News: MLS owners approve fall-spring calendar and season format changes: Sources

Another reason gold is good for money is that it’s useless for weapons. That’s why humans have had a Bronze Age and an Iron Age but no Gold Age. Because if push comes to shove, you need weapons to protect your currency. Not the other way around.

That’s why investing in gold as a hedge against societal breakdown is the dumbest thing possible. You hoard gold, and I’ll hoard lead and metalworking tools. Then I’ll make guns and bullets and take your gold and everything you bought with it.

I can’t promise I won’t be smirking while I do it.

Gold’s value is a shared illusion, just like crypto, except as noted, gold does have some practical value. Crypto’s only value is that it’s good for criminals.

One reason crypto is going up in value is that Trump (can we avoid a political argument? I’m just stating a fact here, not saying it’s right or wrong) is a big fan, so everyone knows it won’t be regulated for at least 3 more years, plus, with Trump, the federal government might well bail out crypto like it did in 2008 and 2009 with banking.

 

Crypto did, overall, very well during the Biden administration too.

 

State of the League Address is tomorrow (Thursday):

1996313880352727504 is not a valid tweet id

 

Cash is traceable? I'm not sure you are familiar that working under the table, the mob and drug dealers aren't using checks and credit cards for payment. So I've been told anyway.

 

If cash is untraceable then money laundering wouldn't be a thing

 

D.B. Cooper said hold my beer.

 

As I say to all the ladies, come again?

 

They already missed this window by not doing it after the World Cup. Can they do other things post World Cup? Of course they can and they will I don’t think anyone is disputing that

and there is a “vs” you can make changes without a calendar change… just like you can with one. If there’s a misconception that mls will “standstill” I don’t think I’ve seen it in this thread

 

They've been discussing it for years, they just couldn't make the agreement in time. It was designed to capture a world cup bump, and they're just going to have to deal with it coming a year later. But it's not like it all just disappears in one year. It's imperfect timing, but that doesn't make it not worth capturing.

Well that's just not what 'versus' means! What I'm saying is that a lot of people aren't getting that the calendar shift is designed to complement other changes, not something done instead of other changes.

 

To create my own straw man here I think the biggest misconception with the schedule change is that MLS needs to do it in order for other changes to happen

 

Maybe 'years' is a stretch, but I thought it was reported that they've been serious enough for long enough that some owners were upset they didn't move faster and do this directly off the World Cup. I feel like it's not exactly unprecedented for ownership not to consult labor until they could present a fait accompli.

 

My assumption is that ever since they moved the season start into February, it was at least partially an experiment to see how they can handle winter games with an eye to a potential schedule flip.

 

I can't find anything on MLSsoccer.com. Is this not being streamed?

 

One possibility is that there was enough dissension among ownership that there was nothing specific to present to the union because the two sides were far enough apart that the change itself was in jeopardy, let alone a real outline of what the change would look like.

 

That, and if they didn't have a concrete plan, why open negotiations with the PA 3-4 years prior to the existing CBA expiring? Especially if there was no definitive decision approving a schedule change. This would be akin to negotiating terms of a divorce before you and your spouse decide to actually get divorced.

 

Some tidbits from Garber's presser:

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/47206379/mls-don-garber-softens-pro-rel-never-say-never

 

1. 15% increase in revenue since last season. (Half of that increase is gonna be inflation + adding 3.4% more teams.)
2. Calls out Vancouver and British Columbia for not helping the Whitecaps find a stadium solution.
3. I still don’t really know if the changes to the Apple deal are just adjustments based on what they’ve learned doing something completely different, or if it’s bad news. (I’ve never seen it suggested as good news, and I can’t imagine a scenario where that would be true.). Garber goes out of his way to say nice things about Apple.

I took his pro/rel comments as saying hey, things are changing fast, so who knows? Plus he’s on his way out the door and he avoided setting up his successor for a bunch of hard questions about p/r.

 

Doesn't look good for Vancouver staying in Vancouver.

 

He's made similar comments on similar situations before, and they didn't all end badly. Mostly they ended pretty well after five years or so (Tampa is probably the only real permanent failure so far).

On the pro rel thing, I think his stance has been consistent for basically his entire tenure: focus is on growing the league through expansion, it's not a no but it's not on the table. He doesn't even get to the second layer: who are we supposed to promote into MLS and how would that work for teams who have to leave because the issue just isn't ripe yet.

 

For the record, I am 100% against Pro-Rel.

But I can foresee a scenario where they expand to 36 teams, divide into MLS-A and MLS-B with 18 teams each, giving them a balanced 34-game schedule.

I still don't see the financial incentive to do this though, and every decision owners make is financially driven. I can't imagine they would be happy if, for example, one of CIN and CLB get relegated and they don't get to play each other for a year or more.

tl;dr - I can understand Garber's stance on pro-rel.

 

What's next, blowing lines of baking powder?

 

I think we’d have to do on our own North American take on pro-rel, for example everyone plays two games against teams from the other tier so local rivalries can be maintained and travels costs are managed. Not saying I’m for it.

 

It's way more complicated than what I am going to say but I would do something like this for ProRel if they ever decide to add it;

Create a 2nd division and charge $250M per franchise. 10 new ownership groups have to enter. That's $2.5B in franchise fees. 10 teams from MLS will get relegated. 1st division stays with 20 and 2nd division with 20.

Create a 3rd division and charge $125M per franchise. Will need 20 new ownership groups. That's another $2.5B in franchise fees.

That's $5B in franchise fees that will be distributed to the current 30 owners of MLS. $166.66M will go to each of those 30 "original" owners.

Sell the entire league (all 3 divisions) to a streaming platform and/or for the lower divisions sell the rights to local outlets.

I know, easier said than done.

 

"We had a deal that was a revenue-sharing deal based on the subscriptions. When that went away, we sat down, didn't take a lot of time, and said, 'Let's redo our deal,' and that has a different term and some other elements. They couldn't have been better to work with. They couldn't have been smarter to work with. They've been great partners."
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Bolded is news to me, the way he phrased it sounds like they scrapped the revenue-sharing part first and then decided to redo the whole deal. I guess it was clear they were never going to reach that subscription threshold for sharing?