UPDATE: The Associated Press released some details of the new five year deal signed between MLS and players shortly after 1:00 PM EST today:

The union leader Bob Foose said that a majority of players would receive guaranteed contracts for the first time and that there would be increased player rights within the league when contracts expired…“Players will have greater rights at the expiration of their agreements, but they will not be free agents within the league,” Garber said.  Instead, there will be a re-entry draft for players whose contracts end or options are declined. Few details were made available during the call.

Replace "transit" with "MLS players" and you get the idea

News broke quickly broke over the Associated Press this morning that there is a near agreement on a five year deal between the Major League Soccer and the players’ union, as the league and player representatives have scheduled a press teleconference today at 1:00 pm EST:

Major League Soccer and its players called a joint news conference for Saturday and were near agreement on a five-year contract that would avoid a strike scheduled for next week, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press.

At this point there is no word on any concessions the league may have granted to players, although some on Twitter are already speculating it will involve some loosening of restrictions placed on waived players.   All Pitch Invasion can tell you with confidence right now is that some quarters of the MLS blogosphere are no doubt already beginning their lengthy “I told you so’s” based on their various predictions about the likelihood of a work stoppage, and that this soccer blogger is thankful it will be another five wonderful years before I have to write about any of this ever again.

Quick Hits

• EPL Talk provides some interesting tidbits from the lawsuit filed against Google and YouTube by Viacom and the Premier League.  While both sides have defensible legal arguments, as more and more underground video highlights providers pop up and viewers flock to illegal live streams to watch games, a massive lawsuit filed over copyright infringement in 2007 over five second vids on YouTube seems to underline the futility of challenging Internet copyright violation via legal means.
• The Scottish FA chief executive Gordon Smith opposes cordoning off certain SPL and Scotland fixtures for over-the-air broadcasters like the BBC.  Smith: “We certainly feel that competition, in terms of the broadcasting rights, is what brings in the best value; the required money in order to fund all the other initiatives you have in your game.  If it becomes a listed event, it means there would be a big drop in the funds for the football association and that would reflect in terms of what we can do for the game here.”
• All hail the “not rich, but comfortable” Sepp Blatter, King of FIFA: “Sepp Blatter has tightened his grip on Fifa after forestalling the challenge of his only probable rival for the organisation’s presidency. The accompanying announcement that the governing body’s annual turnover had broken the $1bn barrier for the first time only served to increase Blatter’s security.”  João Havelange would be proud.

A panoramic view of Hungary's national stadium in Budapest.

Photo credit: Ryan Hubbard on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Big Story

The commercial and marketing success of UEFA’s Champions League since its launch in 1992, with its final now the most watched annual sporting event globally surpassing the Super Bowl, has spawned imitators by FIFA confederations around the world.

We have the AFC Champions League in Asia, launched in 2002;  we have the CAF Champions League in Africa, launched in 1997; we have the OFC Champions League in Oceania, launched in 2007; and we have the CONCACAF Champions League in North and Central America (and the Caribbean), branded as such in 2008.

The only confederation that hasn’t renamed its premier international club tournament as a “Champions League” is South America’s CONMEBOL, which of course has retained the Copa Libertadores, founded in 1960. It hasn’t done so for the simple reason that the tournament is already a success; albeit not as lucrative as Europe’s equivalent. The other confederations have all tried to copy the success of allowing in more teams to the champions’ tournament and giving it a snazzy new name.

The most recent effort, CONCACAF’s, has a problem. All four teams in the semi-finals this year are from Mexico (UNAM Pumas, Pachuca, Cruz Azul and Toluca). Meantime, in UEFA’s Champions League, six different nations are represented in the final eight. Now, UEFA’s showpiece has not always been a brilliant exhibition of the continent’s diversity; England has had four representatives at this stage in each of the previous two years. The institution of the Champions League in Europe itself has been a blow to smaller nations, a fact recognised by UEFA with their reorganisation of the qualification process to benefit countries outside England, Germany, Spain and Italy.

