Regardless of off-season transfers, upcoming fixtures, and starting XI speculation, the question on every MLS supporter’s lips this week has been much more fundamental: will the season start this week, or not? The MLS Players’ Union has been threatening a strike, and with the league seemingly immobile for months, a work stoppage has, until the eleventh hour (and we’re at the eleventh and counting right now) seemed possible, perhaps even likely.
So what’s this all about? In a nutshell, the player’s union wants MLS players to be able to participate in a free market when their contracts expire, to become free agents. With the league’s current structure, all MLS players are employed by the same entity, and thus free agency makes no sense; leaving the Seattle Sounders for the LA Galaxy would essentially be akin to walking over from the finance department to the head of HR and saying, “Hey, what’ve you got for me over here? Make me an offer.”
The positions of the MLS and the MLSPU in the build up to this week have been basically those of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. The MLSPU says it’ll strike unless the new collective bargaining agreement includes at least some sort of free agency. But the league is not, in theory, built of competing, independent franchises; rather each team is considered a piece of the whole, the single franchise of the league itself. Consequently, the MLS has been adamant that, considering the league’s single-entity structure, such a deal for free agency is ludicrous, and impossible.
The League’s Offer: Progress, or a Pittance?
On Tuesday, however, there seemed to be a ray of hope. Both ESPN and the Washington Post reported that the negotiations, which had resumed in Washington DC at the beginning of the week, now included at least a heavily-qualified version of free agency offered by the league. This, on the face of it, seems a huge concession. This was the sticking point, so the league offering some sort of free agency must be a sign of progress, right?
Well, it’s complicated.
ESPN’s “source with knowledge of the negotiations” said that the league had conceded to a form of free agency that would apply to players 28 and older, who have played in the MLS for at least eight years. If this sounds fishy, that’s because it is—three-week-old sashimi fishy. This means that only a handful of players in the MLS would qualify for free agency, and, in order to earn the ‘right’ to enter into a free market for their talents, the player would need to concede eight years in the league in order to ‘earn’ that right. Further, this also means that the lion’s share of players in their prime—let’s say players in their mid- to late-twenties—is categorically barred from free agency, regardless of their time in the league.
Brad Davis: The Only MLS Free Agent
Now, for the sake of illustration, here’s a mile-in-their-cleats thought experiment. Let’s say you’re a promising young American soccer player, having been capped a handful of times for the USMNT at the U-18 level, and you sign your first professional contract at age 17, at Sporting KC. You may switch clubs, but in order to qualify for the league’s free agency, you’ll need to wait more than a decade.
Or, say you have wild success in Kansas City, and at age 21, some big European club comes knocking at your door. You deal with all the work permit fiascos, and finally, sign with Liverpool, and successfully ply your trade at Anfield for 7 years. Then, when you’re nearing thirty, you decide to return to MLS (a story not unlike Clint Dempsey’s), and sign with the New York Red Bulls. And yet, even though you’re over the 28 year old benchmark, you’d need to play in MLS for three more years, until you’re over 30, to even earn the right for free agency.
This isn’t even a drop in the bucket; it’s merely a suggestion that someone perhaps ought to fetch a pail in the first place.
Still, at least the bucket is in the picture. Time and again, the MLS has resolutely rejected free agency. In fact, they even went to court over it, successfully defeating an antitrust suit not long after the league’s inception. That the MLS has even offered free agency might, for the glass-half-fullers, be a light at the end of the tunnel—even if the tunnel is still very long.
Those of that half-full disposition might also take heart from the fact that the Washington Post’s initial report quoted a league offer that would only apply to players over 32, who had been in the league for a full decade. This is absurd, and its absurdity was well-documented by ESPN: that sort of free agency would literally apply to only one player in the entire league, Brad Davis. Quite the robust, laissez faire market, eh? But nonetheless, for all its absurdity, that offer was at least a starting point, and one from which negotiations have, apparently, already moved on.
Let’s Play Ball!…Please?
So, will we have a season after all? It’s hard to say. The optimistic view is that the league has finally put free agency on the table, and that the nature of these things is to start by giving half a centimeter, before meeting, laboriously, in the middle. The glass-half-empty perspective? Even the second offer is weak, ridiculous, a token gesture still little better than nothing at all.
By disposition—and by a habit gleaned from my allegiance to Arsenal FC—I sometimes slide into a woebegone pessimism. However, in this case, I’m inclined to take the sunnier view. The NFL this is not. Both the MLS, and the MLSPU must know how important this deal is. The league has greater visibility than ever before, with ever stronger squads, and ever more robust local support. Further, it’s an expansion year, with two new franchises, NYCFC and Orlando City, coming into the fold, each of which fueled by star power gleaned from former La Liga glory, David Villa and Kaka.
A strike would throw a wrench into the mechanics of a league that is still struggling for both national and international respect. This means that the MLSPU has a very strong bargaining chip in the threat of a strike; but should the strike actually come to pass, all parties will suffer—the owners, the players, and especially, the fans.