OPINION: MLS of Old is Gone

League's Initial Vision Tainted with Big Signings

December 4, 2007

By Emlyn Lewis

I love MLS. I do. And I am very grateful that I have a professional soccer league to watch (and opine about).

But the league I fell in love with has changed.

Gone are the early days when Sunil Gulati and a handful of other men conceived of the league's single entity structure. In my mind the meetings that brought MLS into existence are something akin to Marx and Engels sitting in the Café de la Régence in Paris dreaming of a perfect world, in this case a perfect league, bringing together a pool of common economic resources and funding a league in which all shared the risks and all shared the rewards, in which small-market teams were protected from the brute power of the financial strength of big-market teams and in which parity provided a thrill for every fan at every game, on any given Sunday, as the old saw goes.

Even in those days though, the league's most egalitarian principles seemed carved in Jell-O. A fan (and a journalist) could never quite tell how the murky business of player allocations worked. Players came and went, and very little of the coming and going made any sense. Still, it was a quirkiness I could tolerate. The Revolution just lost and lost and lost then, and it was difficult to blame anyone other than team management for that. They hadn't figured out how to work the MLS system yet. They hadn't hired Gulati to help them pull the strings.

MLS thought Landon Donovan would become the poster boy for US Soccer.

When Doug Logan, the league's first commissioner, yielded way to Don Garber, there was some promise that the rules would become clearer, more codified, more transparent to supporters, and briefly they did. During that time, the Revolution began to transform themselves from perennial doormat to perennial playoff team. With Gulati's help, they began to be able to take advantage of the system. For proof, think back to the year Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny left the league. When their players were parsed out afterward, the Revolution picked up Steve Ralston, Mamadou Diallo, Jim Rooney, Alex Piñeda Chacon and Carlos Llamosa, a mother lode of talent that never would have come under the guidance of the previous regime.

That was a time when a conscientious fan with too much time on his hands could thrash out what each team in the league was capable of doing player-wise by estimating where a club were in relation to the salary cap. Then Landon Donovan broke the system.

Widely believed to be the young American star who could sell soccer to the slobbering masses, the league agreed to pay Donovan more than the maximum salary of $380K. Slowly but surely exceptions were made for other players, the rules bent just enough to retain some semblance of a cap, while making funds available for players who the league deemed valuable from a marketing perspective.

This is where they started to lose me.

If Pelé couldn't sell soccer to the ugly American, then Landon Donovan, Clint Mathis, Eddie Johnson, etc. doesn't have a snowball's chance in South Florida.

Fast forward to the announcement that David Beckham is leaving Real Madrid for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Incidentally, that's like me leaving my wife for Danny DeVito. It's funny to think about, but it's not something that happens in a world still governed by the laws of physics.

After all the hullaballoo about Beckham making $250M dollars over five years passed, the simple truth of his $5M annual salary had to be integrated into the thing the league once called a salary cap and wage structure. To accomplish that feat, MLS made the Designated Player Rule (most often called the Beckham Rule), which basically stated that a club could choose one player and pay them whatever they felt like out of their own pocket. Cute, huh?

So Beckham came to Hollywood. Claudio Reyna AND Juan Pablo Angel went to NY (choosing one in the current scheme means choosing as many as you want as long as you're footing the bill), and Denilson went and jogged his fat ass around in Dallas for a while. Other teams opted not to splash the cash, the Revolution and Houston Dynamo, the league's two best teams, among them.

Of course, the Galaxy have Donovan on their books still, so they've already got two players (and maybe more) over the maximum salary, but HEY PRESTO! TADA! just after MLS Cup this year, the MLS Board of Governors decided to "grandfather" the old over-max salary players into the new system with no penalty for the clubs already spending, in the case of the Galaxy, more than five times the old salary cap.

Now, let us set aside for half-a-minute the efficacy of spending all that money. For their roughly $10M in payroll, the Galaxy didn't even make the playoffs this year, despite the fact that the league office heavily weighted their schedule to allow for the maximum number of games to be played with Beckham on the pitch, an accommodation made for no other club.

Let's just get back to the issue of fairness. No case can be made for the fairness of the current MLS player acquisition rules. None. Don't even try. Don't email me with half-baked justifications or even casual references to long term investment in the growth of the league.

All of that smacks of nothing other than panic and desperation. Not happy with the slow and steady growth of attendance numbers or TV ratings, the people with the money finally cried out for a silver bullet, the single stroke that would put butts in the seats (welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Beckham!) and give them some return on their investment. Where once Marx and Engels toiled away in relative obscurity to create a fair and balanced playing field for rich and poor alike (read: New York and Columbus), Adam Smith has at last intruded to crush that vision under the heel of his expensive Adidas leather boots.

A league that set out to avoid the mistakes that led to the bankruptcy of the NASL, has now embraced the NASL way.

I still love MLS. I still love to sit in the stands in Foxboro, rain or shine, to suffer with my team. But, if I'm honest, this is no longer a league I really like. We've become the joke that every Eurosnob always believed we were, substituting money and gimmickry for culture and tradition and a pure passion for the game. Maybe the passion will endure through the Beckham years. Maybe the league's money men will come to their senses, or perhaps it will all go the way of the Cosmos and the Rowdies and the Teamen, which is to say straight into Leon Trostky's "ash heap of history."

Emlyn Lewis can be reached at emlynlewis@comcast.net.

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