course, having a nice training facility and competent coaches is also a competitive advantage, and some teams are more willing to spend on that than others.