A final question here Liv... If you knew now that if DC played Freddy for 90 minutes in the MLS Cup this weekend, he would DEFINITELY be graduated to your full roster next season, but that the team would DEFINITELY win MLS Cup this year, would you play him, or would you sit him on the bench? Just asking.
Name one high school direct to MLS player who has gradutated from P40 status after his first season. There may be one, but there have not been many. The idea is to DEVELOP these players. That is what P40 is all about. Look how many minutes Kyle Beckerman, Brian West, Mike Magee, Bobby Convey, Santino Quaranta, et. al. had before they were graduated. If anything, the criteria should not be "he is a starter" or "he scores a lot". It should be - a player has a pro-rated amount of minutes that are considered developmental minutes. If he has not played a lick of college ball - it could be 3000 - 4000. For each year of college ball he has played, subtract 750 or something. And if you think that Nowak has been "league average" at developing young players - just look at the other U17 players from Freddy's class. Szetela, Memo, Grabavoy, etc. Only Szetela, who is a man-child, is anywhere close. Look at Esky, Carroll, Perkins, etc. Even Stokes got used a bunch by Nowak. The only coach who remotely compares at developing young talent (based admittedly on short evidence) is Bob Bradley.
That is not the criteria. The criteria that the league uses is case by case judgement calls on how much impact that player has on that team. If he is a regular roster player and no longer needs salary protection to keep a spot, then he is NOT a developmental player. The reason that these spots are salary protected is to keep these players from having to compete with normal roster players, not primiarily to give them to time develop. If Adu can hold down a spot on your team without the benefit of being P40, then he should not be roster protected. That is the criteria. If he's the 14th best player on that team, then he should not be roster protected. Period. He's not fighting for a bench spot now, he's fighting for a starting spot, and therefore, IMHO, he shouldn't be roster protected next season even. Tell me, how many games has Freddy not suited up for this year? I'll give you a freebie, you don't even have to look it up, he has suited up for every away game this year (the only place where there is any competition, given that for home games, every player can dress and is available as a sub). If he needs roster protection, then I need a hole in my head. The only conceivable reason that he would need roster protection is that he's making 10 times what any other entry level player makes, and that's not a good enough reason to give it to him.
You have oversimplified P40. P40 is also a tool that MLS leveraged in order to get the best players in MLS at the earliest possible time in order to help their overall development. What the heck does guaranteed college tuition money have to do with roster spot protection? Nothing. It is simply a safeguard in case the player has a career ending injury or doesn't pan out as a professional soccer player. It provides MLS with another tool to attract players who likely have a higher earning potential in standard careers than they do in MLS. Developmental players who are not in P40 are simply being protected for roster purposes. But MLS has additional purposes for designating players P40. The benefits of that program prove it. Jordan Stone is a great example. He does not want to continue his pro soccer career. So he is going to accept the other track that P40 allows and MLS (Nike) will pay his tuition. A player from his background may never have signed for MLS if this option was not provided. Freddy Adu is another example. His mother very possibly would not have allowed Freddy to become a professional soccer player before he was 15 if he was not afforded the special treatment that P40 status gives him. She is well within her rights as a parent to keep Freddy home from practice, request that Nowak leave him off the traveling squad, etc. if situations develop that prevent him from being able to keep up the schedule of a professional player. For crying out loud, the kid cannot even legally sign a contract at his age (in many states). Given that this is the case, it is only right to confer him developmental status He is 15. He cannot legally drive, he cannot legally drink, he cannot legally have sex, he cannot vote, he cannot join the military - he is developing. It is the definition of ADOLESCENCE. If he was 18, I would agree with you. Since he is 15, you are wrong.
One more thing - What allocation do you think Dallas has been offered for Adu? Do you think they are turning down one awe-inspiring international after another in order to maximize their 2005 draft pick? It's bad enough that DCU fans can't accept a gift graciously, but to pretend that DCU is doing the league a favor is chutzpah.
