A Strike in MLS Seems Terrible but Inevitable

In most professional sports, labor disputes are between millionaire players and billionaire owners. In MLS, there may be billionaire owners, but they aren’t making that money on their soccer product. And the millionaire players? Maybe five of them exist in MLS. This labor dispute more closely resembles a teacher’s union than one of the four major sports in this country.↵↵So with that on their side, after talks with the league passed yet another deadline yesterday without a deal, the players have started to funnel out word that they appear ready to strike. ↵

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↵↵⇥⇥“During the last year, Major League Soccer has been negotiating with the MLS Players Union on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. The current CBA expires today and the Players Union would not agree to a further extension.⇥↵⇥↵⇥⇥“We have told the Players Union that the League does not plan to lock out the players and we are prepared to begin the season under the current CBA while we continue to bargain to reach agreement on a new CBA.⇥↵⇥

↵⇥⇥↵⇥↵⇥⇥“We have listened to the issues raised by the MLS Players Union and the League has made detailed proposals that have addressed these issues, including in the areas of economics, guaranteed contracts, options and the ability of a player to move to another MLS Club if he is released by his current Club. These proposals, which represent substantial changes from the current CBA, will significantly increase our spending and provide substantially more rights to the players.” ⇥↵⇥

↵↵For two paragraphs, the release is a standard boilerplate statement from the league: the Players Union would not agree, we don’t plan to lock them out, and so on. But the last line in this statement is what has always been the sticking point – “increase our spending and provide substantially more rights to the players.” Yes, that’s exactly what the players want, and what the league will need to do in order to keep the players happy and the league as strong as it’s been. ↵

↵↵Around 5 p.m. on Thursday, SI’s Grant Wahl posted a comment from LA Galaxy player rep Chris Klein that states, “There are no plans to strike at the moment.” Yet Steve Goff at WashingtonPost.com – which featured an interesting take on the situation earlier in the day – has a statement from Bob Foose, the executive director of the union who said, in part:↵

↵↵⇥⇥“While we expect that negotiations with MLS will resume at some point, there simply hasn’t been enough progress made in the negotiations to date to warrant an extension of the old agreement. We have advised our players to keep working for the time being, but as of Friday they will be doing so without a CBA. We are completely committed to forging real changes to the way MLS players are treated.”↵↵Jeff Carlisle has a very detailed piece for ESPN that suggests the union has no choice but to strike:↵↵⇥⇥A strike is about the only card the union has left to play if the players are serious about fighting for what they believe in. Given the owners’ deep pockets, and the relatively shallow financial resources of the players, management has long possessed more leverage in these negotiations. But the thought of Philadelphia’s debut game or the opening of Red Bull Arena being canceled, or worse, fielded with replacement players, might be enough to drive both sides toward finding a mutually agreeable solution.↵↵Unfortunately, he’s right. The players want free agency, and as Carlisle points out, that’s the last thing the league will give up. See, giving up free agency pits teams against one another for players, thus driving up salaries. And more than that, when teams are competing against one another on the business side as well as on the pitch, it’s very hard to justify the league’s single-entity status. Losing that could be far more damaging to the league than any strike.↵