But in the CONCACAF Champions League last year as well, Mexico provided three of the four semi-finalists as well and both finalists. Even the final iteration of the CONCACAF Champions Cup in 2008 before it was renamed the Champions League saw both Mexican qualifiers reach the final. This should have been a sign that CONCACAF was not ready for a “Champions League” that allowed in more qualifiers from the dominant country. It has simply entrenched Mexican dominance, especially with MLS still unable or unwilling to prioritise the tournament.

The CONCACAF Champions League may be making more money now; Mexican television will be enjoying their national hegemony. But for countries in the rest of the region, the chances of their champions progressing in the tournament have become slimmer, and that’s a blow to the development of club football around the confederation.

Quick Hits

• Is indoor soccer dead, asks Kenn Tomasch?
• MLS labor negotiations enter extra-time. Fingers crossed, right?

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Programme credit: the excellent Footysphere.

A few weeks ago, following our piece on Man City’s innovative online work, I was tipped off to a website in beta being built by Sheffield Wednesday’s web team that is one of a kind as an official club production in England: a social networking site that gives fans a forum, the ability to blog, upload photos and videos, make “friends” and create groups.

Unlike Manchester City’s expensive effort, this was built by a Championship club at a much smaller cost, and is an interesting experiment in how clubs can use social media to reach out to fans and build community online.

It’s called Our Wednesday, and we talked to one of the men behind it, James Hargreaves of Sheffield Wednesday.

1) Tell me about the thinking behind the launch of Our Wednesday, the club’s new online social community site. Why was it felt important to create this for fans? What can it do that the main official site doesn’t?

JH: To set up a bit of background – when internet entrepreneur Lee Strafford (founder of UK ISP PlusNet) took over as Chairman of Sheffield Wednesday just over a year ago, online messaging and functionality was identified as one of the ways to effectively communicate to and involve supporters whilst providing convenience for them as customers.

The first step in this was to create a useful online retail environment, where fans can quickly and easily buy merchandise and tickets. The club set about creating a functional portal where supporters can buy their tickets online, print at home and scan their barcode on it for entry on the turnstiles, creating real value for the club and convenience for the fan.

The next step was then to create an ‘official’ community. Online engagement had been neglected by the club’s previous management team and there was a real desire to interact with and involve fans again. Sheffield Wednesday has gone back to its roots of being a ‘community’ club – as evidenced with the gifting of the shirt sponsorship space to The Children’s Hospital in Sheffield. Online engagement is one of the keys to getting supporters re-engaged with their club.

There are plenty of unofficial forums that do a superb job of allowing discussion space for supporters and Sheffield Wednesday have an extremely active online audience through those channels. However, due to the problems surrounding the club over several years a lot of mistrust had built up between – and even within – those communities. We sought a way to counter this and create something different but ‘official’ to begin the long process of getting the majority of online community back into a trusting and productive wider online community.

OurWednesday.com was built mainly as a social networking site to create not only a bond between the club and its fans, but also strengthen bonds between the fans themselves. At the very heart of OurWednesday are positive messages – the ability to add friends, the ability to create groups and find commonality, the ability to share memories with photos and videos, the ability to have discussion – and to have your say – with other supporters and people from the club itself. It’s less about just shouting messages at people via news on an official site and more about involving the supporters in the goings on.

The main difference between OurWednesday.com and the official site is that conversation. The official site is a formal place to go for all your news and information, whereas OurWednesday.com is then about informally discussing all those things and more; thus creating an involvement, buy-in, ‘stickiness’ and adding real value to the wider community. It is our view that the internet is not only about serving information, but about creatively involving all the stakeholders.

The idea is not to replace the main official site or the other unofficial fan sites and forums, but to compliment them in an official, yet informal, manner to build up a meaningful online community.

2) What were some of the drawbacks considered about creating a site that allows fans more freedom to interact with each other on an officially sanctioned site?  How do you moderate all the photos and videos fans add, and do you keep a tight rein on what’s discussed on the forum?

