With the news of expanding the salary cap and allowing bigger allocations to slide under the salary cap, who should MLS go after this off-season and future ones?
O.K. well.. with limitless funds. I'd like to see the collective national teams of Brazil, Argentina,England,Germany,Spain,the Netherlands,France,Italy,as well as the cream of the rest of the crop. (Okocha,Schevchenko,etc.) ******** it! Sign em all. Ya suppose people would pay attention to our league then?
MLS should up the salary cap to double minimum developmental players wages. $10,000 a year, even for a teenager, isn't gonna cut it.
From a business standpoint, why? The only reason MLS has these types of players is because they can pay them $10,000 a year while they have "day jobs." Now I agree there should be some provision that if one of these developmental players starts playing regularly in full games, he should automatically get bumped up to a full contract, but the league more or less does that anyway.
there's been some words from Tim Liewicke to that effect, but it was said in a "to be discussed at owners meetings" way, not as if it was a done deal.
We have to let this thread evolve to ~80 posts before we find out that what is really meant is that the 24th man on a 24-man MLS roster should make $1 million/yr. And only then will I go see an MLS game.
I think that if the minimum wage went up to ~ $75K or so, you'd see a lot of top kids coming out of college at 20, allowing MLS to train them with the reserve squads for a year or two. When they get the 23 year olds, their upside is severely limited at that point ... and when these players are forced into starting line-ups, you often see horror shows.
Can someone explain to me the outright aggression towards this thread? God forbid someone tries to start a discussion that my be interesting to some people. Were you people taught to shout people down on que or something. PS Sidefootsitter nice idea but I think it can be accomplished for and even smaller as long as they are guaranteed 3-4 years of employment. A guaranteed 3-4 year 50k per contract would be a pretty good enticement.
rommul, there is no agression towards this thread, just bewilderment as to why it exists. there are two other recent threads in this forum alone to which this could have posted... https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=210093 https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205029 its just redundant.
Well frankly all this thread is doing taking up space on a server that would have been taken up anyway if he went the route you propose. What a new thread accomplishes in it seperates the argument the poster wants to pursue and brings it into focus without any of the distractions that those other threads degenerated into. At the end of the day if people think this thread is redundant they can always simply not enter them. Yours is the only reasonable response to this thread thus far. Most of the others have been along the lines of "Mods Please close this thread because we don't want to hear what is going to be said." Now to get back on topic. I want to see the quality americans who play overseas brought back first (which is 90% of them) then I would like to see MLS invest in players like Julio Arca maybe even a Juan Agarte. We don't need big names we need quality top to bottom. I would also like to see the minimum salary raised to somewhere around the level of 50k plus bonuses. But we shouldn't be paying people more just becaue we want to. A rise in professionalism is in order and this will include manadatory offseason workout programs for players who in the coaches view need such work. We need to see players spend more time away from tactical training and spend more time on technical training (which need not come at the expense of the former). Unfortunately this mean longer practices. If we are gonna ask players to raise the level of their professionalism we are going to have to pay them. And if players want more money they will have to offer something back.
I think the next goal of MLS, after proper venues and owners, is to be the best league in CONCACAF. That means spending some good money (greater than 1 mil) on the best players in the region. This also means going sfter the best, not most popular, players in Mexico (just an example) for the purposes of raising the standard of play. This is opposed to getting the older former MexiNats for the sole purpose of trying to increase attendance. So in answer for the who to go after section I think the Gold Cup is the best place to start looking.
I would agree with you but good Mexican players ain't cheap and it may take considerably more than $1M to sign their national team members. But I do wonder what Borgetti may be getting from Hertha.
No team (or league) worth its salt would offer any kid right out of college a guaranteed 4 year contract at that price. What are they going to do when the kid turns out to be Steve Shak?
Uh no one is talking about 22 year olds with limited potential. Whether you think it is crazy or not that is the type of inducement it will take to get players to take that step towards full professionalism at a young enough age where they can be developed enough to be the kind of world class talents this country needs.
increasing the cap isn't gonna help mls get better players... do u really think the big name stars (even the not so big ones) would come over just because of a few extra thou a year? the only way to get those big names is to buy them or get them transferred from their current clubs at a ridiculous price... a price that the mls clubs can't pay, since mls controls all the contracts and what not. and mls wont be paying millions to bring a star over, since they're already in the red, and are looking to SELL their stars to europe..not buy new ones. once (if ever) mls goes away from single entity, then maybe we can see some superstars under the age of 30 (i.e. in their prime), and not ones that have 1 or 2 good years left in them
If anything, we kind of need to continue the path that we're currently on, with the MFL being our example. Get reasonably good talent abroad from some good scouting (guys like Gomez at DC) and keep the best american players here with some good money.