mexican league is about 5 years from being overtaken by MLS. They're at their peak, MLS is going to grow for a long time.

is this 15% salary cap bump a one time thing for this 5-year contract? pretty ludicrous if so, especially considering the TV money jumping $72m/year (plus an undisclosed amount of money from TSN in Canada), not to mention the recent deals with Sky Sports & Eurosport.

anyway, yeah the players got hosed for the most part, but partial free agency to build on 5 years from now. fair to expect a bigger fight then, maybe it'll come to a work stoppage then if the owners won't get their greedy heads out of their asses.

Because the league benefits way more from bringing in totally past it Gerrard's and Kaka's than it does having a bunch of dudes no one has ever heard of compensated fairly

im almost positive you said this 5 years ago.keep dreaming.

ok so apparently the cap will go up a bit each year, that's good.

also only the top-20 regular salaries will count against the cap, so having extra minimum earners won't hurt a team, if a team wants to carry that many players.

please talk to me about reasonable evaluations.... now how is ochoa's season going?

This is essentially how the Impact got Laurent Ciman. Really solid CB who plays on the Belgian national team, was with Standard Liège but his daughter is autistic and Canada offers superior care compared to Europe so he came to Montreal as a non-DP.

I think the point is that the RSLs of MLS are not going to be bringing in those household names anyway, so why not allow them to build a squad with 15 quality players paid 750k-1 million each.

Because that doesn't benefit the growth of the league. You think people wanna watch RSL? Or Orlando, LA, RBNY (when they had Henry), NYCFC etc...? What if the RSL model works (it does) and more teams go to that? Bad for business

yeah filling the league with old ass Euro starz is def the way to go

nothing wrong with having a squad of solid MLS players that can win
(see: 2014 DCU)

it's mostly a regional league anyway, and winning is far and away the #1 priority

lol, the only teams who could afford that are the ones who don't care about lighting money on fire

current situation with 3 DPs and a $175k squad average ain't too bad really

Strongly disagree.

It's good from a money-making standpoint for the owners, or from a marketing perspective, I guess. I think it's a stretch but I can see some validity in an argument that it's good for the longevity of the league given the way past North American leagues have folded. For the quality of the product, though, I don't see how it could be a good thing that there are, any given year, a handful of players who make more than the total team payroll for well over half the league. Even the Liga and Bundesliga aren't that skewed.

To make matters worse, the process for acquiring the players in that top category is, to put a positive spin, lacking transparency and, more cynically but far closer to reality, rigged. Even if you ignore the league doing all the negotiations as a single body, and thus having a strong incentive to favor big-market teams, the foreign stars my age and top national team guys coming back get to pick where they'll play in an environment where teams do not bid against each other on salary. When these guys are deciding which team to grace with their presence, their only financial incentives come from endorsements and personal marketing, which again pushes them toward the big markets and to the top teams.

The structure of the league is totally ****ed. The league can thank the absurd variance of the playoffs, essentially a turbo cup competition, and Toronto being so bad despite spending 3 times as much as the 5th or 6th highest payroll team for keeping things somewhat tenable.

I definitely feel like an enabler and part of the problem. Even with all of that plus the owner directly telling fans complaining about him not spending to shut the **** up, I didn't think twice when season-ticket-renewal time came. I can't wait for the season to start.

Cliffs: the league structure has essentially turned most of us into supporters of Newcastle.

I wonder how Kaka likes living in Orlando

Brazilians ****ing love Orlando for some strange reason

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/...zilian-tourism

http://qz.com/128367/the-happiest-pl...of-brazilians/

That's true, I was at the disney supermax prison complex early feb and i saw like 4k brazil jerseys

i almost googled how to say "7-1 semifinal" in Portuguese

Honestly, this may be the most useful thing MLS has put on their website in quite some time. Good on them for making these secondary audio feeds happen.

How to watch and record UniMas/Univision games with English commentary: http://www.mlssoccer.com/sap

well it starts today.