JH: Of course there are a number of potential drawbacks with creating such an online community, especially when it comes to crowd-sourcing a lot of the content from the users themselves and allowing such freedom across the site. However, I am a believer of always trusting people to do the right thing in the first instance and as long as the guidelines are laid out from the start then people are generally very sensible.

I feel there could be an initial mindset that, as an officially sanctioned community, it would be a propaganda machine or that opposing views are not welcome, however we’ve all been involved in internet businesses and communities long enough to know that that simply wouldn’t work – and it’s not what Sheffield Wednesday would want from an online community either.

The content that is added or discussed on the site is entirely down to the users themselves – all that we ask, via the guidelines, is that it is not illegal and is in the spirit of a community club (i.e. no swearing or inappropriate comments). There is no ‘tight-rein’ as such; if a user is annoyed with the performance of the team on a Saturday, then they are entirely free to discuss their frustrations – after all, that is what football is all about!

Indeed, so far the moderators have only had the need to edit a few swear words that have inadvertently dropped through the net and hopefully that will be the case as much as possible on an ongoing basis.

In terms of moderation, currently I myself will monitor what content is added by users to the site along with a very small team of volunteer moderators from the fanbase. As the community grows we will recruit more of those moderators from the community itself and effectively allow the community to govern itself much more – this is an ongoing evolutionary process.

3) What kind of a budget did you have for the site?  What kind of tools did you find to build it for a reasonable cost?

JH: Without going into commercial information, I will say that the cost of developing the site to where it is has been minimal. Using a mixture of experience, open-source technologies, capable supporters from the fanbase and contacts throughout the internet industry we have managed to build a very functional site at a very reasonable cost.

4) How successful has the site been so far?  What has been the main positive and negative feedback that you’ve received about it?

JH: We are still in the early stages of our online engagement and still developing all our web properties (of which OurWednesday.com is just one piece) – and all early signs are good.

We currently have over 1,000 members of OurWednesday’s open BETA trial and that number continues to grow, with usage increasing in all areas across the site. Feedback has mainly been positive with each of our blogs (either departmental updates, or insights into happenings at the training ground) being discussed across both Sheffield Wednesday and opposition teams’ forums (opposition fans are generally impressed with how open and engaging our club is with its fans through OurWednesday.com). As an example of creative and open content that we look to provide, our most popular content to date (in terms of page views) is a blog on humorous applications received for the recent managers’ vacancy.

The only real negative feedback we have received is regarding the registration process and the information that is collected – however, supporters generally understand when we explain the reasoning behind it is to create an account at the online shop, to help make a seamless login across both sites. We’re looking at streamlining this somewhat and also introducing login for OurWednesday.com through a Facebook Connect feature in a future release.

Additionally, our Facebook page has reached over 10,000 fans – which we believe to be the highest number for a Championship club – and our Twitter profile now has over 2,000 followers, again believed to be the highest in the Championship. We believe that this, as well has having one of the most frequently updated official club sites in the Football League demonstrates our commitment to open online engagement.

5) Do any other clubs in England have a comparable official online community site?  If not, why do you think that is?

JH: Surprisingly, a number of football clubs in England do not even have a Facebook page or Twitter account, yet alone something along the lines of what we are doing. There have been one-or-two attempts by clubs at something similar through various hosted solutions, however we believe we are the first club in England to have our own dedicated social network platform for supporters.

There are a number of reasons clubs haven’t yet extended into these avenues. Resources is a big factor in an environment where a lot of clubs are cutting back, however I believe that most football clubs in the UK can be ‘old fashioned’ and are struggling to understand the online marketplace and the benefits of such engagement – we are happy to be a trendsetter in this respect!

Thanks to James for taking the time to answer — check out Our Wednesday to see how this all works in practice.

Big Story

Scabs in MLS?

Here’s Real Salt Lake’s owner Dave Checketts, as reported in the Deseret News (via Fake Sigi):

“I just came from a meeting with several owners and the commissioner down here in Los Angeles, and we know exactly what we’ll do. These are all owners who’ve been in the NBA, they’ve been in the NHL, some of them own Major League Baseball teams even today. We know what we’ll do. We have a plan if the players strike,” said Checketts.

