Why The MLS Needs Free Agency for Players

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Thursday, February 05, 2015

Hank Stern, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Major League Soccer faces a big-league crossroads with just over a month to go until the Portland Timbers’ regular-season opener March 7.

Either the league joins the NFL, the NBA, MLB and the NHL in recognizing that free agency in some form is a must--or risk a strike that could derail the league’s growth plans at the outset of a new eight-year TV contract.

Two decades since the league’s beginnings, MLS remains resolute that it can’t have free agency for players despite the fact that other pro sports leagues in this country flourished after each allowed free agency.

And why wouldn’t the league take that stance when its average player salary is $213,000, which according to this analysis ranks MLS 21st among world soccer leagues (MLS just gets nosed out by Greece, remarkable when you consider that country’s brutally tough economic times, to put it mildly). 

Yes, $213,000 is a lot of money for the average American. But U.S. soccer poobahs must be laughing all the way to the bank when the average player salary is just short of $5 million in the NBA; about $3.8 million in MLB; $2.6 million in the NHL and above $2 million in the NFL.

And the $213,000 average salary masks the fact that the league minimum salary is $36,500—or roughly 150 percent of the federal poverty level if the player happens to be raising two kids with his significant other.

As with all player-owner battles in sports, it’s not a question of players starving. Rather, it is a question of who deserves a bigger piece of the revenue pie.

On one hand, you have the MLS commissioner saying his league’s teams combined to lose $100 million. 

On the other, somebody must be making money when soccer’s collective regular-season attendance last year came in at more than 90 percent stadium capacity and increased collectively by nearly 3 percent league-wide. 

Further, the Sports Business Journal has calculated that the league’s new eight-year deal with ESPN, Fox Sports and Univision will increase the league’s annual TV haul fivefold to $90 million.

In essence, the league’s stance is that after 20 years, MLS remains too fragile to put its teams and players in any form of a semi-free market where players could become free agents and seek employment with other teams after their contract expires.

Baseball’s Curt Flood swung the first hammer against the archaic notion that players were stuck with their teams in perpetuity – the reserve clause -- when he famously challenged baseball’s troglodytes 45 years ago. Similar, if less dramatic battles happened as well in the NFL, NBA and NHL—all with owners screaming free agency would kill the game. Instead, all four sports flourished.

So here’s the big-league question that MLS owners must ask themselves: can they weather the kind of strike that the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB endured in labor negotiations past? 

One suspects that MLS management looks at sold-out stadiums of passionate and rabidly loyal fans in Portland and elsewhere, and answers that question “Sure.” They’re probably right that little could damage that attendance.

But here’s another thing for management to look at: dismal network TV ratings that indicate how little MLS has engaged the broader U.S. population outside cities with a franchise. For example, an average national regular-season telecast in 2014 on ESPN 2 attracted about the same number of viewers as residents of Lubbock, Texas. An average national regular-season telecast on the NBC Sports Network attracted fewer viewers than the population of Eugene. 

If they think those pathetic TV figures will survive a long strike right when the new TV deal was set to begin, they’re crazy.

A native Oregonian, Hank Stern had a 24-year career in journalism, working for more than a decade as a reporter with The Associated Press in Oregon, New Jersey and Washington, DC. He worked seven years for The Oregonian as a reporter in east Multnomah County, Washington County and Portland’s City Hall. In 2005, he became Willamette Week’s managing news editor and worked there until 2011.

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