Dynamo Quiet in First Stage of Re-Entry Draft

If you don;t allow workers/players to move via free agency, this is the sort of ridiculousness you get. The absurd canard is that free agency hurts teams and leagues. It does not hurt teams and leagues. Free agency is actually one of the best innovations ever in the history of professional sports.

The problem is not free agency and never has been. The problem is not club expenditures. The problem is the uneven, unfair and unequal acquisition of club revenues. MLS has it compeletely backwards. You want to have a single entity system? Then have a single entity system for revenues. Spread all revenues equally among all of the teams, local broadcast, merch sales, national broadcast, ticket sales. Throw them all in a pot and divide all of the revenues equally among all of the teams. Give them all a level playing field.

Then when you introduce free agency as a means of player movement and contracts with a salary floor instead of a salary cap, you find out just which teams have good GMs/coaches/technical directors/personnel directors and which do not. Mandate a percentage of revenues per team that must be spent on player compensation. Make that the floor. If teams go waay beyond that, then they have to deal with the consequences, but if everyone is starting with the same resources, the need to be smart, to be competitive, solves that problem. And if the administration is truly that bad, then the league steps in.

This is a phenomenally simple model, and if MLS is to grow beyond the single entity model they have had so far, then flipping SE to ensure an equal allocation of base revenues instead of as a mechanism to restrain players’ salaries and team expenditures will be crucial to that growth.

Free agency does not produce wild expenditures. Bad management and administration does that. When you take a look at sports leagues along the economies of scale, then a $1 million (or more) footballer makes perfect sense.

We’re not talking about moral equivalency here along the lines of “How absurd that a teacher makes this and a pro athlete makes THIS.” That is a completely different argument. What we’re talking about is how to develop a relatively free, well-regulated market for player resources. Players are highly-skilled, independent contractors and the market for their services should be open to allow them to market those skills to greatest effect. This draws more people to the profession, to the market, which is a long-term guarantor of market health. Simply, free agency brings more and better players to the sport, which grows the sport and the league.

I honestly believe that the US will never develop into an upper echelon footballing nation until MLS makes this sort of transition. Having a healthy league is not enough, and MLS is definitely a healthy and growing league. But what is needed now is to take that next step.