“I just hope the players understand the implication of the threats they’re making to strike because if they do in fact go on strike, then that forces the owners to do something very aggressive and very different.”

There aren’t many things the owners can do that would be “very aggressive and very different” that don’t involve hiring scabs to replace MLS players on strike.

I don’t see this scenario resulting in a Keanu Reeves movie romanticising the replacements, but it may be an apropos comparison. That 1987 players strike in the NFL came as massively rising television revenues were lining the owners’ pockets and the players wanted more of the pie; not quite the same as today in MLS, though obviously rising revenues are behind some of the players’ demands. Moreover, NFL players were already being paid considerably more than MLS players today, with a median income of $170,000 in 1987 money, double MLS players median today not even adjusting for inflation.

But one key issue was similar to the dispute in MLS: free agency.

In 1987, NFL players initially wanted unrestricted free agency, while the owners only offered a modest advance on the compensation system in place.

According to this 1988 Monthly Labor Review article, the owners had a fairly simple strategy to break the strike: “(1) stonewall in negotiations, (2) use the NFL’S public relations program to persuade the fans of the rightness of their position, and (3) divide and frustrate the players by proceeding with the regular schedule using strikebreakers.”

As this piece puts it, following the breakdown of negotiations, a 24 day strike resulted in one of the weirdest periods of play in the history of professional sport:

What followed was one of the strangest months in pro football history, as NFL teams fielded lineups of amateur athletes unconvincingly masquerading as NFL players while the real players—many of them millionaires—walked picket lines, unconvincingly masquerading as blue-collar working stiffs.

A previous strike in 1982 led owners to prepare replacement players as the labour agreement negotiations broke down in 1987.

This strategy, a throwback to the early 20th century, was calculated to wear down the union. The owners were taking a long-term view. This approach was effective because unlike 1982, the games went on. This, coupled with the breakdown in player solidarity, probably won the strike for the owners. But there was a bargaining issue that also contributed to the union’s failure: free agency.

The owners simply would not budge on this issue, and as the strike went on and the players changed their demand on free agency to restrict it to only players with four years experience or more, divisions amongst the players on the importance of this issue grew — it obviously benefited veteran players much more than poorer players, in the short term at least. And the short-term was the problem for the union.

Despite the NFL players’ relatively rich salaries, the union was ill-prepared for a strike; there was no strike fund to provide benefits, no line of credit for player loans. It’s interesting also to look at the economic impact, again from Monthly Labor Review:

What was the impact on players and owners? The strikers lost an average of $15,000 per game, and approximately $80 million altogether. All teams refunded monies to fans who had purchased tickets but did not attend strike games. Although gate receipts and television ratings were down, the owners saved on salaries by paying the replacement players comparatively little. The average owner’s profit per game actually rose from $800,000 before the strike to $921,000 during the strike. This profit was temporary, however, because the league has to refund $60 million to the networks over the next two seasons for the one missed weekend of play, the reduced ratings, and the decline in advertising revenues.

In MLS, the owners will surely save money in the short term in the event of a strike. Television deals in MLS are not worth a great deal. I don’t know if the MLS players’ union has a strike fund or a line of credit to help striking players out, but I rather doubt it. This is a young league that hasn’t had much time to prepare for a strike.

In 1987, an ESPN poll found that the NFL owners won the public relations battle. Though attendance dropped, the second week of the strike saw many fans return to games. Regular officials showed up, and regular television presenters appeared. 16% of the players crossed the picket line. After twenty days, the players’ union made a proposal to the league that was rejected, and their strike collapsed four days later. The result was a disaster for the union.

The 1987 strike ended in total defeat for the NFL Players Association. Having lost all leverage, the players crawled back to work without winning free agency, without winning a guaranteed share of league revenue, without even reaching agreement on a collective bargaining agreement. The owners’ victory was so crushing that in 1989 the Players Association actually went out of business as a union; under federal labor law, workers gained standing to file class-action lawsuits against their employers only if they didn’t belong to a union. Therefore, having been utterly thwarted in their 1987 strike, the players took the radical step of decertifying the union two years later to pursue their goals in court.

