Robbie Earle On The Standard Of MLS

I think some MLS clubs if in the Championship would challenge for promotion and occasionally a club might get through and get promoted. Also think a few clubs would be in relegation battles and would get relegated to League One.

Creativity in the mid field is what many MLS clubs struggle with. Some are really fun to watch but others severely lack in that area with little creativity or tech ability to where they can barely advance the ball. I'm looking at you, FCD. But I wouldn't be surprised in clubs like DCU, Sea and RSL would challenge for promotion right now. Maybe NYRB as well. FCD however would be scared s***less they might get relegated right out of the Championship. And I'm a fan of FCD before anyone thinks I have an agenda.

 

Yeah I think that its the depth where MLS would struggle if it ever was in the EPL or in the upper Championship. Some MLS players are premiership quality and a large amount are championship quality. But we also have a lot of League One and Two caliber fellows who find a way to remain in rosters as a result of the expansion keeping playing slots available.

 

I like what Darren Huckerby had to say after playing in MLS for a season and a half or so: that the league had the whole gamut, from Premier League-quality players down to League Two quality players. I don't watch a lot of English League One or League Two games, but I can't say I really disagree with him.

Interesting the 4 players Earle chose to showcase as additional talents, in addition to Cameron, who Stoke might be interested in: Beckerman, Nagbe, Kamara and Wondolowski. Nahbe makes the most sense because of his age, though he's mostly potential at this point.

 

FCD would be doing 1000x better with "creativity in the midfield" if not only Ferreira, but Villar, had been healthy. Now that they're both back or close to fitness, FCD's creativity is about to improve exponentially.

 

Kind of like the English national team.

 

makes sense considering you have Prem/La Liga/etc. veterans still playing at a high level (Henry types) mixed with teenagers and minimum salary college rookies. always interesting to look at production for MLS vs. lesser foreign leagues. a League One/League Two player like Luke Rodgers was quite good in this league. Saer Sene is going to be a double digit goalscorer after basically being a 3rd/4th division guy in Germany. (Of course, Matt Taylor was basically cut multiple times here and has been a star at that level there.)

depth of rosters has improved, but there really isn't consistent 1-18 quality overall yet.

 

I'd say MLS was similar to the Championship. IMO, MLS has more good quality attacking players but is defensively slightly behind.

I'd guess a mid table team like Watford might sneak into the play offs in either conference. Equally, I'd expect a team like Kansas to be involved in the play off race in the Championship, finishing somewhere between 4th and 8th. All pure guesswork obviously!

 

I always wonder how an MLS team is supposed to look creative when every team is equally creative.

 

If you believe wikipedia, his German career can be divided into two parts.

1. The "score 1 goal for every 2 games" phase.
2. The "reserve team for Bayern Friggin' Munich" phase.

You're making him sound like he's another Joe Enochs, and I don't think that's accurate.

 

Watching MLS this seems to be very true. In a sense the amount each player is paid shows their world market value. T. Henry playing with C. Lade, D.Beckham playing with B.Jordan or M. Stephens.
The depth just isn't there. With soccer injuries, callups, suspensions so prevalent its not a stretch to have top players playing along side poor players. Someone making 40K (Lade) vs 325K (Beckerman)vs 2M (Donovan) in a sense shows their skill on the world market. Wide ranges which isn't the case in most leagues.

 

i think the main issue here is still the league isn't spending very much at all on salaries. by the recent PA release it is 90M total for every player in the league full salary. which is about 25% of turnover or less ... a pathetic amount when in world football 50% is considered miraculously low and well disciplined.

there are also too many americans/canadians on the rosters. MLS isn't an employment charity designed to give american soccer players jobs. there are usually 2-5 american guys on every roster that really serve no purpose and are pretty much medicore rubbish.

as long as MLS has enough spots for the upper most echelon of US/Canadian players, those in the extended national team pool, that is enough. plus there should be enough spots for young domestic players to show over the first 2-3 years whether or not they are NT quality. If there were 8 senior domestic spots out of 20 and 8 out of 10 "off-budget" spots for domestics that would be more than enough to develop the top level of domestic talent. anything else is just filling the league with crap.

pair this with a doubling of the salary cap, so that teams can have more guys in the 300-500K range and you'd see a lot more overall quality past the starting 11 and perhaps thru the whole roster.

as it is MLS is between League One and Championship ... because even if a team like RSL can put together a decently quality depth roster it can't hold it together for very long or even add to it or make it better. so unless the rules change to allow more foreign players (not a ton more but some more, especially at the main roster level) and to vastly increase the salary cap i don't really think MLS can compete with the upper half of the Championship for overall quality. And frankly i'd be fine if the quality of play in the league were upper Championship quality at least over the next decade.

 

By domestics you mean anybody with a green card or equivalent (in the U.S. at least). So they wouldn't necessarily be American players.

 

true but largely irrelevant ... even with that definition of "domestic" 8/20 and 8/10 spots available would still mean more than enough places for the top senior US/Can talent to ply its trade and the top young US/Can to prove they deserve to be considered in that top echelon.

there are usually 3-5 US players on every senior roster that if they were replace by 300K foreign players would make the team hugely better and not effect the development of US talent for the NT one iota.

