We might be heading for a work stoppage in MLS if things don't get better quickly. News of a ridiculous proposal dropped on Tuesday.
The MLS collective bargaining agreement is expiring, and with the season scheduled to start this week, the players' union and owners need to hash out an agreement. It's not easy to keep the league growing and evolving while shaping it into something that can challenge the rest of the world competitively, in terms of both quality play and player compensation.
At the core of the negotiations for players are a rise in minimum salary levels and, in a much more major shift, a move for free agency. It was doubted that true free agency could be achieved in this set of negotiations, but some kind of move to lay the groundwork and allow at least some degree of freedom in player movement would probably have gotten the job done.
On Monday, after players had gathered in Washington D.C. to negotiate with Don Garber and other league and club ownership representatives, the mood was good. It seemed like a deal of some kind could get struck that worked for everyone for the time being, and the season would start as scheduled this weekend. Then today, MLS owners reportedly blew everything up.
The offer heard 'round the world
Owners' apparent lone proposal: player age 32 with 10 years' experience with same club can become free agent. #mls
— Steven Goff (@SoccerInsider) March 3, 2015
That's an offer so insulting you'd almost think it was fake, but Goff is as tied-in to this process as anyone, and others like ESPN's Jeff Carlisle have backed it up, adding this detail that shows just how well the players' union took the news:
I'm hearing agents are lining up training stints w/NASL foreign teams as we speak. #mlscba
— Jeff Carlisle (@JeffreyCarlisle) March 3, 2015
Seems they took it well. Or, wait, no. Sorry. The opposite of that.
This being a labor dispute, though, there are leaks on both sides and the owners have their own version of events.
Source close to negotiations on the 10 year/32 year old MLS FA proposal: "old info. we've moved and improved it since then."
— Jorge Arangure (@jorgearangure) March 3, 2015
Why is this so terrible?
Simply put, the proposal Goff reported is a bad-faith offer from the MLS owners. It's simply not a realistic way to achieve free agency in MLS with how the league operates.
In a league where player movement is extremely common because of the tight-salary cap rules, players just don't spend 10 years with one team. Heck, it's rare for most players to spend more than two years with a team. In the entire league, there is one active player who would be eligible for that kind of free agency setup. That's Brad Davis, who has spent 10 years with the Houston Dynamo organization, joining them in their last year as the original San Jose Earthquakes.
In the entire 20-year history of MLS, only six other players would ever have been eligible for this ridiculous version of free agency -- Ben Olsen, Brian Ching, CJ Brown, Logan Pause, Jaime Moreno, and Landon Donovan. In contrast, the NBA has nine such eligible players right now -- Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Tim Duncan, Tim Parker, Manu Ginobli, Dirk Nowitzki, Anderson Varejao, Nick Collison and Udonis Haslem.
Really, if the MLS owners thought that such an offer was going to do anything more but make the players union angry, they're delusional. After reading this nugget from Goff that came out not long before the offer leaked, maybe that's not surprising:
Says well-placed source: "It's shocking. Almost as if owners want a work stoppage. They see players as incidental to MLS' growth"
— Steven Goff (@SoccerInsider) March 3, 2015
So what happens next?
Well, for now at least, there's no strike, nor lockout. There's still technically time to get a deal done, albeit not much -- the season is scheduled to start on Friday when the defending champions LA Galaxy host the Chicago Fire, with the big showcase slate of matches coming on Saturday and the league's two new clubs Orlando City and New York City FC facing each other on Sunday. All indications are that a deal must be reached by late Wednesday, as the Fire need to board a plane for LA on Thursday, giving the two sides precious little to come to an agreement.
Of course, circumstances aren't exactly ideal right now.
MLS labour dispute: #WhitecapsFC player rep Steve Beitashour says a strike vote would occur either tonight or tomorrow morning. #VWFC
— Cam Tucker (@CamTucker_Metro) March 3, 2015
So that seems promising. The next question then becomes this: if players strike, how long can they hold out? Owners seem to be gambling on them not being able to afford to stay on strike for long, and then being in a much stronger position when they are forced back to the table because players are running out of money.
They may have misplayed their hand on that front, though:
Overnight, CSN was told that the union may have some powerful allies in the form of the other pro sports unions. It was suggested that the other unions would help to increase the player strike fund to allow for MLS players to make a living wage while on strike. The motivation to do so comes from a desire to see MLS move away from core concepts of single entity ownership. It's felt that the model is a threat to all professional sports in North America and there is a fear that other leagues could try to emulate all or parts of the system in the future. The other unions want to do what they can to make sure that doesn't happen.
-Source: Canadian Soccer News
If that's true and unions from America's other major sports like the NBA, MLB, and NFL are willing to throw their financial and perhaps even political weight behind the MLS players' union, that could put the league and club owners in an awkward position of facing a long strike with little leverage to break it.