This may or may not be a relevant historical example for the present state of MLS; there are plenty of other examples we could look at. But it’s hard to say that the MLS players’ union is in a stronger position than the NFL players union was in 1987, with players even worse off economically, and the real value of free agency still somewhat amorphous given the hard salary cap in place (ironically, in the NFL, following several court cases and the reformation of the players union, in 1993 free agency in the NFL was granted essentially in exchange for the introduction of a hard salary cap).

If there’s a strike in MLS, will the players be able to hold firm for more than a couple of weeks? How important is free agency to most of the players? Will MLS really be prepared to take “very aggressive” action and bring in replacements? Will fans show up to watch? Will Keanu Reeves appear in a soccer sequel to the Replacements?

Quick Hits

• Genius plan by the Glazers to win back Manchester United fans: raise ticket prices again.
• The death of a PSG fan following a clash between PSG supporters themselves has put hooliganism in the Ligue 1 spotlight.
• Speaking of the NFL, remembering Bob Kap, the man who brought soccer style kicks to American football.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Given how things went for Chelsea this week, here's a reminder of when they were "Kings of Europe" (or at least the 1971 winners of the European Cup Winners' Cup).

Photo credit: ca1951rr on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The MLS Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations are coming down to the wire and appear to be reaching an impasse.  Many of my New Year predictions will prove false, but I’m afraid the first one, which predicted a 3-4 week work stoppage,  is beginning to look accurate.  No one wants this and outsiders don’t have the specific information to fully understand how or why the situation has gotten to this point.

The differences seem to center around the less tangible issue of “player rights” rather than pure cash.  The owners have invested considerable sums into the league and they continue to do so.  Players see that the tide is beginning to turn with some teams generating positive cash flow and now want to be included in the reward.

While players and owners are beginning to provide general positioning statements, specifics are still hard to find.  The tight lips surrounding the CBA talks with the MLS Players Union has effectively limited public speculation and discussion to conjecture and generalities on the issues that are separating the players and management.

I don’t know first hand what MLS Commissioner Don Garber and MLS Players’ Union Executive Director Bob Foose are debating, but from the outside, there still seems to be quite a gap between the two sides despite the inclusion of a federal mediator.  Today’s column delves into some of the specific issues of the negotiations and, while somewhat speculative, is based on issues that are relevant to the current CBA.  To each issue I offer a proposed solution.

There are reportedly three main issues that the players are seeking concessions on:  free agency, guaranteed contracts and receiving 10% of international transfer fees.  These aren’t the only issues of course and the owners and players are discussing them individually and in context with them as a group.  Following are eleven issues that are likely among the most contentious.  The chart below lists the issues, how each one is addressed in the recently expired CBA and my proposal for how to handle each issue in a new CBA.

1. Unilateral options vs. multi-year contracts and semi-guaranteed vs. guaranteed contracts.

These are both very important issues to both parties.  The players obviously want more security and the owners want to maintain the flexibility that goes with semi-guaranteed contracts (contracts that allow teams to waive a player prior to July 1st without having to pay out any more money) and unilateral options (team options to extend contract on an annual basis for a minimal percentage increase in salary).  In-demand players (mainly national team players and high first round draft picks) have been able to leverage guaranteed contracts of one or more years.

I propose that MLS retains the unilateral options, but gives a little on guaranteed contracts by following the WPS model, which provides a minimum number of guaranteed contracts on all teams.  The exact minimum number of guaranteed contracts per team could grow over the life of the CBA.  Perhaps start at four and increase to six by the end.  MLS may be philosophically opposed, but the practical impact would be minimal as most teams have at least three to four already.  The risk is that a player underperforms and a team is stuck with a contract until the end of the term.  My proposal would not mandate any of the guaranteed contracts be multi-year, so “mistakes” could be released at the end of each season unless the team voluntarily chose to sign multi-year deals.

