thanks Goodsie, some great questions and answers (by both guys), hard not to like our new #9. Sounds like at the time of Jesse's departure Chris had a list of prospects and that was about it. Jeremy was at the top of the list but next to nothing had already been done on this deal until Chris took over as interim GM. Chris then had to hustle hard to make this happen, careful to include Matias and his coaching staff along the way, so kudos to Chris and welcome Jeremy Ebobisse! looking forward to seeing how he fits in, hopefully Sunday. I also appreciated that Chris had some kind, thankful words for Flo.
Blue! Blue's your color, @kingjebo. pic.twitter.com/mnFj5JDwks— San Jose Earthquakes (@SJEarthquakes) August 6, 2021 GO SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES!!! -G
Note to the Quakes Epicenter guys - jeebus, give these guys a break with your 3 and 4 part questions - on unrelated topics! Leitchy had to break out the notepad to keep track of all the questions within one "question" (which showed an impressive bit of conscientiousness on his part). I was impressed with how clear and honest Leitch seemed to be. There were no airs put on, just honest stuff and his presentation was very clear and thorough. He answered every question. Same goes for Jeremy really - good, thoughtful, honest answers. So it sounds like the limitations CL had to work with were as I suspected: no intl slots, and no (or very little) cap room. Too bad that resulted in the loss of Flo, but I think there were very few options.
I hadn't seen this before so if it's been linked, apologies. This article has some interesting character tidbits: https://www.portlandmercury.com/blo...e-ebobisse-tensions-mount-among-team-and-fans
Since he founded BPC with former quakes Ike Opara, Quincy Amarikwa and Kei Kamara, I hope Ebobisse would have talked to them before coming to SJ, so he knows he is walking into ownership that is 180 degrees from Portland's. Plus, despite the historically large number of Black players on Fisher's Quakes, I feel like the club has focused on the Hispanic community and hasn't really marketed to the Black community. I don't know the racial makeup of the Oakland Roots fan base, but maybe Ebobisse would expand the Quakes into that market. Anyways, I hope he can be happy here.
So I seem to remember us saving up a lot of Garber bucks over a long period of time. Was Ebobisse basically us cashing the check on everyones favorite draft pick, "Allocation Money" and "Pass"?
Extratime said since quakes don’t trade inside MLS, they don’t value the garber bucks. I don’t know if it piles up somewhere
That statement doesn't make a lot of sense though. Pretty much every trade that the Quakes have conducted with other MLS teams was for allocation money (the Garber bucks). So both of these things are actually false. The Quakes have traded plenty within MLS, just not for players. And if they opted to get allocation money instead of players, that would indicate they do put value on it (presumably for buydowns of players on their roster to keep them from being DPs (which we know they've done) or to buy down transfer fees of players from outside the league. Kinda sounds like the Extratime folks don't know what they're talking about, which is pretty sad considering they are a podcast about MLS.
You’d have to ask ExtraTime. I think it was David Gass. He followed with a justification/explanation, but I don’t understand TAM GAM Thank you Ma’am enough to comprehend and retain exactly what he said, other than the general idea that the Quakes don’t do anything with the fake money.
But they do in fact use the fake money. Basically every player who is paid above $500K or so but is not a DP is a usage of GAM and/or TAM.
Yep. I'm surprised that this "Quakes don't use their TAM / GAM" thing is even a point of discussion. We have a number of players above $500k (or whatever the current non-DP limit is) who are not DPs.
It likely comes from the same place as that gross article about how Almeyda would figure out how to use the "dark arts" to help the Quakes get better results. It's just plain ignorance and a willingness to not even do basic research. This is one of the reasons soccer is still a thousand years behind practically every other sport with regard to meaningful discourse.
Oh geez, you guys are making me go back and listen to that episode. I don’t want any misinterpretation on my part to reflect poorly on ExtraTime, because I think they do a great job even though they are not independent journalists. It’s the Aug-5-2021 episode starting at 34 min 30 sec. They discussed the transfer before it was officially announced, so maybe the details changed post-podcast. They discuss pros/cons of the deal, but I’m only writing down part of the discussion. Now that I re-listen, I don’t know if I misinterpreted what David Gass said. I’ve put in bold the points that stuck in my mind when I posted what I attributed to ETR. $1.6M in GAM split over 2 years 15% sell on if Jebo sells for > $1.6M Jebo will sign a new contract Charlie Davies says Jebo was not going to work out in POR because they did not value him up top; they got great value in the trade SJ gets a player in a position they need. THey are not going to go out and spend a lot of money for a DP David Gass says “SJ has transferred 1 player in from outside this league on a permanent deal in the last 2 transfer windows. So this allocation money doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to other clubs. And that’s one of the things that skews the numbers. Because I feel like the trade happens and everyone goes, ‘1.1 M, is he worth 1.1M?’ …[he gives examples]…. It doesn’t come down to just the pure number. It comes down to what are the assets to the different teams. And for SJ, that’s money that they probably weren’t going to use. So now they bring in Ebobisse. He signs a deal which means he’s going to stay or they’re going to get something for him when he leaves. And it fits for both parties.” Andrew Wiebe adds that Jebo will be a #9 and he can learn from Wondo. Plus, “he gets more money if he signs this new deal, and some security. That’s a big win. And by the way, this is a big deal for Chris Leitch as well. He was sitting in the background behind Jesse Fioranelli in SJ. This is sort of, I’m putting my piece on the table move. I’m the right man for this job.” And then he talks about how the SJ signings have not been universally productive but this move is a win.
