The 2010 Major League Soccer season will begin on time after the league and its players union agreed to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement on Saturday. The sides agreed to a new five-year deal.
MLS commissioner Don Garber and MLS players union executive Bob Foose announced the deal in a conference call on Saturday.
Guaranteed contracts (details to come on how many), improved freedom of movement by players out of contract (not quite free agency) and "greatly improved compensation" for players.
The league will create a new Re-Entry Draft, where players out of contract will be able to be selected by new teams after the season. A very interesting development. Details on that should be interesting.
You can now start to party and get ready for the 2010 season.
That’ll never happen.
It’s better than the players being held hostage by their teams.
Fantastic to hear you’ve recently converted!
New England til I die! New England Til I die! I know I am, I’m sure I am, NEW ENGLAND TIL I DIE!
Can’t you just line item veto the parts of your taxes you don’t want to pay?
From a fan perspective:
Thank goodness we’re going to be able to watch top flight professional soccer…the rest is just details at this point.
Thank you Lord!!!
Great news!! I can finally make my plans to attend Red Bulls games in their brand new state-of-the-art stadium.
Frankly, I could not bear to think of the damage that a strike /lockout would have inflicted upon the league, players, owners and fans. We would all have faded into irrelevance. I am glad this was just a bad dream.
Time to move on …. for another 5 years.
Great news for MLS, glad the owners and players got an agreement in place.
BUT THE DRAMA ISN’T OVER. The league will never progress until it gets better attendance overall. Any club that can’t manage 15,000 fans a game should be relocated.
So here is the challenge. If your team falls under 15,000 fans, take it upon yourself to get people interested. Buy an extra season ticket and bring people to the games.
Chea brah!!!!!
A fantastic day for the beautiful game in this country.
Certainly, just another step in the on-going progression but a step in the right direction, never the less.
(meh to the “Re-Entry Draft” jargon but I’ll refrain…..a good day!)
like i wrote above. i think the reason is cause a draft prevents players from pitting one club against another for their services.
owners are trying to not get in bidding wars.
i think from a players perspective it would suck. Seems that if donovan had never resigned he’d go into a new draft. So he’d have no control. Thus his only options would be to resign with galaxy for whatever they offer. could be a cut rate deal. or risk ending up in like salt lake or columbus or toronto, no disrespect. but it’s cold small or canada and turf. None things landon seems to like a lot. But i think that’s why it’s done that way for the owners.
I guess lando has to stay with the galaxy…:(
yep people ignore the 40 million in expansion fees they are charging.
that’s actually not true. a salary cap means works to keep costs down. no matter what a player asks for they still get more then the salary cap and if you’ve got 23 men on a roster you can only get what’s available after paying the other 22 people. So there is always a constraint on costs. And though the contract is with the mls there’s nothing that says individual teams can’t compete to offer the best package. nothing more then that they don’t want to.
DP is a separate issue that isn’t dealt with the CBA
yeah exactly. the idea a free agency is to give the players some bargaining power to pick their own team. Good players can say nope i’m a star coming out of contract so you either need to pay me more or i’m going to go to the highest bidder. The draft idea doesn’t really do that. One, it doesn’t seem to affect a good player with time remaining on his contract but maybe it does. lets assume it does for the sake of argument. If seems that if Donovan came off contract he’d go into a draft and then if Columbus one he’d be forced to sign with columbus on nobody which pretty much defeats the point of free agency cause it doesn’t let the player go to the high bidder.
MLS clearly wants a sort of totalitarianish system where there are wage ceilings and no competion between teams for labor.
Personally i think this is actually bad because if i’m a foriegner trying to join the league i’m not coming if i’m going itno some draft or if they are retaining my rights. Everytime they’d have to break the rules like they did with beckham.
And if i’m a young player i can play well for my contract and when it ends i just have to hope i get a big contract from who ever get’s my draft lottery rights. They could easily say, “$75K” take it or leave it. I mean if you suck and are gonna be a mls journeyman your whole life maybe your fine with that. I wonder though if your a young 20 year old if you really want that. You could play 4 great years be a good prospect at 24 and get offered a nothing deal. The other thing is i think the current system gives the teams no incentive to improve. if they aren’t going to have to fight for the best players why not just coast wit mediocrity? And if i’m a player that’s not going to get rewarded for playing great with a fat contract what’s the incentive to improve? Who knows but if the players never want to compete for the signature of a player they seem to be saying they never want to be in the same league as top leagues the world over because if they did, sometime they’d have to be outbidding teams for the best players. So i think the longterm future of this league is pretty not much more of what it is right now.
Thank god. A strike would have seriously sucked. Right now, we are so close to the tipping point for both soccer in this country and the league. It’s great to see the progress consolidated.
I’m most curious to hear if this affects anything with the DP rule. I heard rumblings of the DP not counting against the cap, and also increasing the number of DPs per team to 2 with the possibility of trading for a third. Again, I’m not really sure if the CBA would even address this.