2.  International transfer fee split.

MLS and the MLS team retain 100% of the international transfer fee with the League keeping 2/3 and the teams keeping 1/3.  In the rest of the world the player or his representative receives 10%.  MLS suggests to the agents that they work out the 10% directly with the new team while they’re working out the player’s new salary.  The player does receive a huge bump in salary and has the opportunity to negotiate the 10% from the new team, so it’s not as if the player is worse off.  As Buzz Carrick notes in this fine piece for the Dallas based blog 3rd Degree, players from Latin America often have the money go directly to their agents and never see the transfer money, so this won’t be an important issue for them.  It also won’t be an important issue for the 90% of the players who have little realistic chance of an international transfer.  While this is an important issue to the agents and a few of the high end players, my proposal would have the players acquiescing on this issue in exchange for cracking the door on free agency.

3.  Standard salary escalator.

Most MLS contracts in the League’s first ten years had unilateral options that increased salary 3% if exercised by MLS.  The last CBA increased the escalator to 5% in recent years.  My proposal is to increase the escalator to 7% for the contract’s second and third year and 10% for the fourth year. In practice, a rookie making $38,000 would make $40,660 in his second year, $43,506 in his third year and $47,858 in his fourth year.

4. Standard length of contracts.

Most MLS contracts are four years with a League option after each of the first three seasons.  Players would prefer shorter contracts that would allow them freedom sooner.  My proposal calls for second contracts to be a year shorter to reward veterans with a little more flexibility and give them an opportunity for a better contract a year earlier. This change shouldn’t result in an increased European flight as most players would be 28 to 30 when the second contract expires.

5. Length of CBA.

The last MLS CBA was for five years. MLS would certainly like this one to be as long or longer to maintain stability and allow long term planning which is important to securing further expansion.  MLS is hardly rolling in money now, but there are finally several teams that are proving profitable.  If the next rounds of expansion in Philadelphia, Vancouver and Portland prove equally successful and Red Bull Arena turns New York around, the players may soon have some real leverage as a critical mass of teams will be financially incentivized to avoid a strike.  As it currently stands, most teams would be better off economically in the short term if the players went on strike – kind of like NHL owners in 2004-05.  A shorter CBA would allow players a chance to revisit all of the issues they compromise on this time when they have a little more leverage in a few years.

While the owners may be looking for seven years, the players would be wise to cut a deal for five or even four years.

6. Free agency. On the surface, as long as the League has a salary cap, it doesn’t seem like free agency can have a negative economic impact  on the owners.  Sure, teams would lose players within the League, but there’s a finite amount of money in a cap system, so those teams would then get other players to replace their losses.  So what’s the risk to owners if free agency is installed?  There are several:

• Free agency would lead to increased compensation for current “middle to upper class” MLS players who really don’t have good European options (i.e., American veterans).  So instead of spending money on retaining or attracting the best talent, the League would be spending money retaining players who really don’t have better options.
• There is also the potential of a competitive imbalance caused by players willing to sacrifice money for location.  Potentially, Los Angeles for example, could have an unfair advantage, because so many players are from southern California and many others desire to live there.
• Free agency also has the potential to squeeze out the League’s middle class players.  Bidding would result in higher salaries for the best players leaving less money for the rest.  The result would be a preponderance of salaries on the high and low extremes without as many players in the middle.  Many “middle class” players would be forced into retirement leaving the League with a bit of a talent – or at least experience - drain.
• Opening the door to even limited free agency may be anathema to the owners who have a legal ruling in federal court upholding the current system to back them up.  After all, the players sued MLS over free agency in the Fraser case and lost.  The ruling provided MLS with cost certainty, which has proven very helpful in attracting new investors.

The flip side is that limited free agency could potentially resolve the impasse without having much significant impact to the League’s economics or competitive platform.  A compromise found in other sports is to provide a form of restricted free agency that allows player movement, but limits it to players of a certain experience level and compensates teams that lose a player.

My proposal calls for free agency after seven years in MLS and compensation from the signing team to the team losing the player in the form of a SuperDraft pick.  For example, if a player finished his second MLS contract (a four year and a three year contract), he could sign with any team in the League.  The higher his new salary, the better the compensation pick the new team would provide the former team.  Perhaps compensation of a first round pick for a player who signs for more than $200,000, a 2nd round pick  if the contract is for more than $100,000 and a 3rd round pick for a player who signs for less than $100,000.