 

i agree with you on the salary being low, not in a sense that we need to raise the overall salary per player, but teams need more salary to get guys of value in the $300k+ range. having said that, a team like RSL has had its core roster together for 4+ years now, which is flat out unheard of in MLS. the problem they are experiencing now is that this core roster turned out to be pretty damn good, so all those players have needed some substantial salary bumps. this is preventing them from filling roster spots 15-25 with players that are any good. i think 1-11, maybe 1-15, RSL has about as good of a roster you can get within MLS salary standards when they are all healthy (another debate for another day), but after that it's a crapshoot. once you get below the 70-100k salary range in MLS it's a whole bunch of shit, players that are being passed around teams like $2 hookers and quite frankly guys that are lucky to even be on a MLS team. these are the guys that would be good players in USL, but in MLS (at least on RSL) they shouldn't really be on the field.

depth is the biggest hindrance in MLS right now. even with teams that are smart with their salary and have scouted good talent for relatively cheap. in RSL's case they are pretty good from 1-15ish, after that it's a solid dropoff. RSL has had some injuries here or there, coupled with a couple suspensions, and the play has suffered big time with the mixing and matching of crap players in roster spots 15-25.

i'm not saying to open up the checkbooks, boost salary caps to $10 million or anything like that, but incremental increases of 5% or less a year (basically amounting to maybe a $100-150k increase per year) is not enough. when you take into account players that need bonuses and raises, that $150k disappears immediately. so the next year you're keeping the core players, paying off their basic raises with the new $150k and then just reshuffling the bottom of the barrel hoping for something to pan out. MLS needs something like a $1 million salary cap increase every 3 or so years to go along with the 5% increase per year. i think the owners could stomach that right now with how the league has been growing and attendance has increased over the last 3-4 years.

 

This is why I think that comparing MLS to any other league in terms of "quality of play" is so foolish. In any given MLS game, you could see things that no Championship game could have and you could see crappy touches that would embarrass any League One player. People who judge MLS cast one or the other as typical, usually depending more on their own prejudice or agenda than any sincere desire for objective scrutiny.

MLS is not the Prem and it isn't League Two and the "quality of play" isn't equivalent to those or any other leagues. Claiming otherwise is just a waste of time, IMO.

 

Just going down the list from the players union of players under 100K base salary:
Juan Agudelo
Nick Labrocca
Andy Gruenebaum
Tony Cascio
Jaime Castrillon
Omar Cummings
Kosuke Kimura
Martin Rivero
Daniel Hernandez
George John
Nick DeLeon
Bill Hamid
etc, etc, etc (I only got through DC).

The point is that, as in everything, there are good players at every level. Just because somebody is making less than 100K doesn't mean their crap. Its up to teams to find the diamonds in the rough.

 

To be fair, he did say below the $70-100k range.

Look at who's making under $70k and see if you can make a similar list. My guess is that you'll find the rough-to-diamond ratio skyrockets pretty quickly.

I'd do it myself, but had trouble copying and pasting from the 2012 salary PDF to easily sort the salaries. I didn't see anyone on the first page who looked diamond-y.

 

Raising the cap so that you can pay Mike Fucito and James Riley more money won't make them better players. Yeah, there are some players in the lower reaches of Europe (and even the middling reaches of Europe) who would marginally but noticeably raise the level of play. But it would still be marginal.

If you want MLS to get better,

1. Slow down expansion (mission accomplished.) That will allow the increase in the number of decent players to start percolating up.
2. Improve college soccer. The players we're talking about here, the guys who are the first to get playing time if and only if there are injuries or starters need resting, primarily come from college soccer.
3. Improve youth training in general, and MLS academies in particular.

 

Ah, my bad. That said from the players I listed:

Cascio, Castrillon, Rivero, John, and DeLon are making under 70K as a base salary.

 

you don't just raise the cap. like i said you open up more spots for foreign players AND up the cap.

because the goal isn't to pay mike fucito or james riley more ... the point is to replace them with better players (which will most often demand more money) and send their sorry arses to the NASL where they belong.

 

And hope that more people come to your games and watch on TV to raise revenue or your expenses go through the roof and your revenues stay flat. Or you can find a way to cost effectively develop your own players at an ROI that is far greater and has a long lasting growth potential beyound Paying Marquez 5M a year or Lampard 10M a year without any chance of selling them on.
The point isn't to replace them with better players without looking at improving your teams to increase revenues.

 

If we are doing a decent job of training youth players, then their skill level will improve even if their salaries stay low.

Otherwise, it means the US youth development system is already as good as the worldwide standard.

 

I don't buy the argument that expansion has any significant negative impact on the quality of play. The number of soccer players in the world is >>> the number of MLS roster spots. The limiting factor on the talent level is the salary cap, and you can complain about it all you want, but it is determined by the league's revenue. And the most effective way to grow the league and increase revenue is through expansion.

 

I agree with that, and that is only referring to making it through the MLS season. Then we get to CCL, where without the ability to add more quality depth participating in it actually becomes a hindrance.

The cap doesn't have to go up much to see solid improvement across the table in MLS. It's not about the 1M+going to Euro's which we need more room for. It's that instead of paying 1M for an aging Euro, you could instead get a couple attacking young mids from S America for maybe 250K -300K apiece which would greatly improve many MLS rosters, and use 200K-300K to round out the bottom of the roster with maybe five guys making about 75K, where I'd target Central America, instead of having guys who shouldn't be on an MLS team getting about 30K per year and wasting everyones time.

The cap isn't set up for that though. You could spend 10M per year on one DP, but can't bring in four guys worth 400-500K each, which seems ridiculous to me. Is it about hyping the big time Euro name on the back of a jersey, or trying to improve the name on the front, the teams, across the board?