The manner in which teams violate the rules vary, the CSOs said. Many pointed to creative ways to pay agent fees as the most common way to spend outside the cap.
CSOs said teams will pay consulting and scouting contracts, marketing arrangements or schedule friendlies with teams to hide payments.
“The trick that a lot of the teams will try and use is that they enter into scouting agreements with agents,” one CSO said. “That’s the way they take 10 percent off. If you’re running a budget, say you even just take the salary cap, which is whatever, $5 million, 10 percent of that is $500k, which is a player. I’d say there’s a handful that are still doing that. It’s certainly a real struggle for us. Because we are faced with this every time we look to sign a player from abroad, we just get told the same thing: ‘Hey, we’re just going to do a scouting agreement, it’s what we do with a bunch of other clubs.’ That is something we face quite a lot. And 10 percent across all the players add up quickly.”
One CSO provided a recent example.
“We were talking to an MLS free agent this offseason that we didn’t end up signing,” he said. “But part of those conversations were literally his agents being like, ‘Oh, yeah, well just pay us the agent fee through the MLS Next Pro team. That’s what we do.’ So when we presented an offer, it had a marketing agreement but not an agent fee. Generally speaking, you look at the marketing agreement, the agent fee comes out of that. That gets paid to the agency. That’s above board, that’s the way it works. And they responded and we’re like, ‘OK, we could agree to this and then, you know, have our 10 percent net agent fee on top of it.’ And we were like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? That’s the marketing agreement, that’s literally where that comes from.’ And they were so confused. They didn’t know that the agent fee was included in that. So it’s like, ‘OK, hmmm, wonder what his previous team was doing.’”
One CSO said finding ways to pay comparable agent fees to leagues around the rest of the world is a sign of MLS rules simply falling behind.