This compromise would permit a certain amount of player freedom and would open the door to increased free agency the next time the CBA is negotiated.  Both sides would feel they sacrificed, but hopefully both sides will see the benefits as well.

7. Team autonomy to negotiate contracts. The players feel this would improve their ability to negotiate better contracts and ease transfers to foreign clubs.  They are right, but it would also undermine the League’s single entity justification, which has allowed MLS to sustain itself and attract new investors.  This issue is a non-starter for owners, who would rather close down shop than give on this point.  I am probably biased, but i adamantly agree with the owners on this point.

8. Roster spots. More jobs!  There are two ways to create more jobs for the players:  expand the number of teams and expand the team rosters.  Developmental rosters constricted two years ago when the MLS reserve league disbanded.  The reserve league rarely served its intended purpose of developing players as their games lacked quality and often included tired players who had played in first team games the day prior.  The overall roster never grew beyond 28 and injuries, suspensions and national team call ups meant reserve teams were often short of players.  Current rosters are 22-24 players.  I propose that two developmental slots be added each year until there are a total of 32 players per team.

A 32 player roster would allow enough players for quality reserve team games, which could be brought back in a couple years.  The additional developmental roster spots could be filled by MLS team academy players who would be promoted based on merit.  This would provide a strong connection between the team’s academy program and the first team.  It would generate enough success stories to attract more youth talent to the MLS team academies and would fuel the quality and quantity of these MLS controlled youth programs.

9. Minimum salary and 10. Team salary cap. The impasse in these negotiations does not seem to be caused by money.  The major differences involve player rights.  Given that, I don’t believe MLS will stand in the way of reasonable increases to the minimum salary levels for senior and developmental players or to the team salary caps if the players acquiesce on many of the player rights issues.  I propose a 10% increase in each the first year, increasing to 17% by the end of the CBA.  This would lead to a $40,000 minimum senior roster salary, a $23,500 developmental roster salary and a $2.7 million team salary cap.  I would also propose that any developmental roster player who sees first team action gets paid at the rate of a minimum salaried senior roster player.

11. Waived player rights. The union and players, including Freddie Ljungberg, have mischaracterized this policy in an attempt to show that MLS unfairly restrains players from actively seeking employment.  But the truth is, this policy does NOT prevent players from being resigned in MLS.  As the recent waiver deals of Kevin Hartman and Adrian Serioux showed, the current MLS policy of teams retaining the rights to waived players does not prevent waived players from finding new teams.  It merely gives their former teams a chance for 48 hours to match the new salary offer.  If the former team doesn’t match in 48 hours, the player is free to join another team at that salary WITHOUT any compensation going to the former team.  I propose that this policy be maintained, but if MLS chooses to trade this for a union give elsewhere, it wouldn’t be a huge give on the League’s behalf.

So there you have it.  Proposed solutions to eleven issues.  Taken individually, I imagine folks on the two sides can find fault with many of my proposals, but I’d like to think that taken collectively, these eleven points represent a fair compromise that would allow the union to show its membership that they have made some real gains both financially and on player rights.  At the same time, I believe MLS would come away retaining the foundation of its business model, while allowing the players to share in some of the revenue growth the League has enjoyed via improved broadcast rights fees, sponsorship, team expansion and stadium development since the last CBA went into effect.  And if both sides are a little upset with the compromises, that probably means it’s a good deal.

Whaddya think?  Too generous to the owners?  To the players?  Too impractical?  Too simplistic?  Am I missing any key issues?  The devil’s in the details of course, but could this serve as the framework for a solution?

Big Story

Here’s a curious proposal from one of England’s most thoughtful football writers: in order to increase ties to local clubs lost by national television broadcasts and migration patterns, Gabrielle Marcotti suggests that “if fandom is reached via television, then television should be fully embraced, albeit with some key safeguards, along the lines of what the NFL has done for years.”

