Not again: Monthly BA Duane Strange & the Salary Cap

This is why I don't subscribe to 24th Minute. Every time I go over there I see something that makes me want to stab my eyes out. Most of the Canadian blogs, actually. Which is kind of sad. I mean, most of them can write. It's just what's going on up their heads that's the problem.

Anyway, BA Duane with a rumination on the follies of the New York franchise, with commentary by yours truly:

Just as Canadians hate that everything here is Toronto focused (and, say, that USL-1 championship final is overshadowed by TFC's attempt to sneak into the playoffs), Americans don't much like to have it pointed out that it's important to have a presence in the New York market. That doesn't make it any less true though.

What? I mean, I'm sure there's that *one guy*, maybe this guy, who thinks that, but who in their right mind has ever been opposed to having a team in New York? I would wager that American baseball fans in general are upset about the New York Yankees having a huge unfair advantage over other teams. But I don't think anyone's opposed to an actual soccer team or two in the city.

Since much of the sports media in the U.S. is focused on NYC, it is not helpful at all that the Red Bulls are a punch line.

Honestly, that team will continue to be a punch line so long as they are named after a punch mixer. Although not having won anything in their history doesn't help either.

If the league is going to do everything in its power to force parity you can't make New York be good. Maybe a loosening up of the academy rules would give N.Y. a slight advantage over less populated areas of the U.S. but that would not likely be enough on its own.

Yeah, that happened. And MLS letting New York sign players for outrageous sums of money even before the designated player rule. And giving Alexi Lalas the resources to make it a "superclub". Nevermind 14 years of outrageous rent at Giants Stadium. Ok, so tipping the scales hasn't worked out.

Obviously, Bill, the league will survive just fine without a major presence in the N.Y. market, but can it thrive?

What the hell does a Bill Archer strawman have to do with this?

Although the NASL eventually collapsed under its own weight, the existence of the Cosmos is what gave it a few glory years. Finding a way to create sustainable Cosmos is vital to MLS if it ever wants to break through to the next level.

Oh, I see. We're back to the salary cap/superclub thing you got destroyed on. Or something.

As an aside, I find it interesting from a trivial perspective that Toronto will be playing in the last ever game at Giants Stadium, which was once, undeniably, the Mecca of northern, North American soccer. Combine that with the fact that the Toronto Blizzard were one of two teams involved in the last ever NASL game played and you see just how ingrained Toronto and Canada is to the history of U.S. soccer.

1) Yes, your perspective is trivial.
2) Giants Stadium is a building absolutely *no one* (except, apparently, Ives, because it reminds him of getting paid) will be sad to see finally excluded from the league for a number of reasons.
3) Northern, North American Soccer? You've been reading too much Richard Whittall.
4) The Toronto/NY 2009 Finale in a nasty, expensive, empty bowl is hardly comparable to an NASL championship game.
5) That NASL game was the one where Toronto Blizzard fans broke through barriers and invaded the field when their team didn't win:



5 i) Some things never change, do they?
5 ii) So glad stuff like that is ingrained in the history of US Soccer. Quite frankly, I could do without it.

Not that the isolationists will ever see it that way, but they are a dying breed anyway, so...

We’re in this together whether we like it or not. Call it a soccer thing.

Isolationists? Dying breed? In this together? That last bit makes more sense in the light of Duane's post from the beginning of October revisiting the salary cap issue we so thoroughly debated:

Unfortunately, the debate has often become as much about flinging insults at those that disagree with you than it has been about actually talking about the issue. Whether it's my buddy Bill or his sock puppet friend FakeSigi it seems to be easier to just call someone an idiot than it is to articulate why the league's fans should be happy with the status quo.

Since BA calls me Bill's sock-puppet, I suppose I should link to it in the first Fake Sigi Unmasked post, but whatever. Clearly, I've referred to Duane as an idiot on a number of occasions, but never in the context of the salary cap debate, unless you consider a cold, methodically constructed argument to be such a thing.

Anyway, Duane's post is filled with straw man arguments (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find them all), and his ultimate vision is that fans of the original MLS teams are against raising the salary cap, fans of new teams are for it, therefore, as more teams enter the league, the new owners will out vote the old and raise the salary cap to the point where the the parity band is increased sufficiently so that a few teams can dominate the league every year.

I hope my readers can already see the problems with Duane's vision.

To start with, I've never been against raising the salary cap. And when Duane calls for a salary cap of about $3 million a team:

The $10 million figure that's out there is likely about $7 million to high.

That's shockingly close to what I think is appropriate, even if it's higher than what we're likely to see from the next collective bargaining agreement. In other words, we have almost full capitulation from Duane on how much the salary cap should be raised.

What I have been against is a salary cap that blows a massive hole in MLS's cost structure (the first proposals were a $50mm-$100mm league-wide increase in salaries) without bringing in any more revenue, or that introduces a significantly wider parity band. If you double or triple the MLS wage structure right now, yeah, the league has a real chance at folding, and that's what people like Ben were advocating with complete disregard as to the impact such a cap might have on other teams or the league as a whole.

I'm also against giving financial advantage to certain teams over others anymore than that already exists. It's not about being a fan of a small market team, it's about keeping the league interesting, financially stable, and on a consistent path of growth. Besides, the parity band will increase by default as more teams enter the league. As more teams are left out of the playoffs, there will be a greater distinction between teams that are bad and teams that are good.

Since Duane asks for a reason why fans should be happy with the status quo, I'm going to point right at this year's playoff race: going into the last weekend, 6 teams are competing for the last two playoff spots. Only two seeds have been decided. There's not one game on the docket that doesn't matter. And it's been that way for almost the last two months. Honestly, you'd rather have the same three teams at the top of the table every year over this? Not to mention the fact that questions about the league surviving have all but gone away, and now it's how fast can the league grow?

I'd say a gripping season endgame and an expanding, stable league are two very good reasons that the status quo is working well.

Another problem is BA's conflation of the fans of expansion teams with their owners when talking about who supports a higher salary cap. In my piece on parity, I point out how the owners of Toronto and Philly are in favor of a low, hard cap. Dave Checketts hasn't exactly been an advocate of more flexible spending beyond saying in the long term the salary cap will go up (duh). Who knows where Vancouver's owners or Merritt Paulson stand, but the fact that their wage structures are going septuple or octuple off the bat ( that's about $300,000 versus $2.4 million for the lazy) probably means they'll want to keep things in check for a while.

As for the fans, their views on the issues are influenced by more than what team they root for, but that doesn't mean they are all that relevant as to how a few billionaires decide to spend their money in this year's meetings.

Finally, when I write that a massive increase in the salary cap is a bad idea and/or won't happen, I'm not writing from a position of fear. I think MLS has a bright future and is doing really well compared to the dark days just after contraction. But there are ways to grow the league, and then there's wanting to raise the salary cap because your team doesn't make the playoffs. And no matter what imprecise rhetoric you couch it in, the latter is as progressive as Republican tax cut.

Fake Sigi out.