The net result of Dan, Bill and yours truly spraying varying amounts of ordinance in a variety of directions was this:
1) The soft cappers are back pedaling on the $10mm number per team - everyone agrees that it is too high after having the numbers look them square in the face.
2) Duane admitted in the comment thread to Bill's post that what he really fears is that Toronto's attendance will go down without victories. Therefore something must be done to bring their massive gate receipts to bear on the rest of the league.
3) Loney pointed out that there have always been ways around the cap as it is, and that no matter how high you raise it the rank and file MLS players won't see that money.
4) Knight throws out some more suggestions - eliminating the DP cap hit, raise salaries for rookies, or give each team a second DP (without the cap hit).
Knight also reiterated that he wants to lower the amount of parity in MLS:
I see a disconnect in my argument now. I was hoping the salary jumps would be discretionary, on a team-by-team basis, as they are in the current Designated Player arrangement. Clearly, it’s not that simple, and the idea needs some tinkering.
The idea here is to try to end this endless parity. We’re not talking about enough cash to eliminate most teams from any chance of winning before the season starts. I deplore that everywhere else in the world. I certainly don’t want to see it in MLS.
But we’re losing a lot of drama. This league needs a powerhouse team (or two, or three) everyone else can get angry about. The L.A. Galaxy would be there right now if landing David Beckham had translated into winning back-to-back MLS Cups.
So let's start by taking a look at the concept of parity. It's not helpful to think of parity as a boolean, either existing or not. Parity is better described as an axis, with teams distributed along that axis according to their skill. The parity band is easy to conceptualize because we implicitly think of it every time we look at the standings. If we want to get really tricky we could even plot teams out on a Cartesian coordinate system, with one axis corresponding to position in the table, and one axis corresponding to revenue or brand strength.
Every sports league has a parity band - if the band is too narrow, the perception is that "there are no good teams" but if the band is too wide, then the league becomes uninteresting as certain teams always win and certain teams always lose.
I'm already on record as saying that I think the current parity band in MLS is almost perfect. Some teams tend to win, some tend to lose, but there's plenty of opportunity for smartly run teams to win the Shield and MLS Cup. At the same time, teams like LA and New York have been given behind the scenes advantages since the league began. Personally, I think those need to end.
In terms of a powerhouse team people can get angry about, I think the Columbus Crew are doing a fantastic job in that role this season. Duane even argued they should be moved! And you know what? DC, Chicago, and even New England on their day are total and complete assholes. If you really want to read about the slippery definition of a super club, and why or why not MLS should have them, I point you at this thread, but I honestly don't have the energy to raise the intellectual level of that discussion beyond saying I think things are fine the way they are.
Widening the parity band is a solution in search of a problem. As Bill Archer points out, most of the people pushing a widening of that band are fans in bigger markets frustrated by their own sense of self-important grandeur, which immediately compromises their contention that "it's for the good of the league". The self interest in trying to rig MLS so teams with bigger gate receipts can dominate is transparently obvious. Ben claims in the comments to Bill's post that the idea "walks the streets of every MLS town" but to me that's a gross mischaracterization of a nutter like pc4th filling a couple BigSoccer threads with nonsense.
I'm not against raising the salary cap or increasing rosters. I think both should happen at some point, but that growth will in all likelihood be conservative. The only thing raising the cap will do is create wage inflation across the board, and MLS is still at a point where it is extremely concerned about controlling costs. If the new CBA agreement had bigger rosters, two new teams, and a $500,000 cap increase with the DP rule in place, that's an annual increase in salaries of $11 million (about 25-33% of the current spending on players), not including what gets spent on DPs. In my mind that's plenty big, and looking at that number, I'd be amazed if the owners went along with that.
Regarding the argument that fans of teams that draw well will be unhappy that their clubs can't spend with abandon, all the league needs to do is point at the DP rule - a team can even trade for two of those players! Someone pointed out on BigSoccer that LA didn't suck because they had three max salary guys, they sucked because one of those guys played terrible, another just ok, and the rest of the team was awful. And let's face it, with a team like TFC acquiring so many draft picks and allocations in their short existence, it's hard to argue that MLS isn't doing everything it can to get a decent team up there as it is, salary cap be damned.
Quite frankly, the fact that Toronto and Seattle have no problems drawing fans with mediocre teams is a great argument *against* letting those teams put a larger percentage of their revenues toward player salaries. Why should the league piss that money away on aging foreigners when it could be reinvested in league infrastructure and used to recoup some of the massive costs incurred by the guys who started the league up, especially when things are going great at the gate the way it is? Single entity or not, those are the last teams that the rules should be tweaked to favor.
Fake Sigi out.
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