Chicago at LA 7 PM PST.

just remembered that NBC Sports won't be broadcasting MLS games this season. I don't have lolFS1, so will have to hit the links you guys have mentioned above this season I guess to watch anything.

and i would probably make that argument here. time has shown over and over that owners have to be saved from themselves, and it's probably good for the stability of the league that they are in these ways.

i don't think that the league would be that much better off if they were pissing away money on more foreign also-rans at ~$750k/year. not sure if it'd be worth it from a financial or quality standpoint tbh. more Liam Ridgewells at $1.2m/year aren't turning this into the BLITW. a lot of the guys in the $200-387k range are pretty wat imo, so i'm not sure that things would be much better if the non-DP max was higher or gone really. teams would keep burning money on guys who aren't difference makers, only it'd cost them more.

that line is obv a good way to suppress salaries and save money.

the other advantage is that the league not being full of teams with guys making ~$300k means that there's a greater ability for development. think fewer young players (American especially, and there would be even fewer, almost zero Canadians) would get any playing time at all if rosters were full of professional veterans.

i'm obv not, and probably would would, defend the league on transparency or the single-entity stuff. that said, the owners seem happy with the insane ways the league operates, so i dunno. it might not actually be the worst thing in the world if the league finds a way to give some advantages to the big money teams, if they're footing the bill for the teams in the red.

the one that started to grind my gears this year was at the draft with a player who said he'd only play in LA or NY, or else he'd take one of the European offers he had. supposedly he was a top-5 talent, and ofc he falls to NYRB at #18. i feel like something like this has happened with LA before as well, but maybe not. anyway, i hate this because the draft should be an equalizer, not a way for the richest teams to get the best young players, when they don't deserve them.

not sure what this means exactly.

anyway, what i was trying to say before was that looking at the guys who make ~$300k, ~$200k, ~$100k, etc i think one can build a fine team with a ~$175k squad average.

Brag when I was 13 a group of Brazilian girls ask for me to chill with them by the pool

Sent from my SM-G900T using 2+2 Forums

I am legit excited. This is a lock to be the best and most fun season in our league's history. Am going to be dedicated in watching more than I ever have before.

Canadians are still garbage at this point. Last year, Montreal used a ton of French Canadians and the season was a disaster. During the CCL Quarters vs. Pachuca they used 0 Canadians and were successful.

This happens in the Big 4 leagues as well. Although that's more about a player not wanting to go to a certain crap market or 2 and not cherry picking a top 2 team. The big markets will always have an advantage no matter what, but MLS has done a pretty fair job of leveling the playing field.

yeah i know. and how many Canadians do you think would ever play in MLS if the cap and non-DP max were higher? ~none.

it'd probably end up hurting US player development as well imo. most kids would be relegated to the USL Pro teams and probably never make the jump to MLS, but for the few exceptional ones.

one of the original goals of this league iirc was to develop domestic talent, and that'd take a beating with higher salaries imo.
(if teams were willing or able to spend more anyway)

A wild Landon Donovan appears! (On the unimas field set pregame)

haha so the first game on MLS live will be in Spanish?

Landycakes speaking Spanish?

I'M IN

No Unimas aqui, no es bueno

This is ridiculous.

A big part of growing the league is increasing the overall quality of play and also generating name recognition by developing talent and then selling those players into Europe.

The reputation of the league gets enhanced anytime a player goes through MLS and then does something of note in Europe.

Allowing teams to spread their money over 10-15 players @ say 500k each gives you a way better chance of pilfering young players from South America.

I mean the TSN guys are saying that VWFC is going to lose Laba soon and they think he's good enough to play in the EPL. That's a great thing for this league.

What other leagues operate on a strict peasants + past it superstars? The only ones are in the middle east and China.

Plus variety is good. A few glamour teams plus a few really well run teams, nothing wrong with that.

Plus doing this would put the feet to the first of ******* owners like Kroenke who bring nothing to the table