Graham Forgey on The problem with Major Leauge Soccer
Graham Forgey
The problem with Major Leauge Soccer
Claims and stances
Transcript
- 0:00 What's up, guys?
- 0:01 It's Graham.
- 0:02 Topic today is the MLS, the problem with Major League Soccer in America.
- 0:07 The fundamental problem with American soccer, unlike the the problem we can't catch up to Europe, is the MLS is unlike most sports leagues, like most sports leagues in the world, the MLS is one independent business.
- 0:20 MLS operates as a single company in which owners hold shares in the company MLS and they buy in to become owners.
- 0:28 The league office signs players, not the individual team.
- 0:30 This structure was designed to control costs and survive.
- 0:33 As the NWSL, the previous uh league to the MLS, died tragically because they overspent on players like Pele and George Bass and Franz Bachenbauer to get them to America to draw in the crowds, but they didn't have the finances to support it.
- 0:49 So what the MLS did was create this.
- 0:51 But the problem with this now is the MLS franchises are very valuable and could play the players, but now they have these rules set up that they can't.
- 0:59 The MLS acts as a monopoly power.
- 1:01 The league structure has been challenged in court as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
- 1:05 This players have argued it legally suppresses their wages by preventing teams from bidding against each other and with their services.
- 1:11 So corrupt.
- 1:12 And there's also a legal prison.
- 1:13 Courts have largely upheld the single entity model.
- 1:16 The reason that you can't conspire with yourself.
- 1:18 This legal shield allows the league to impose the salary casting roster rules that would be illegal in other contexts.
- 1:24 The way the MLS works is they have three designated players.
- 1:27 They can pay them any amount of money.
- 1:28 So, for example, inner Miami can pay Messi what he would normally get paid in Europe.
- 1:32 But the problem is after that, the rest of players are salaries are vastly cut.
- 1:38 So leaving many top players to leave America.
- 1:41 However, my solution would be to dismantle this salary cap like normal soccer, which has no salary cap, and allow American teams such as Atlanta United to compete with Europe with Europe's top talents like Real Madrid to get better players to make it more entertaining in America.
- 1:58 The last problem with MLS is the promotion relegation.
- 2:01 Every other soccer league in the world has promotion and relegation to incentivize teams to do good to do good to get better and teams who do bad worse.
- 2:09 This structure is the primary barrier to the US adopting the global soccer standard and a promotion and relegation where worst teams in division are demoted to lower division and the best who are promoted.
- 2:18 Owners who paid massive expansion fees, this the I mean this is the problem.
- 2:21 The owners, like I said, they buy into the MLS.
- 2:23 So they don't want to buy in, and then the year later the team sucks, they leave.
- 2:27 That's the main problem.
- 2:28 The most recent team, San Diego SC, for example, paid 500 million dollars to get into the MLS.
- 2:33 So have a guaranteed spot in the top division.
- 2:36 And if they risked if they had the risk of going down to a lower division, there'd be no point.
- 2:42 This creates a philosophical clash between the American franchise model and the global soccer tradition.
- 2:48 This raises the debate for me.
- 2:50 Does the single entity structure, which is arguably save professional soccer in the US, otherwise that we would have just been tumbling down the same problem we had before in the other league?
- 2:59 But does it now unfairly restrain player wages and stifle competition in the name of investor security and in turn hurt the fans, such as myself who want to see better soccer and better soccer comes with better players and better players have to pay more.
- 3:12 Thank you.