Re: How high can you get? It is also true. As a condition of his mother's permission for Freddy Adu to play in MLS, he had to play for DC United. That does not mean that DC United is not happy to have Freddy, but it is arguable whether or not it would have been better for the team to have drafted Chad Marshall or Clint Dempsey and had their allocation to boot. They did not have the opportunity to do this. By the same token, what would Freddy have done at Dallas or Columbus? Neither team would have been as good an environment for him from a soccer standpoint or a human standpoint. It may be paradoxical, but it is true. DC United is doing the league a favor. I don't know why Dallas has not used their allocation, but ask someone on their board - they have one. I believe it is a major allocation. If so, it entitles them to put together a package to buy a player at a transfer fee of between $500,000 or even slightly more, depending upon how much of the allocation goes towards the transfer fee and how much goes towards reducing his salary against the cap. There are many instances of teams holding onto allocations rather than spending them just because they have one. DC has held onto allocations in the past. So have the Metrostars and Chicago Fire. You can ask Greg Elliott and Colin Clarke why they are waiting to "spend" it. Do you seriously think that MLS announced that Dallas got an allocation and then not follow through? Aren't you forgetting that Lamar Hunt owns three (3) MLS clubs? He has quite a bit of schwing in the league. I don't think he would take that kind of thing lying down. In any event, proceed to the following link for this quote: http://3rddegree.net/thirdindex.cfm?page=article&show=482 That is the report from the team's town hall meeting.
Re: How high can you get? If doing the league a favor means making out with a Salary Cap about 30% higher than any other team in the league, in return for a draft pick and an allocation...I think a lot of other teams would be stepping up and saying, "Hey, where do we sign?"
Re: How high can you get? DC is not likely to get $500,000 per season out of Freddy Adu next year or likely the year after that. They did not choose his salary allocation. Every other team gets to determine how much they are willing to allocate (in cap money) towards every player on their team. Except DC w/Freddy Adu. The league stuck the team with Freddy and they stuck the team with his salary level. That is a different scenario from every other player and team in the league. Why aren't you crying about Carlos Ruiz and the pitiful amount he counts against the cap? There are other players in the same situation. Every team has weird situations like that. Your team made out like bandits in the last expansion draft cycle - and many people complained. So what? It is the price we pay for the SEM concept. I for one am glad that MLS is as stable as it is. I am glad (for Freddy and for the league) that Adu is not in Ramon Nunez's shoes in Dallas. It would have been a terrible situation for the league and for Freddy. That's all there is to it.
Look, it's really quite simple: MLS needs to have uniform rules for when a player graduates from P-40/Developmental status. It can be any combination of age, games played, minutes played, games started, factor whether he played a year or two in college, games he was on the travel roster, whatever. As long as the same formula is used for every player. Now, Liv, you can't be serious about the "Dallas got a fair deal" talk. Where is Dustin to set the record? There is a "sticky" in the Dallas forum about this, and while fans can often be blind toward their own team, the vast majority of Dallas fans feel they got a raw deal. And it isn't as if the 2003 Burn couldn't have used a few upgrades either. And the contraction (not expansion) draft, that you refer to us having made out like bandits was more of a matter of the Revs paring down their roster and selling off players like Mauricio Wright and William Sunsing to Costa Rican clubs (for allocaitons), so they'd be in a better position to make the Ticos' WC team. Now if you want to allege that Sunil knew what was coming and was able to stockpile allocations, it wouldn't shock me, but we weren't the only team to know that. How else would the emotional Geordie, who described the folding of his team as "a kick in the teeth" and how he was "gutted" and "sick as a parrot" sign a contract to coach DC the day before the announcement? The Revs were not the only ones who knew what was going to happen, but they just managed to play their cards right, for once. By the way, you could have had Adin Brown if you wanted him too. As for whether you would have drafted Marshall or Dempsey, somehow I doubt you would have taken Clint. A lot of teams passed on him and he wasn't all that highly rated by the alleged "experts." Hindsight is 20-20. Tom
Re: How high can you get? I guess Tom beat me to it. I would love to see you post your froth on the FCD board. You'd be flamed like a marshmallow.