With further expansion, we need to open the purse strings a bit in order to gain/retain talent in our domestic league.
On a side note, I’m psyched for the Red Bull stadium opening today and this is coming from a Timbers fan…
She-ca-go-Fire clap clap clap clap clap clap
Salary budgets (not caps) are examined each year by the competition committee and raised or not raised based on their rulings, so it’s not a hard and fast # that’s going to stay static. I don’t imagine this year’s budget was raised much… Maybe up to $2.5M per club. Remember that also doesn’t include any money spent on DPs beyond max base salary and doesn’t include allocation $$$.
I also imagine that it was a 5-year deal with the ability to negotiate deal points throughout that 5 years, so I don’t believe the players screwed themselves.
I do think the league would have survived a strike. The owners were willing to let that happen. It was in the best interest of players, moreso than the owners, to get this deal done.
I am interested to know what the developmental contracts were raised to, league minimums and max on senior roster players??? Ives, any idea what those #s are now? Any idea if roster size, including any update on reserve teams/rosters, will change?
Thanks for the heads up, we almost wore the same shirt.
I haven’t even read the details…..
YYYYYYYEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS !
Here! Here! Give him that arm band and put him (up front) so he can score!
Sigi Sigi Sigi
AWESOME! The IRS just tore me a new one so it was nice to get some good news.
Estoy de acuerdo ELAC… VA chivas VA, a ve te a su estadio propio ahora!
Arriba LA GALAXY. (welcome back elac)
Thank God!
Gosh quit asking about the cap already. We will all know in a few days.
Thank goodness it’s over. Though this “Re-Entry Draft” deal seems very kooky. Leave it to the MLS.
Just weird.
GO RSL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can finally get excited about the season!
Sorry wilyboy, your Screaming Eagle is stuck in my GALAXY.
You will be united in your loss in LA!
Ha, I’m LA till I die, I’m LA till I die, I am I am I KNOW I am I’m LA till I DIE!
As soon as Donovan went to the CBA meetings this week everything got resolved. Everything he touches right now is turning into gold. Let’s hope he can keep this string of good luck going into the world cup. (there is some sarcasm intended in this statement)
Now, who thinks that Donovan is ready to be given the armband and lead the National team to victory?
I would like to echo all of the comments supporting the agreement. It will preserve current gains and set the stage for future growth. Now, where can I sign up for MLS fantasy?
How so?
DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT THE SALARY CAP HAS BEEN RAIED TO, AND WHEN IT WILL GO INTO AFFECT? SOME TEAMS MIGHT HAVE TO MONEY TO SPEND IF IT GOES UP THIS YEAR
Gracias a Dios!
Vamos Chivas!
Thank the soccer gods
They have a very low, hard salary cap. Free agency wouldn’t have impacted a team’s salary roster — not to mention the fact that MLS teams aren’t even responsible for paying the salaries — that’s on the league to do. The league is making plenty of money with expansion fees.
LOL. When I read the article with RSL owner Dave Checketts and the AEG guy for the Galaxy saying how important it was for a deal to come through, I actually said yesterday that hopefully when I get home from class, they’d have agreed to a deal. And guess what, they did. Happy for the MLS.
That’s the real issue there — that, and the seemingly endless options that clubs have on the contracts. If the CBA cuts back on the number of options years, then the players will be able to move abroad more freely. And, they should get a % cut of the transfer/loan fee, like other players around the world do.
Great news! But without the threat of a job action, believe me, nothing would have changed. It seems to me that a five year deal is way too long though, and a three year contract should have been in order. Let’s get this show on the road.
They didn’t really get everything what they wanted. They wanted free agency for veterans — that was priority 1A or 1B. They didn’t get anything even close to that.
Huzzah! While we’re waiting for the details, so far this seems to me to be exactly the solution that I was hoping for – enough to start down the path and satisfy both sides, but not everything under the sun.
They may have been using the term “free agency” but they weren’t after FA as we think of–they only wanted the right to find work when out of contract or released, which there is now a mechanism for. I don’t see it as caving as much as a true concession by both sides.
Good news. Hopefully the deal works for BOTH sides.
great stuff
Awesome. Glad to hear it. Just as the league is gaining momentum. I’m excited for this year. I’m a recent convert. NFL football is my main sport. But I cheering for MLS. I think it becoming more fun with the increase in fan support. Looking forward to a good year with Philly on line and Portland and Van. It’s nice to see another sport grow in this country. Now shut up all you haters. Soccer is moving inland off the beachhead. Wooo!!!
Well, why should the player not want a decent transfer fee to be accepted when they have waived their right to get part of the transfer money? Players that go on a transfer keep some of that money unlike MLS players, that is disrespectful in my opinion.
Who are Sounders?
Never heard of ’em.
yessssssssss