Which forces us to reconsider RSL’s failure to spend money to boost it’s talent level in the off-season. Could it be that our FO was playing chess, while the rest of the league was playing checkers?
In this podcast they discuss an possible scenario wherein MLS takes advantage of the pandemic’s aftermath to bring in some great talent from around the world. It’s interesting and some of us have time to listen... Coming out of COVID-related suspensions might present some unique opportunities for MLS for rapid growth and change...if the owners seize the moment. But will they? @samstejskal and I discuss in our latest podhttps://t.co/X7GwqejnJi https://t.co/XnW51XRisL— Paul Tenorio (@PaulTenorio) April 3, 2020
Listened to this yesterday. I agree with the concept of it, at a high level, but it also must be said that this will look awful in terms of PR if MLS clubs continue to furlough employees in the short term. You can't go out and "take advantage of the market" just months after laying off people that rely on the club for their livliehoods. In England, some clubs (even Premier League clubs) have started to furlough employees so they can go claim unemployment from the government. Which is ridiculous for a premier league club (see my other club). On the ESPNFC podcast with Juls and Gab they came up with a really good idea. If a club furloughs employees - we're taking them at their word that they are this financially stressed - then those clubs should be banned from transfers for at least one or two transfer periods on the other end of this. Otherwise, if a club like Tottenham furloughs all of these working staff employees, and then they go spend a bucket of cash on a player... That is nonsense. This 100% is an opportunity for MLS, as awful as that sounds, but that doesn't exist in a vacuum. If FIFA was worth a damn they would implement transfer restrictions for any club that furloughs or takes government funds after this short of a time.
DLH getting a lot of hate over this. Can someone explain to me why this move makes him worse than Hitler? I'm seriously looking for someone to change my view. Like, I get that he's a self made billionaire and can probably finance all of these workers by paying them out of his own pocket even though they don't have a job to perform, but I don't see why it's so horrible for him to not do that. Sure it'd be great and generous if he did, but I guess I don't equate a lack of extreme generosity to evil. I also don't get why everyone is bringing up the rare coin purchase. I bought an expensive TV last year, because at the time I was able to from a financial standpoint. I sure could use the money now to put more food on the table but I don't beat myself up for failing to see this pandemic and subsequent economic strain in my crystal ball last year.
For me, he's already got more money than he'll be able to spend in his lifetime. Sure, he can do what he wants through all this, but why not take the negligent monetary hit and keep paying staff throughout this and come out with an even more positive image? Nobody asked for any of this, but when you have billionaires still penny pinching when they don't need to, it seems a bit petty. I suppose that's a reason I'd never be a billionaire. I don't have the mindset of screwing people over and doing whatever it takes to get to the top. Nobody needs billions of dollars.
I don’t get angry at Del Loy for not paying for nothing. I don’t know if this is the case elsewhere, but REI paid their employees for 30days their average over the previous few months, and then furloughed like 80-90% of their staff. Everyone remaining has taken 30-100% pay cuts for the next few months (CEO unpaid for 6months - his decision). Furloughed employees are still able to be on the company healthcare plan while they collect unemployment. That sounds pretty generous in an environment that doesn’t require it. But yeah, DLH has an opportunity to really buy some enduring PR here, and passed. It has not changed my opinion of him.
that TV wasn't worth your employees salaries for a year or, at the very least, a significant amount of time Also, if the first thing we do in the summer window is go buy an expensive player I'll cancel my season tickets.
I’m not going to judge DLH’s personnel decisions right now. He is wealthy, yes. But who knows how much of that wealth is liquid? Plus he has other businesses besides RSL and those all have employees too. I would imagine there are still notes to be paid on the Herriman facility, the Academy and it’s teacher payroll, etc.... I’m on repeated record here as not liking the guy other than he kept RSL here (which is significant), but his personal financial situation is not something I know enough about to warrant a criticism.
Seems like there is a lot of this going around social media and such. All I know is that it is really easy to spend someone else's money... I wonder what all of the people calling for sports team owners to use personal funds would actually do if it were them.
Does anybody here have more? This is terrible if true. It doesn’t reflect well on DLH either, if true. Not sure who Jake is. 1247651340735541250 is not a valid tweet id
We don't know that he has more money than he'll be able to spend in his lifetime. Isn't he a real estate mogul? I'm sure most of his networth is tied up in land. But either way I'm sure he's a smart guy and can figure out a way to pay his employees. Overall I think this casts him in a bad light especially if his players are willing to forgo a paycheck to help out their fellow colleagues and he can't be bothered to sell some assests to help keep his sports team afloat.
