Backpass: Make Designated Player Slots Tradeable
Also: some pre-season predictions for the Rapids and the MLS Western Conference.
Paul Tenorio’s recent recap of Inter Miami’s ill-fated world tour for The Athletic had one of the most predictable MLS manager complaints imaginable: that the league’s structure makes it hard to build a good-enough team.1 Here’s Tata Martino, with Paul Tenorio’s context as well:
“Which team has the best chance of competing? (Which is) better? One that has three designated players and three young designated players, or one that has eight players under the age of 30 at a very good level competing in the league?” Martino asked, before rattling off a list of in-prime stars who had recently left careers in top European leagues to sign for one of Miami’s two Saudi opponents.
“MLS does not have that possibility,” he said, referencing MLS’s myriad roster rules and cap limitations.
Martino was chuffed that Al Nassr have an ‘unfair advantage’; they can pay players whatever they want, and unlike European teams, they aren’t subject to so-called ‘Financial Fair Play’ rules, in which teams must generally spend on players roughly what they earn in football income. Al Nassr are 75% owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is worth $770 billion. PIF also owns 75% of three other teams in the league: Al Hillal, Al Ittihad, and Al Ahli, as well as English Premier side Newcastle United. Saudi teams can spend whatever they want on players, and can have up to 10 foreign players on the roster. The only things holding them back as a league from being the best in the world is 1) players desire, or lack thereof, to live in a desert kingdom where the citizenry are strongly discouraged from drinking, canoodling with women, or practicing free speech,2 and 2) playing in Asia and the AFC Champions League doesn’t have the same cache or prestige as playing in the UEFA Champions League.
Tata, and many managers of high-end, free-spending MLS clubs who have coached in other leagues, aren’t wrong to criticize the league. But in general, their criticisms of MLS are rooted in their own competitive best-interests, and not the interests of the league at-large. If Martino, Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas, and some of the other go-big-or-stay-home owners like City Football Group (NYCFC) and Arthur Blank (Atlanta United) had their way, there would be no salary cap and no foreign player limit. American players would have an exceedingly difficult path to getting playing time in MLS. Billionaire owners willing to spend would buy up big talent and dominate the league the way Manchester City and Liverpool and PSG have; 20 teams would begin the season with no hope of a title.3
MLS is an American sports league, and American sports leagues value parity and competitiveness over all. Ironically, Europe, with its stronger leanings towards socialism, has a purely capitalist structure for which teams are best and which are not. In Europe can spend as much as you want - or at least as much as your accountants can prove you can afford.4 In contrast to this, American sports leagues have a college drafts that gives preference to the worst teams. American sports leagues also have salary caps and/or luxury taxes which try to level the playing field and lift all boats. [Gasp! Socialism! The horror!]
But we all know that Tata has a point. MLS has whales and minnow. The Rapids, despite their gazillionaire owner, are minnows. And thus in the owners meetings, Josh Kroenke and some of the other tightfisted ‘don’t depreciate our asset by forcing us to spend our money’ individuals are constantly arguing for a system that keeps spending on players low. The rules MLS has created: the ‘soft’ salary cap of $5.2 million; plus the $1.9 million in General Allocation Money per team (GAM); plus the discretionary Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) of $2.4 million; plus three Designated Players who only hit the cap at $651,2505; plus roughly eight International Slots per team; all of these protections keep costs reasonable for owners.
Cost protections and salary caps (and single-entity ownership) were built-in to the creation of MLS because of the disastrous end for America’s previous iteration of professional football, the NASL, which collapsed in 1984. The North American Soccer League jumped from being a semi-pro league in the late 60s and early 70s into being a serious league beginning in 1974 after they splashed big cash on European-based superstars like Pelé, Johann Kruyff, George Best, and Franz Beckenbauer. However, those players moved on, team profits didn’t keep up with lavish player spending, and interest dried up in the early 1980s. Business math: IF spending > profits THEN bankruptcy. As a result, there would be no (outdoor) pro soccer in America for another decade and a half.
MLS is starting its 29th year in operation, and survived a brief contraction scare in the early 2000s, so I think we’re through the financial viability phase. Some teams – LAFC, Seattle Sounders, Atlanta United, NYCFC, and Inter Miami – want to go bigger. They want to spend, spend, spend their way to the top. And while it might be somewhat unfair to let the billionaires buy their way into cups, it is also somewhat unfair to restrain them excessively from spending to win. There has to be a better way.
My modest proposal is to make DP slots tradable. If Inter Miami wants to pay five MLS teams $3 million each so that they can become the South Beach Galácticos, I say let ‘em. Buying another teams DP slot would re-allocate wealth across the league, and also re-distribute the aspirational expenditures of a team like Inter Miami when they buy a player like Jordi Alba, Lionel Messi, or Luis Suarez, because for the right to buy that player (and three or four more like them), they have to pay another MLS team for the privilege.
