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With the Collective Bargaining Agreement between MLS and the MLS Players Union expiring Jan. 31, this league can ill afford a work stoppage. But after a CBA that favored the league, the players tabled a proposal last month with two big changes: Free agency and guaranteed contracts.
According to the Sports Business Journal, players union reps met league brass last month and those were two huge bones of contention. They’ll probably continue to be, because those are two things that fly in the face of everything MLS (seemingly) has shunned at all cost.
Let’s face it, MLS has a worldwide reputation for being cheap, and that reputation isn’t helped by stunts like strong-arming departing players like Kenny Cooper into giving up the 10% commission on transfer fees that they’re perfectly entitled to. Cooper’s father raises some good points to Yanks Abroad, valid complaints of the sort that cause strikes _ and that’s something nobody wants to see. The discovery claims that alternately confused and enraged fans was ostensibly to promote balance, but realistically in practice was to artificially suppress salaries and avoid bidding wars. Free agency=free market, unless there are some serious checks and balances with it.
Free agency combined with guaranteed contracts would result in the NBA, where the most sought-after players now are the all-important “expiring contracts,” players used as tools simply to get bad money off the books. The most important step of rebuilding is the salary dump, because it’s the first.
Baseball has both, but unlike the NBA, no salary cap. With prominent figures from both the Bundesliga and la Liga saying a cap is the wave of the future, I can’t see the league acquiescing on that. But with the present CBA universally-regarded as favoring ownership, what concession do they make?
Few deals are guaranteed right now, and those are Designated Players, or players who come from abroad with cache and bargaining power; that’s likely something the union will fight for.
And Red Bull sporting director Erik Stover had said his club was one of several pushing for a significant increase in the salary cap, perhaps as much as double. We’ll see; but with more soccer specific stadiums opening next year, and added revenue streams balancing the books, it needs to go up _ and if free agency is a reality, it needs to go up SIGNIFICANTLY.
In the middle of a recession, a strike or lockout would be both catastrophic for business, but beyond asinine considering the strides MLS has made the last two or three years toward profitability. Commissioner Don Garber knows that as well as anybody.
What do you think the new CBA looks like? How high do you think the cap goes? Do the players get guaranteed deals or free agency? Both? Neither? Hollar at us….