Re: How high can you get? Hey this debate us finally getting interesting---flamed marshmallows--get some Herseys and crackers and we can have S'mores
You're wrong on a number of issues here. A person over the age of consent cannot legally have sex with him, but he can have sex with anyone that he wants legally. He can't legally drink, but there are photos of him at DC area keggers already floating around these boards. He can join the military, if his parents cosign the documents, just as his mother cosigned his contract with the league. If he is moved to the senior roster next year, he will not lose the educational and other benefits of P40, just the roster protection ones. And to pretend that he's a P40 beneficiary is ludicrous when he's making 10 to 20 times what normal P40 players make (24k at the low end, maybe twice that at the high end before Freddy). The education benefit is a significant lure to P40 for those who aren't able to continue their careers, but we're talking about two totally different things here: 1. The benefiits of P40 entry into the league versus non-P40 entrance into the league. 2. The benefits of development roster exemption from the salary cap and the competition that developing players have to endure to be part of the first team. The reason that P40 and then other developmental players were given roster protection (ie, do not count against the number of senior players on the roster) was specifically to prevent them from having to compete against more senior players in a league with a very slim roster. The roster is still only 18 players. You're going to dress 15 for each game. Some might be injured at any time. You want to maximize the amount of bang you get for your salary buck, and most of the time that means that you want veteran players or known quantities. I think we all know what Freddy is worth at this point, and I think that you agree with me that he is not worth what he is valued at. You are pretending that he is worth nothing, that he is a player who has no cash value to DC, and that in fact he is a liability. That argument is clearly **************** for many reasons, both economic and sporting. Don't pretend that many pennies are flowing into DC's coffers as a result of Freddy fever pushing up attendance in DC and all those Freddy Number 9 t-shirts and jerseys that Addidas is so happy to print up. You pretend to believe that I am saying that he is worth 500k, which he is not. I don't believe that he's worth that even to the league. They paid it but I don't understand it. However, he is not going to count 500k against your salary cap, and you know it. Despite this, you say things like, using up 30% of your cap space. It isn't 30% or even near it, even at max salary vs the cap we're talking half that or less. I don't think he's worth that either, but I do think that he's worth more than what you are likely to get off with next season. Next season you are very likely to get full utilization out of him all year with no penalty to your salary budget at all, which is a load of crap. You like to pretend that LA is somehow gaming the system with Ruiz, when he counts against the cap just in the same way that any other player in his contract situation would. Face it, the biggest bargain in this league in terms of payroll vs salary cap is Freddy Adu, whether he gets league max or not, he's still about 50% off retail. I think that's ludicrous, but I think it is more fair for you to be charged 50% than nothing at all for a player who is clearly capable RIGHT NOW of more than the paltry number of minutes Novak is giving him. And I will state again that I believe that Novak is intentionally limiting the number of minutes that Freddy gets to help ensure that the system will be gamed completely next year. The league is not going to change Freddy's P40 status in the middle of the season, that goes against all of their roster rules, so if he can pull it off for another couple months, then you'll be in the clear and laughing all the way to the bank. That kind of fraudulent attitude is what really annoys me.
Re: How high can you get? Here's an analogy to how I'm receiving your comments here: You're like a whiny next door neighbor who's getting 50% off the payments on his brand new Ferrari, but you come over, complaining that you're paying too much because you only get to drive it on the weekends and it's not exactly the shade of red that you wanted. You know what's in our garage? A Ford Festiva (on blocks) and a beat up 1979 Chevy Silverado with a rebuilt engine that might go another 200k miles if we take care of it. That and a go kart with NOX. Get the hell out of my driveway.
To be honest with you, if Nowak was basing his decisions purely based on merit and what helps the team on the field, Freddy would be getting less minutes than he does now. Freddy has improved a lot this year, but he is a huge step down from Moreno and Eskandarian at forward, and from Gomez at attacking mid. As long as those three guys are healthy and capable of playing 90 minutes, Freddy's presence really is more of a burden than anything else to the team since Nowak is forced to play him. (And I'm not bashing Freddy, I'm actually very excited about how he's played the last few months. Still though, at this stage, he is simply not close to as good as the three guys that he takes time away from.) Now, who is this Twellman guy you are talking about?