YNT-eligible MLS players: 2019/2020 Offseason thread

Gregg Berhalter: MLS "desperately needs to become an exporting league."

— Jonathan Tannenwald (@thegoalkeeper) February 26, 2020

 

Half of Big Soccer's brains just fizzled as the unstoppable object of Berhalter hate just met the immovable wall of MLS hate.

 

I don’t think it’s a matter of being a selling league, it’s about involving themselves in the global market of buying AND selling players. Right now, and historically, it’s been heavily slanted towards buying only.

I’d love to see the numbers of total cost of incoming and outgoing transfers in MLS the past 10 years. The numbers would certainly be heavily skewed towards the purchasing of players, how sustainable is that model long term?

 

It seems pretty sustainable to me. The MLS model is built around financial stability and so there is (I believe) the expectation that buying is funded by general revenue or increases in marketing revenue if it's a name player and not by player sales. It's relying on selling players to fund a team that generates instability.

That said, we haven't really seen a team in MLS that has been aggressive about buying players with the intention of selling them. Maybe Atlanta? But 50,000 people in the stadium can fund a lot of purchases even without sales.

 

Yup. Its not about "desperately" becoming a selling league.
Its about being an active participant in the global market. Buying and selling, buying and selling, buying and selling. But MLS can afford to spend differently than say...........the Uruguayn league. I watched Atlanta United last night. THe combined transfer fees of just Ezeqiel Barco, Pity Martinez, and Josef Martinez? ~35 million. Outside of the top 4 or 5 leagues, that's a high level spending. Let's think of a famous and historical club outside the big leagues. Celtic. Atlanta have bought two players in their short history for more money than Celtic's record transfer fee. I hope people understand that the buying power of MLS clubs on the global market is really significant.

We were talking about Chris Durkin and STVV the other day. DCU just spent about 5 times more on Edinson Flores (reportedly ~15 million) than STVV's record transfer fee. 5 times.

"The transfer fees are going to continue to go up … the arms race will just keep being pushed."https://t.co/CGyJNNHbB3

— Charles Boehm (@cboehm) February 26, 2020

 

It's a league that intends to improve it's quality, so it's going to continue as US player development will not improve the league at the pace it wants, or on its own.

It's also a league designed not to get a substantial portion of revenues from player sales at the moment. The league sees player sales not as required revenues but as upside that could drive future growth.

That's different than a real selling league, who develops players internally as a key revenue stream above and beyond attendance, sponsorship and media deals.

 

Here's more from Ronny Deila on James Sands, and a few words from Sands on #NYCFC starting the year with two wins: pic.twitter.com/HmITlnaiBt

— Jonathan Tannenwald (@thegoalkeeper) February 27, 2020

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriss...xpansion-fees-sale-prices-surge/#b58f40251b58

Only 3 teams had revenues above $50 million (in 2018). These teams that are paying $8million+ are likely spending 15-25% of their entire yearly revenue on one transfer. One. Even with shared revenue models, I just can’t see this happening far into the future without actively selling players on whilst simultaneously continuing to buy.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriss...xpansion-fees-sale-prices-surge/#b58f40251b58

Only 3 teams had revenues above $50 million (in 2018). These teams that are paying $8million+ are likely spending 15-25% of their entire yearly revenue on one transfer. One. Even with shared revenue models, I just can’t see this happening far into the future without actively selling players on whilst simultaneously continuing to buy.

 

There is also other revenue not tied directly to the MLS team most often associated with the stadium both an NFL and XFL team leased from the Galaxy as an example.

Also a lot of these ownership groups have tons of money. Dave Tepper is worth 12 Billion. He can pay these transfer fees out of savings account interest and still have hundreds of millions left over. Not dissimilar to an Man City. Most of these owners are not in Teppers stratosphere in-terms of wealth, but basically all of them have money to burn and typically buy into a league like MLS to burn some of it.

 

Yep, this is the kind of brilliance in business strategy for MLS, despite fans constantly whining about the ownership group being such an important part of the expansion process.

In order to grow, MLS has had to, and will have to, continue to invest ahead of revenues. There's no getting around that. And probably for an extended period of time, as revenues tend to lag product quality improvements in sports fairly significantly.

In recent years, MLS has added people like Masayoshi Son, Jimmy Haslam and David Tepper to the already aggressive Arthur Blank and the borg cube of LAFC ownership. The Fire went from relatively poor Andrew Hauptmann to Joe Mansueto. Cincy added Meg Whitman and Sacramento didn't get their franchise until they added their billionaire.