Seems like this Gass guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about in this instance. The Quakes use their TAM / GAM to buy down salaries under their non-DP max and they appear to do it a lot: probably Rios, Fierro, Alanis, and possibly more. This deal means that they will be able to do less of that in the next few years.
Yeah, I mean there was a run of trades that Quakes have made where they were kind of stockpiling allocation money and there's no way they didn't use it. The lack of transparency with regard to player salaries makes it somewhat difficult to determine, but yeah, I just don't understand Gass' perspective there at all. He's looking at it basically from the transfer perspective rather than the "keep everyone you already have on the current roster that you want" perspective. The Quakes are not a productive team on the field, but a number of there players earn pretty good money. And outside of Cowell, none of them are young and/or earning league minimum.
Well, Gass didn't explain himself very well, or in fact he's just dead wrong. For the sake of conversation I'll assume Gass didn't mean that the Quakes were simply letting their allocation money expire without spending it (allocation money expires after 4 transfer windows). If that's the case what he said is completely illogical as it can be debunked easily by looking at the salary list from MLSPA. So what could he have possibly meant? Up until the last few years TAM/GAM has been primarily used to import internationals to fill the gap between the high priced DPs and the rest of the roster. I think the Loons were one of the first to spend a boatload of TAM to acquire someone from MLS (Ike). Then Nashville followed up with Zimmerman and Columbus got Nagbe. Then Colorado just went all in and decided they would use all of their GAM on MLS guys. This strategy, so far, seems to work (although my theory is that it will never win you a cup unless you strike gold in your academy). The Quakes don't have a gap to fill between high priced DPs and the rest of the roster. Instead Jesse used the GAM money to cherry pick what ever guys he could from off of MA's list of former players. That is really a unique way to spend GAM in the league. I don't think any other team has done that before. When the MLSPA released the players salaries this year (they skipped last year) we all gasped as we saw our latest signings were grossly over paid and we have been complaining about ever since. Did we really need to offer Rios et al. such high salaries, or did we offer them high salaries because we had the GAM to burn and you either use it or lose it? At least I'll say we probably didn't have great leverage in the salary negotiations due to the obvious connection the players had with the coach. In hindsight, not a great use of TAM and really rather wasteful. So when Gass says TAM doesn't mean the same to SJ as it does to other clubs this could be that we aren't filling the GAP between DPs and the rest. Rather we used it to go out and get the guys who worked with the coach before. Since it's funny money anyway who cares what we pay the guys in the end? When Gass said we weren't going to use the TAM anyway he must have meant that wasting the money on over paying guys is just about equivalent to not using it at all. I'm sure Jesse would take issue with that as he must have believed we had a quality roster that was going to meet the ambitions set forth from the club owner. How much a player is worth means something different to every club. He might argue that these players are worth more to us than any other club because of their connection to MA.
I think he's probably just wrong. I think the "we carelessly burned it to overpay Matias guys" argument is a pretty convoluted one. Even before Jesse / Matias, we used TAM / GAM to burn down a lot of salaries: guys like Hoesen, Hyka, Flo, even Wondo, etc. Those were not Almeyda guys. I don't think there's a fundamental difference between how we have been using TAM / GAM and how most of the other teams used it. We hadn't used it to acquire MLS players until Jebo, of course, but as you say, only a few teams have leaned more heavily into that strategy. But in the end the allocation money is very useful to all teams, whether you use it to acquire "tweener" intl players or MLS players.
Yes, using TAM to grossly over pay players only really started in 2020 and continued in 2021. Jesse signing Nathan was an indication that maybe he was backing off of that strategy. Regardless of what Gass meant, there can be no doubt that our use of TAM has been wasteful. Would we have been so wasteful if the money was coming directly out of Fisher’s wallet? We can only speculate I guess. Although I don’t think we’re going to adapt Colorado’s strategy on going all in on MLS players. Leitch himself said he will sign MLS players as well as internationals. I’m not sure how he weights one over the other though. Even Colorado still uses the international market as evidenced by their recent signing of a Palmeiras left back to replace Vines.
”Grossly overpaying” is kind of putting our own second guessing spin on it though. I don’t think they went into any of those contracts thinking they were over-paying. I haven’t been able to figure out how the money is actually sourced. So I’m not sure it’s not “Fish’s money”. It’s called “allocation $” but is it really money that the league allocates as in awards teams or are they just allocating the ability to spend more $ as in “awarding additional space under the cap”, in which case it’s still Fish’s money. Or does every team contribute to create the pool, in which case if Fish doesn’t use it he’s lost $ with no return, and he would certainly be motivated to use it. And yes if Leitch is GM he’s not going to just leverage the league, he’s going to use all of the resources at his disposal (according to what he said). And that’s the right thing to do. You don’t want to artificially constrain your resource pool - that just prevents you from getting the best players for your team.
As a base each team gets around 3m in allocation money each year. On top of that teams are given more for various reasons (e.g. teams that use a 3rd dp pay the teams that don't use a 3rd dp). Yeah, we have the benefit of hindsight of course and I'm sure Jesse though this roster would meet the goals of the club (and may very well end up doing so). However, I think if any of us saw what we were paying these players before even seeing them play we would acknowledge it seems a bit much. In fact this was kindof Gass's point was to justify why the Quakes spent so much on Jebo. After all, less was spent for Ike, Zimmerman, Nagbe and those guys are more proven than Jebo. The Quakes were wasting that allocation money anyway so slightly overpaying for Jebo doesn't seem like such a bad idea.