By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Nov 22, 2008) USSoccerPlayers --
Well said Commissioner Garber, but... remind me how much you expect to get from expansion fees? Yeah, about that $40 million or so from every new club and the insistence that those clubs will pay or expansion doesn't happen.
As always with Major League Soccer, we're getting the 'whatever is best us in the moment' treatment of a broader issue they've already told us won't have much of an impact. That would be the economy, the current excuse for pro sports to undo a multi-year spending spree.
Did the Arizona Diamondbacks really need over 300 employees at the best of times? Probably not. Was anybody questioning NASCAR's expansion into new areas at the expense of established tracks? Yes, they were. Should anybody be surprised that the National Football League, already taking the most advantage of their players by operating without guaranteed contracts in a sport built on smashing into each other, would become even more economically conservative? You get the idea.
Here we have Major League Soccer, to this point only spending on real estate and the occasional foreign player, deciding it's Woody Guthrie season and times are hard. Well yeah. They were also hard when this same League ran itself $200 million into the hole and responded by cutting the Florida contingent.
Open question as to whether or not that changed anything, with MLS only releasing the balance sheet when it suits them. Yes, we all realize this is a privately held company and that even a season ticket doesn't make you a stakeholder.
It does make you a customer, and that's where the strongest critique of MLS as it stands should be made.
Remember that the whole point of setting up what became Major League Soccer was to strengthen the player pool for the US National Team and turn the US into a soccer nation. MLS has made three obvious moves against that. Breaking with the United Soccer Leagues so there's no direct link between MLS and the lower divisions, increasing foreign allocation slots, and now getting rid of the reserve division.
That last one should have every MLS fan asking the same question. Why? Well, it gets rid of a massive public relations problem. MLS tried very hard to associate developmental salaries with rookie league and single-A baseball. Both are embarrassingly low and require a player to live like a work/study student.
Yet without the reserve league and the developmental setup, most MLS teams end up hurting for cover when their senior roster breaks down. Do we even need to list the examples from this season?
2009 is an expansion year and MLS rosters can't afford to lose even one squad player, much less an actual contributor.
In real numbers, it works like this. Twenty senior players making the MLS minimum. Four developmental players getting treated like interns on a stipend. That's not an improvement over the current model. Yes, the relatively small sum spent on the reserve squads is getting dumped into the senior roster, but come on. They weren't paying enough players on the reserve squads for that to make much of a difference.
The immediate offshoot is that reserve team players now become end of the bench or not in the squad players. The developmental model is once again broken, with a League pleading poverty in response.
Unless you want to become an investor/operator, all MLS has done is once again confirm what we already know. They’ll run the show on the cheap while scolding anyone who complains. Garber had a throwaway comment about bloggers ‘sitting around’ taking shots at the playoff system. Cause, you know, professionals such as myself write standing up.
What we’re seeing here is a petty League doing what it does, setting up success only on its terms and putting any failure perceived or real on something else. Right now it’s the economy. This time next year, it will be the players. It will never be MLS itself.
J Hutcherson works for USSoccerPlayers.