This ignores that fact that DLH doesn't pay these guys salaries. Every player in this league signs their contract with the league. It's one of the quirks of MLS that doesn't get talked about enough. The salary cap is specifically designed for the league to pay for each team's salary. Anything above that, it must be said, does come out of DLH/Owner pocket. Which brings up Rusnak. He is the only full blown DP on the team in terms of his salary being what pushes him over, from what I've gathered. Sam Johnson is a DP, but it's been well established that is because of his transfer fee and his salary is more in the "TAM will pay this off" range. The last is Jeizon and we have no idea what his salary is because the numbers haven't been published for this year. So, if Albert Rusnak stepped up and said "I'll give a months worth of my salary" then there is some money for the club to use. The players union numbers have Rusnak at $1.8MM base salary and a guaranteed salary just above $2MM. For simplicity sake, lets say Albert makes $2MM a year. DLH isn't on the hook for that full $2MM, the league still pays the max player amount ($350k, I believe) of that salary. So DLH is on the hook for $1,650,000. Divide that by 12 and you've got $137,500 that Rusnak offered up. That's not nothing, but that money will go a lot faster than what Jake is playing at with his tweet. Jake (@sltidjake, for the record, used to post here semi frequently and is one of the hosts of the RSLShow. He has a lot of connections with the club. He's pretty close to Dunny and has even done radio work for the club when the typical guys are out on other duties.
There is a lot of unknowns in this, for sure. To make it cleaner, why not require a business/owner who takes part of a furlough in times like this make their books public.
Jake used to post on here quite often. He currently is one of the guys that runs the RSL Show podcast. Edit: looks like I was a little late with this comment.
In reviewing those tweets again, it looks like in the first one Jake says MLS blocked it. Then in the second he is saying that players are working to find ways to get some money to the employees?
which shrinks the number even more and makes me wonder if Jeizon is purely a DP on transfer fee alone. Further, TAM can be used to lower these hits. From my understanding, that TAM is paid by the league essentially as an extra slush fund to the salary cap. The number that has been made available for DLH to use continues to shrink. All that said, I still do not see how DLH has enough cash on hand to buy the coin and nearly $4MM on a trade dollar but can't sustain the employees of this club for a month. I've defended this guy for saving the club, but this is bullshit.
It is all about the look so far for me. I get that Dear Leader can do whatever he wants with his money but that's why people hate or should hate that we have a system that allows for people to become billionaires. But I digress. It's a reflection on an organization that was once perceived as a respectable and quality organization even when everyone knew that Uncle Dave struggled to pay the bills. Now we have an organization that can spend money, seemingly willie-nillie, and has to be shamed into paying it's employees and not letting them go only to wait a week or two and do it anyway. We certainly don't know all of the particulars of the furlough and what will happen to the employees let go and that is also a problem or indictment of this current ownership/management team and how they lack any real self awareness it seems. If you are letting people go until the season re-starts why not let everyone know what you are doing for your employees? Are they still providing any benefits like health insurance, retirement etc? Depending upon what they were paid or salary going on unemployment at the current time might not be that bad. No one wants to do that for sure but with the extra $600 a week until the end of July means you could get up to, around and just over $1000 a week in unemployment benefits. Maybe that factored in their thought process, I don't know. Even if you don't qualify for the regular benefit you could possibly qualify for at least the $600 from the Feds. It's also not prorated. If you qualify for $36 a week for regular unemployment with the feds $600 you would get $636. Certainly not ideal. At all. The fact that they just released a pretty short not descriptive press release leads me to believe that they didn't take anything but the bottom dollar in to account when making this decision. Not a good look in my opinion. How this team is perceived by fans should be important. VERY IMPORTANT. But it's really not. As mentioned by 15, Dell Loy could have really done things to rally fans around this team ESPECIALLY when you consider that the other Pro Team in town started cutting employees. Letting Tony and Austin go sucked. I doubt Arthur Blank and ATL are losing a single fan over this with his announcement of a million dollar relief fund to support their stadium workers during this experience. https://bleacherreport.com/articles...relief-fund-for-stadium-workers-amid-covid-19 That's how you keep and win fans. I'm not a #DLHout guy. I wouldn't trust him to sell locally for a minute. Maybe he can become a good owner. Maybe. I did drop of some pennies in protest this morning. It probably wont mean a thing in the long run but I find it humorous. I am a STH and will keep paying for my tickets because I support the team. For now. The fans of RSL deserve better. The employees definitely deserve better.
I know we won't know how much we overpaid for this kid until we can actually see him play but, yikes, how much did we overpay for this kid? According to transfermarkt (I know, I know, super reliable source) he was sold to the greek team for around 300K before we interjected. That's definitely not DP territory. *IF* this was the thought process, what an even shittier thing to do. He's a BILLIONaire but is dumping his employees on an already strained system to save a few bucks? Disgusting.
Like I said, I suspect Jeizon is a low price DP that is that way because of the transfer fee, not his salary. Speaking of Jeizon, how ********ing awful is this situation for him I wonder? The kid just moved her from Venezuela, of all places, and now is being told he can't interact with anyone thousands of miles away from his home. I really hope he brought some form of family with him and that the club thought ahead in getting him some "support".
Mostly I wonder why DLH didn't wait a couple of days for another team to make the move at the same time. Perhaps with the league already doing something similar at MLSHQ, he figured the cover was already there. I think we're stretched as hell by having the three teams and the Academy. Floating just the MLS team is a different prospect than the whole kit and caboodle.
That's a fair point. Also weird in the timing is that the players union, apparently, wants to help these people. This is just like the EPL setup where people are rushing to decisions on these things without taking into consideration those that could help. Which brings up a point that I haven't seen too much: Will the league cut players wages? I know they've said they're still planning on a full season, but the more this stretches out the more ludicrous that becomes.