This isn't romantic, but they are buying out any of the owners who can't afford to or are unwilling to lean in. There's still five or six, but even some of those are trying in different ways.

What it will allow is people to make $13M mistakes. Or not have to sell to make payroll like some Euro clubs.

 

I really think that Gregg has the same mentality of MLS needing pro/rel and to become a develop and sell league but he isn't allowed to fully speak his opinion. Gregg is significantly smarter than what the ussoccer community gives him credit for. He has vision but it would go against the interests of the people who pay him so I don't think he can freely speak his mind.

 

Well, that's the point. Buying and selling. Buying and selling. Being an active participant in the world market.
Atlanta spent 35 million on Pity Martinez, Ezeqiel Barco, and Josef Martinez.

They also sold Miguel Almiron and Hector Villalba for a combined 30 million.

FCD just broke their transfer record received when they sold Carlos Grueso to the Bundesliga for 4.4 million dollars. (Who they had purchased for 1.6 million) What did they do? Went out and signed Franco Jara from Pachuca to arrive in the summer window. We don't know the figure yet, but they reportedly broke their transfer record on him. Keep it churning. Keep it churning. Upwards and upwards increasing quality.

 

No trolling! Just a bit of ribbing and the possibly erroneous assumption that you did these lists for U17 squads as well as U20s.

 

soon we will have a starting xi of all tanners

 

Not if your both good at buying and selling ... Before the Europa League tie between Celtic and FC Copenhagen, there was an article about how clever FC Copenhagen are at doing exactly that :
https://www.skysports.com/football/...r-triumphs-johan-lange-explains-their-success

 

Yup.

Here's the thing with Americans, though. We won't accept being Copenhagen.
Divine providence and all that. I mean, Copenhagen is very clever and do really well in the transfer window for a club of their size. The also are never actual contenders to win European trophies. They have parties when they reach the round of 16. To Americans that's 15th loser.

I'm starting to think of clubs bigger than Copenhagen in this regard. I'm old enough to remember when Dutch clubs were serious contenders to win European titles every year. Now we talk about how good Dutch clubs like Feyenoord are at developing young talent that moves elsewhere. Great. Feyenoord have won one league title since the late 90s, and of course do nothing in Europe. So what the hell? You've got wealthy accountants, but you're not aaaaaaaaaactually all that good at winning soccer games any more.

Americans and MLS aren't going to be happy until WE'RE the ones at the top of the food chain. That's just the nature of Americans. And MLS is starting to really flex its financial muscle in the Western Hemisphere. Its MLS that's buying the talented young Argentines and Uruguayans. I mean, the motivation for MLS selling players isn't the same motivation as a Copenhagen. The Seattle Sounders are owned by the estate of Paul Allen, the founder of Microsoft. They won't sell their young American players like Ocampo-Chavez because they need to make "clever" moves in the transfer market. They have more money than they know what to do with anyway. The motivations are going to be different.

I travel a lot in the Western Hemisphere. When you go to Brazil or Argentina, most of the fans there have more of an appreciation for what MLS is doing than American fans. They know its just a matter of time before MLS is the dominant league in this hemisphere. We're not competing with the big leagues in Europe...……..but MLS is also only 25 years old. We're going to get there. Everybody in this hemisphere seems to know it other than Americans.

 

MLS is never going to be at the very top of the food chain in soccer, no matter how much money they will be able to throw at signing players, for some of the same reasons the Russian league is never going to be at the very top of the chain either, no matter their top clubs are being sponsored and owned by a rich Russian oligarchy. Russian clubs are not even able to attract the top talent produced by FC Copenhagen or the Danish league in general, and neither will MLS ever be able to, because for the most talented players it's not a question of money, but a question of their own development and they only join up because of the promise of playing Europa Cup and the promise of a quick efficient development that will see them move to one of the top-4 leagues of Europe within a few years.

And that is the whole point. If you are going to tell young talents that they will need to stay so that MLS some time in the future is going to be the best of the best, these talents will leave for Europe as soon as they are able to, being happy playing for much less money to further their own career. Because why would they wan't to waste their own career on a dream that they are not going to be part of anyway and will lead them to nowhere ?.

