The NASL Player's Union

Looking back at how salaries worked in the NASL

The NASL Player's Union

I’ve had money on the mind lately.

We looked a few days ago at how the structure of Major League Soccer works. I naturally was interested in looking at how the financial structure of its precursor, the North American Soccer League, worked.

The NASL was a mess, as many of you know. However, its underlying structure was based on the same National League (baseball) principles that the MLS is based on.

When you’ve got a system that is monopolistic and favors the owners by its very nature, of course, you wind up with trouble when the players try to unionize.

And that is precisely what happened in the summer of 1977:

From The Province (Vancouver, BC), August 4, 1977, page 2

Why unionize? Well, it turns out that the major foreign players were making huge salaries at the time, while domestic players were making very small salaries.

Now, the biggest problem that the union had with the NASL was not salary discrepancies — not at first, at least. The biggest problem was a lack of union recognition on the part of the owners.

No recognition meant no collective bargaining agreement — and that meant that there was absolutely nothing the players could do about the salary inequities.

And that lack of recognition led in the end to a player’s strike, which began on April 13, 1979.

The players weren’t exactly in solidarity with each other, by the way. You can see that in this Washington Post article:

From Washington Post, April 14, 1979, pages E1 and E6

Now, as you can imagine, the threat of domestic players striking did not exactly fill the owners with fear. And that lack of solidarity led to a disaster.

From The Philly Soccer Page comes this account — the best one I’ve seen:

In the end, the issue was never resolved. The NASL went out of business before it could reach a resolution with the players:

Now, the truth is that the NASL did not fold because of the players strike. Rather, it folded because ownership was unable to resist the temptation to spend money it did not have on big name players from abroad — many of whom were already past their primes. The constant roster turnovers meant that fans couldn’t identify with local teams, and, in retrospect, it’s clear that the NASL was in freefall as early as 1981.

But it’s interesting to see just how little power the players had in the NASL. And it makes for an interesting comparison with the current MLS.