Ben Knight: Time to rethink MLS
Well done. Nice piece exposing the absurdity that is MLS.
good read ben, and one that presses issues
Very good piece indeed. League owned contracts must be done away with, and hopefully the "Super" draft as well. I could be totally wrong here, but the draft seems like an entirely North American concept. It works in the big four (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) because those leagues are the pinnacle of their sports. Soccer is an international game, and MLS certainly not the pinnacle. The draft is awkwardly paired with soccer's traditional transfer practices, and MLS needs to find a solution before the league can move forward.
^ good point
The timing is right for some but I think MLS would wait until the league gets to its full contingent of teams before the single entity dropped. The talk will continue but MLS won't be hassled till they get those 50mil entry fees from the new teams and the players sorted next year.
hey ben, Toronto *did* overcome Montreal in the Canada cup.. they just couldn't overcome Vancouver
I try to remind people of this just because I hate Montreal and we don't need that mistruth being circulated
regarding the topic tho, I agree completely. I also think that a simple salary cap and revenue sharing with proper review conventions would probably function in the same way without all the unneeded extra rules. one thing that the extra rules and the single entity do is they make it time-consuming to get players. Mojo can't just fax over a contract to a player and say "sign here". Everything has to be put through the league and that takes time.
Last edited by rocker; 08-29-2008 at 09:49 AM.
Fantastic article, lets hope it falls on open ears.
As usual a great article. It is so nice to read a soccer piece written by someone who "gets it" and understands the games place in the world as well as in North America.
What good points did he make? MLS is going to be a selling league if they spend five times as much on salaries. Europe will pay a lot more for the forseeable future, and has the cachet of being the best place in the world to play. Also, TFC has lost one (1) player to an overseas bid in its entire history, and despite what Knight said, nobody except for Wynne is even remotely on the transfer radar screen.
It's easy to tell other people how to spend their money. I'd like to see an article where Knight actually does some reseach on how much money MLS makes and how much they are projected to make, and then actually makes some realistic proposals for what is realistic to spend on players.
My only problem with restruction is that the MLS is still a baby league. Its a league that has overcome and survived for this long I can't see making rash decision now. Yes there are some teams doing well finanically but dare I say their are teams in cities where no one could give a crap about them.
I'm just saying if the league plans to move forward they should make calculated risks and not expand or change anything without thinking of the ramifications
^^
$200 000 is a pittance for a soccer player, especially one with a bright future. Garber has probably sold MLS players for less, which is why he balked at paying that price for a player from a lower league. It really is quite distressing... can you see the SPL telling Rangers they couldn't buy Edu for $5 million because he was from MLS? Of course not, because that's a ridiculous notion.
my post is not for DVS, but Dub Narcotic.
What is this obsession with selling leagues? We have younger league and a smaller talent pool to pick from. I for one don't care if my league is a selling league for most of my days as long as it improves as best it can.
I think many people look at this market and continent as a great place to play but for better competition they must look at stronger leagues.
His point was that well managed teams draft well, train players and make them attractive to other leagues. The problem is that the team does not have final say on the player transfers as the league "owns" the player rights.
As a result a team trying to build through player development, like TFC, are at risk of losing assets and getting a pittance dollar wise in return. They are then restricted in how they can spend that money.
The result is that the league runs the risk of stagnating with teams in a constant rebuilding phase.
Of course, the league has to move forward in a landscape dominated by those Big Four. So far, everything I've seen about improving soccer in North America has been about making it more like the rest of the world.Originally Posted by ginkster88
Does soccer in other places have to compete with four other professional team sports and hundreds of college teams that draw huge crowds? (I actually don't know, I've never lived anywhere else but Canada and I only recently started following soccer).
revisionism at its best.hey ben, Toronto *did* overcome Montreal in the Canada cup.. they just couldn't overcome Vancouver
I try to remind people of this just because I hate Montreal and we don't need that mistruth being circulated
The one thing that people forget is that MLS is a relatively well attended league - somewhere else on this board I saw numbers that put it in the top 5 or 6. Consider that many European clubs play in much larger stadiums, but there are a few that are closer to our range. It is within reason that Toronto could sell 25,000, or close to 30,000 which would put it in pretty good standing with other clubs - it currently is about the same size as Millwall, and with a few more seats would be comparable to Charlton Athletic, Crystal Palace and West Ham in the UK, and is currently only slightly smaller than Villareal in Spain.
Toronto could compete, and some other MLS teams could also, but anything that is close to the edge (poorly attended MLS markets) would have to be moved to better markets.
I still feel like we lost that Montreal game. I went into the CC expecting to see Toronto scoring every other minute while never allowing Mon/Van in the attacking third. Naive, perhaps, but I've never followed USL. Every game was a rude awakening for me.