As for FC Copenhagen, then Arkadiy Abramovich was in Copenhagen some years ago, hoping to negotiate a bid, point being, that throwing money at the club would be a great business, because. 1) He would be sure they would win the league every season = access to Champions League every season = lots of UEFA CL prize money and obviously with a vastly larger budget and some bigger "name" players, also be able to actually do some damage at that level. But the FC Copenhagen board and owners respectfully declined to even consider negotiating a possible sale. Money is not everything, a solid development and business model on the other hand will slowly but surely keep your club and team getting better. MLS is only 25 years old, but FC Copenhagen is only 27 years old, and their present business model is not even half as old as that.

 

Perhaps not. But they can surely move much farther up the league ranks than they are now.

I don't think anyone is saying that.

But MLS isn't going to sell a player because they need the money to balance the books or make payroll for the year. MLS is going to keep increasing payrolls, and if they think the player is worth it, will offer them more money to stay.

MLS absolutely wants to sell players to drive revenues, but it's also still very interested in improving the overall quality of play year over year.

MLS owners agree in part with you and FC Copenhagen.

On one hand, a solid development and business model with sustained, consistent growth is EXACTLY what MLS is all about. Previous American soccer leagues have gone for the "buy up tons of big stars and go big" model and failed.

This is why there's a salary cap and other cost control/parity mechanisms.

However, the difference between FC Copenhagen and MLS is that MLS has a massive potential untapped domestic revenue stream that they are going after -- basically just their share of a 330 million person domestic market that owns 40% of the world's wealth.

It's incredibly hard to capture, and maybe they never will, but they absolutely, certainly won't without increasing their overall talent level across the league at a significant level.

This isn't one team having a good run of internal development and making some Champions League noise. This is an entire league trying to elevate itself in a country that hasn't become accustomed or happy with the idea that they only keep their best players for 1-2 years.

The US has the capacity to fund media contracts akin to EPL or Champions League for the entire league. It's a different set of opportunity than given to a single team in Denmark.

 

Welll, you are both right and wrong, because the money earned in the Danish league may be fairly small, but then this also makes it much easier to actually win the league and qualify for the big prize and TV-money you get for just participating in a group stage in the UEFA Champions or Europa League, so though Denmark is fairly small, much like a State in the US also would be on it's own, FC Copenhagen do have access to a massive potential Europa Cup revenue that just seem to keep growing. So there is also a huge potential for FC Copenhagen and other Danish clubs to grow bigger and bigger.

I noticed that it was mentioned by @kba4life1 that only 3 MLS teams had revenues above $50 million in 2018. As you can see in the link below, the same figure for FC Copenhagen (Parken Sport & Entertainment A/S) was just around $115 million in 2018 (and with a profit of $14.3 million), with the expectation of this figure growing to somewhere between $118 and just around €125 million (850 million Danish crowns) in 2019 depending on if they as a minimum would qualify and participate in the Europa League group stage, which they obviously did and have now done even better by progressing to the Round of 32 and now also to the Round of 16.

https://www.fck.dk/en/news/financial-statements-2018

 

The best league will always exist where the best pool of talent exists at. Unless USA becomes the global soccer power house like we are in every other sport we won't have the worlds best league. When Europe has the best talent combined with the best infrastructure they will always be better than MLS and we will always want MLS to be a seller's league.

The best spot MLS can get to is being better than all of the mid-major european leagues (eredevise, Primeira Liga, Belgian First Division) but not as good as the top dog leagues (Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1).

For me the biggest constraint on the growth of MLS is the salary cap. If the MLS salary cap was moved from $5 million where it currently is to say $15-$20 million I think we would very quickly move to that level but I don't see the best european and south american players in their prime ever wanting to leave the big time leagues for MLS.

 

This is a pet peeve of mine, so sorry if this comes off the wrong way...

It's perfectly sensible to argue that the MLS salary cap acts as a constraint on spending/ambition (and I hope you take this reply as nothing more than a correction on your figures), but be careful with citing the cap number as gospel. In practice, the "cap" in MLS acts more like a salary floor.

In the summer of 2019, the top 5 team payrolls in the league all exceeded $13m, with TFC's being highest at $22m. The bottom 5 payrolls in the league are all around $8m-to-$9m (with Houston being the lowest at $7.6m).

SOURCE: https://www.prostamerika.com/2019/06/21/kicking-the-numbers-2019-mls-player-salaries/225525/

 

I’m not talking about current revenues. I’m talking about potential revenue upside.

There’s a reason for the whole league to keep improving.