What he means here is that Premier League clubs’ games should be shown only in their region and not nationally, as long as they are sold-out, a sensible enough provision to ensure games are seen by actual fans. As Marcotti explains,

“Scrap the notion of nationwide Premier League TV games, with the exception of one “game of the week” which would be on a terrestrial brodcaster and would be the league’s showpiece that week. Then, divide the country up into regions and show every Premier League game but on a regional basis as long as one of two conditions are met: either it’s an away game or it’s a home sellout.”

Marcotti accepts it’s a rough idea, but concludes by summing up the benefits:

Obviously it’s a radical re-think and requires a number of adjustments. You need to do a lot of fiddling for regions where there are many clubs (like London or Manchester). You need to spread the schedule out across the weekend which will, no doubt upset traditionalists (although, in fact, it’s already very spread out). But it would allow many who simply can’t go to games – whether because they are too young, too old or too poor – to follow their local club and develop (or rekindle) their passion for it. And, if done right, it would also boost attendances. By the way, technologically, it would be very easy to do: Sky boxes are already set based on postcodes, which is why if you move from Liverpool to London and take your receiver with you, you still get local Liverpool news.

This isn’t quite the NFL model, though. Yes, home teams have to sell-out their games 72 hours before a game or it will be blacked out on television within a 75 mile radius of the team’s home stadium. Meantime, when the local team’s game is airing, no other game can be shown on a local network station.

But there’s still a hell of a lot of nationally broadcast games, which is why the NFL’s television deal is even sweeter than the Premier League’s. A fan of an NFL team who does not live in that team’s local market can purchase NFL Sunday Ticket on satellite and watch all their team’s games that way. You don’t have to be local to watch every game your team plays, wherever they play. And through Sunday Ticket, you can watch pretty much every game every weekend.

Aside from the premium Sunday Ticket package, there’s an enormous amount of gridiron on American television broadcast nationally.  If your local team plays at say 3pm central time (in my case, the Chicago Bears), you can usually find two games on local network stations beforehand at noon, and then nationally broadcast games on both Sunday and Monday evenings. For the second half of the season, NFL Network (a dedicated station available on most cable or satellite packages for little extra charge) shows a live game on Thursday nights nationally as well.

The point of all this is to say that the NFL’s model isn’t exactly one of encouraging local fandom over following a team across the country. A Cowboys fan could watch every game Dallas plays even if he lives in Seattle by buying NFL Sunday Ticket or going to one of hundreds of bars that has it. He can also gorge on a dozen plus other games and entirely ignore the Seahawks if he chooses.

What the NFL’s model does do is encourage existing local fans of their team to go to games, or they will be blacked out in their locality on television. Essentially, though, this is presupposing a local fanbase for that NFL team, not encouraging one over national affiliations.  The NFL is obviously popular enough now that a team can move states and suddenly a sold-out stadium will appear in their new home. Part of this is precisely because of the amount of games shown nationally.

Marcotti’s model would surely result in a far less lucrative television deal for the Premier League. But I’m also not sure it would help local clubs outside the Premier League, as the regional behemoths like Liverpool would in this model have more of their games on television available to local fans.

The problem is that in most of the NFL, there is only one team per region. In England, ensuring every Manchester United game could be seen locally on television every week would surely only do more damage to other local clubs like Rochdale or Stockport County by increasing the availability of United games from the armchair, even if they were not shown at the same times as their games. It would actually encourage local armchair Premier League fandom, wouldn’t it?

The local television model works in the NFL with 32 teams spread across a geographic area so much larger than England, which is the size of Alabama and has over 90 professional clubs. Limiting broadcasts by locality and not damaging smaller teams is much harder to do in England.

Quick Hits

• Fans of Cambridge United are aiming to help their club buy their own stadium back from developers, with more than £1M now pledged by fans towards the cause.
• 4,000 miles away, a local council vote sees San Jose move closer to their own stadium being built.
• Martin Samuel says proposed investment into Liverpool will hardly be a panacea for their financial ills.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.