For this to work, teams would have to be allowed larger sums of discretionary money to trade, and so the TAM limit would have to go up significantly; to $15 or 20 million per team. But think of how this might benefit the league overall. Lets say LAFC wants six DPs in 2025, but currently hold only the league-allocated three slots. They buy a slot from RSL for $2.5 million; they buy another slot from the Rapids in exchange for $2 million and their hot new youth academy prospect. They buy their third slot from LA Galaxy in exchange for Carlos Vela and Hugo Lloris. Their TAM expenditures, and their high-quality players, get spread around the league. The TAM-receiving teams (in this example, RSL, Colorado, and LAG) are now flush with additional cash would want to hit up global leagues for more mid-tier MLS players to acquire. A rising tide that lifts all boats.
For this to work, there would also need to be a ‘minimum TAM expenditure’ floor.6 That’s to keep the cheap teams from dumping all their DP slots for cash and thne choosing to tank and become non-competitive because it might be more lucrative for them to operate a terrible team.7 It might also be wise to require teams to carry no fewer than one DP, and no more than seven: to once again maintain competitive balance.
This system would works because it still relies on smart teams to spend wisely. The Jorge Mas’ of the world will bring in seven big names, each on an 8 or 9 figure contract, but would have to pay other clubs for the privilege. Those clubs would now have millions to spend on players making $500,000 to a million each, and would be betting that they could construct a better roster by buying diamonds in the rough rather than blockbuster names.
This proposal might be hard for owners to agree upon early on, because it would be a fairly large leap forward in potential spending for teams. International slots are currently tradable; DP slots are not. But more DP slots for teams that want them would get more eyeballs on the league; and more TAM to trade to acquire those slots would improve the quality of players in league while maintaining protections for domestic players and not forcing the lower spending teams to up their ante. I think this is a win-win for the league. All I ask is that Don Garber give me credit for this idea when it is implemented. Also, I’d take a hat, too.
Rabbi’s 2024 Preseason Predictions
Rabbi’s 2024 Western Conference End of Season Table Predictions:
All of this follows my Western Conference previews, parts I and II.
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Rabbi’s totally un-informed Eastern Conference Champion Prediction: Inter Miami
Rabbi’s Golden Boot Prediction: Samuel Adeniran (St Louis)
Golden Boot Runners Up: Petar Musa (Dallas), Luis Suarez (Miami), Dennis Bouanga (LAFC)
Rapids Mid-Season MVP8: Andreas Maxsø
Rapids Mid-Season Best New Player: Kimani Stewart-Baynes
Rapids Mid-Season Biggest Disappointment: Zach Steffen
This one requires explanation; the easy pick here is someone we already are disappointed. Ralph Priso; Lalas Abubakar; Sidney Tavares; Jonathan Lewis. That’s a cheap cop-out – how can you be disappointed in a player from whom you have low expectations?
So the subjects then are players we pin our hopes to: Cole Bassett; Connor Ronan; Djordje Mihailovic; Sam Vines; Andreas Maxsø; Zach Steffen. Steffen has the most rust; is at a critical high-pressure, high-leverage position; and is in a league full of excellent goalkeepers. For me, if Steffen is statistically league average, it’d be a massive disappointment from where his potential lay just three years ago.
‘Good enough’ here is probably ‘to win against teams in other leagues’ or ‘to be world class’.
It is rumored that the reason Messi didn’t take $100 or 200 million a year to play for Al-Hilal or Al-Ittihad was that Mrs. Lionel Messi did not want to live in Saudi Arabia. Which, personally, I can identify with. All the money in the world won’t make up for being bored, lonely, and miserable. See also: the Chinese Premier League.
As it stands, a league with 30 teams is already too big. I really want MLS to push to 40 teams and split in two. I wrote about it once (and just spent the last 15 minutes resurrecting that old post from zombie Burgundy Wave using the Wayback machine.)
This is called ‘Financial Fair Play’. Teams can run afoul of FFP if they wildly overspend their revenue in order to buy players. However, PSG and Man City have infinite Saudi/Qatari wealth behind them, and some very creative accountants, and seem to be getting away with it. For now.
Never forget that for cap purposes, Lionel Messi and Kevin Cabral cost the same amount. Wild.
Once TAM has a ‘minimum spend’, it stops being discretionary. Which is why it probably would make sense in my new system to combine GAM and TAM back together and rename them back to ‘Allocation Money’.
Go read up on Donald Sterling’s LA Clippers. The dude was an evil genius: he only wanted to operate a bare-bones NBA franchise knowing it was more profitable than actually spending big to win.
Predicting out more than to July is stupid.