Why The MLS Is Different
Diving into the structure of Major League Soccer
Why The MLS Is Different
I made a video several months ago about managing in the MLS in Football Manager:
I’ve been meaning to come back to some of the ideas in this video for a deeper look. And it’s about time now.
Major League Soccer is substantially different from every European football league. In fact, I believe the general structure of Major League Soccer is different from every football league in the world. While the MLS is not the only league in the world to feature no relegation or promotion, it is, to my knowledge, the only league in the world in which all contracts are owned by the league itself. This is how Wikipedia explains this phenomenon:
We’ll talk about Fraser v. Major League Soccer and its implications in a later post. The important thing to understand here, though, is that players sign contracts with the league in a legal sense, and not with individual teams.
That helps explain a lot of the wacky things that happen in MLS saves if you aren’t careful. If you run afoul of registration rules, for example, your players might automatically enter waivers — or might even be dropped from your squad automatically. And, unfortunately, a lot of this is quite realistic.
But where does this structure come from?
The truth is that this monopolistic structure is a very old concept in American sports. It dates back to the 1870s, when baseball’s National League was formed.
The formation of the National League actually mirrors the formation of the Football League in a number of ways. Baseball had a National Association of Base Ball Players as far back as 1857, or 6 years before the foundation of the Football Association in England. This loose association helped establish rules among the many amateur baseball clubs that existed throughout the United States, much the same way that the Football Association brought some semblance to the many school clubs that existed in England.
Both the National Association and the Football Association ran into problems when professionalism crept into the sport.
Professionalism was actually initially largely an American phenomenon. Baseball teams paid players under the table throughout the 1860s. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first fully professional club (to my knowledge) in all of world sport, directly challenging the concept of amateurism that was a hold over from the schoolyard days.
The National Association didn’t survive, unfortunately. It tried at first to distinguish between professional and amateur clubs, but wound up crashing. A second National Association was formed for professional teams in 1871, but this, too, suffered from the instability of member clubs and numerous financial and organizational issues.
The National League finally was formed in 1875. By nature, it was designed to be a legal monopoly: in other words, the league would grant “franchises” to certain owners, who would receive the exclusive right to professional baseball in certain geographic regions. This was the beginning of the notion of territorial rights (a concept that all American sports suffer from), and was a clear deviation from the European tradition of having fully independent clubs.
This, by the way, is a huge contrast to how the Football Association dealt with the problem of professionalism in the 1880s. When it formed, the Football League tried to work with the FA instead of against it. The Football League eventually merged with the rival Football Alliance (originally known as The Football Combination) in 1892, which gave birth to the promotion and relegation structure we know and love today.
If you’re interested — and if you want to look at original newspaper articles — check out my in-depth analysis on my baseball blog:
Major League Soccer exists in the same theoretical framework as the National League. Instead of being a collection of independent clubs, the league as a whole serves as the body of professional soccer in the United States. The league governs contracts, just as the NHL, NBA, NFL, and MLB do. This means that players who are transferred from one team to another keep the same contract, since this contract is with the league and not with the individual team.
This also means, of course, that the league is free to change the location of its franchises as it wishes. Such relocations are extremely rare in England (and, yes, I know all about Wimbledon and MK Dons), but are a constant threat in the United States. The monopolistic nature of these leagues means that the league has the ability to hold cities hostage, threatening to move teams to sunnier locations if cities don’t provide certain amenities — things like tax breaks, stadiums, parking facilities, and so on.
And, yeah, this is a pretty damning comment on the nature of American civic life. Countless commentors have noted that the American sport structure seems to run contrary to the free market principles the country is supposedly founded on. But this isn’t a political blog, of course.
What you need to understand about Major League Soccer before you start a save is that your team will not be completely independent. The salary structure is pretty much put in place, and the league will always take its chunk of flesh from whatever you do. For example, if you sell a player and make a large profit, the league will take a certain percentage of that profit and will share it with other teams in the league.
Major League Soccer is actually the most centrally controlled of American sports leagues, with the most aggressive salary system and the most complicated roster management rules.
Personally, I think all of this exists to the league’s detriment. However, there is a historical argument for this heavy handed central control, as we’ll get into when we compare the current structure with how the NASL worked.