Good stuff, how can any team develop with the babysitting that the MLS wankers are doing, at least double the salary cap.
hopefully this problem will be resolved in the next few years...
maybe then can gradually wean the league off the current system... baby steps to freedom!
Yes..comparable in attendance and stadium size but not in talent and that's the point. The longer MLS tries to manipulate the talent pool in this league, the longer it will take to get real talent. The managers of each respective club need to have free reign on searching out talent and signing new players, without the league getting involved.
The leagues security blanket is eventually gonna stifle progress, if it hasn't already.
i'm sure there are even teams in this league who complain about this shit.
Mo johnston complained on GOlTV, for example. last winter some owners wanted to raise the cap by a lot, while others wanted to keep on the same course.
So it's not like MLS doesn't realize this stuff. They just aren't gonna change things right now, since the CBA negotiations are coming up.
Just let the 2009 season play out under current rules, let negotiations take their course, and then possibility we'll see change.
one thing i really dislike is the american national team player allocation thing.
since allocation spots can be traded now, there's really no point in having this. I know it was designed like a draft, to reward the bottom feeders to get nationals when they come back. But if a bottom feeder trades the allocation spot to an already good team, then it defeats the purpose. Given that it seems returning players can demand where they want to play, the reward goes to the better teams. Yes, they still have to make a deal with the team (like Shitcago and TFC) but then that essentially lowers the quality of the team who gets the returning player.
Also, there's a rule where a team keeps the rights of a player who is out of contract and leaves for Europe (if the player is offered a contract and rejects it). This needs to go as well. It's hard to imagine the point of having rights to a player who has no contract with a team and who may have been gone for a year or more.
A lot of this stuff just duplicates the intention of parity. When have 5 rules that work towards parity when 1 (salary cap) will do?
if they can't raise the salary cap then they should at least offer 2 DP slots per team.
with a maximum of 3 per team through trades.
and the DP should count for a little less towards the cap than it does now.
This would allow teams with bigger wallets to spend what they want.
It would be nice to have a salary cap that reflects individual team earnings....
... if you earn more revenue then you should be allowed to spend more...
fuck parity!
So what if some teams have stacked clubs? As long as the spending is regulated it would fine.
It would even increase the attraction of fans in smaller markets when they get visited by the big clubs with more stars.
No, you ass-munching Limp Act troll, it's reality. We beat them 1.0 at home. They did not defeat TFC in either game. Therefore, we overcame them.
If you're going to come onto this board and troll TFC fans (in the vein of your Yeah! Montreal thread yesterday) try getting a grip on reality first. And if you think the kind of performance that piece of shit from the USL put in the other night is going to take out any other team than one from Nicaragua, a baseball country, then you're as deluded as stupid.
Fuck off.
I use this argument sometime as well but I shouldn't, because it's disingenous. The reason MLS is still losing money rapidly as a whole is because it's using artificial ticket giveaway numbers to represent "attendance". The Columbus Dispatch exposed this in an article earlier this summer, where it proved using internally leaked documents from the Columbus Few front office that the team was actually getting fewer than 10,000 paid fans per game but reporting an average attendance of something like 15,000.
I think you can guarantee that, based on market buy in, a whole bunch of clubs are still losing money: New York, San Jose, Columbus, Kansas City, Chivas USA right off the top of my head. But given their long-term debt to income ratio, you can probably add RSL and Chicago to that list, maybe Dallas as well.
The MLS is selling something of a con job to its own fanbase right now. I'd bet based on the Dispatch's discoveries and what we've seen in some cities that a league average of closer to 12,000 to 13,000 is more accurate than the 16,000 it puts out there.
Couple with that the fact that most top euro leagues make the bulk of their money off a tv deal and MLS doesn't, and you have a recipe for a league that isn't really doing very well financially.
Having said that 12,000 is still more than most professional leagues around the world; and you have to spend money to make money. The league has already identified that their is a core of immigrant American soccer fans -- just as in Toronto --who COULD support MLS but simply don't, because they think it's crap. That's why they can get tens of thousands more out for a Thierry Henry charity match in New York than for a REd Bulls game. The only way the league will ever reach those people is if it is willing to expand rosters by five or six slots, and give teams the cap depth to add player depth to fill those slots.
Psychiatrist's are located to your right.
I agree that the Kandjii transfer saga, if true, was stupid, and some MLS rules need to change. But, I'm not that impressed by a newspaper article that just hand waves at actual research and numbers by saying 'the league shouldn't be run by MBA's'.
Look at this board, people are freaking out about 15-20% raises in ticket prices but they are demanding that MLS spend two and three times what is does now in salaries, youth development, single-table travel costs, etc.. It's always easy to spend somebody else's money, and I think Knight is just being lazy here and playing to the crowd.
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