This weekend the Seattle Sounders will host Sporting Kansas City in the MLS regular season. Most Seattle Sounders fans agree that Andrew Thomas, Jesus Ferreira, Jordan Morris, and eight water bottles could probably beat SKC this year. SKC is really, truly, monumentally bad at the moment.
Which is weird. Historically the MLS has enjoyed significant parity; any team had a reasonable shot at beating any other team (although of course not an equal shot). Over the last several years, that parity has been strained. This year it appears to be broken. It’s early in the season, obviously; we’re about nine games in. Yet there are teams with twenty or more points, having lost only one game; and there are teams with seven or less, having won only one game. It’s not just Kansas City; the bottom six teams simply aren’t competitive.
In hindsight, I think this was entirely predictable – although I think unpredicted. Some of this is simple mismanagement, of course; but in general, I believe a cascade of reasonable, necessary rule changes are responsible. (Note that this is a pretty wonky MLS posting, so if you’re not a serious MLS fan you are likely to have some eye glazing in about three sentences.)
Background
Couple of background thoughts. First, Before 2024, GAM1 was injected judiciously and specifically to encourage parity. Teams playing in multiple competitions (eg. CONCACAF Champions League) played many more games, and so would have struggled to compete in league due to fatigue. The MLS gave them GAM to improve their roster to inject a bit more quality to remain competitive. Similarly, teams that failed to make the playoffs or otherwise struggled were given additional resources to improve their roster the following year.
Second, it’s relevant that one of the goals of the MLS is to help develop domestic players. To this end there is a roster rule which reduces the salary impact of homegrown players; there’s another which allows teams to bring in young, promising players with reduced salary impact. These sort of adjustments have been successful; the average player age in the MLS has dropped from ~27 years old in 2016 to ~25 years in 2026. MLS teams have young players on their roster on terms that are very favorable to the team.2
This has resulted in teams developing an increasing number of players ready to play in established leagues with bigger budgets (see: Europe). But these same roster mechanisms meant that those teams with young players on favorable contracts could not sell without handicapping themselves. For example, if you sell a player earning $100k a year to a team that is willing to pay him $1MM a year, as the Sounders did this year when Obed Vargas went to Athletico Madrid, you are unlikely to be able to replace him without spending a lot more3 – and the salary cap makes that challenging.
Rule Changes
To address this the league changed the rules so teams can convert up to $3MM of the fees received for players into GAM. For example, Athletico Madrid paid Seattle $2MM for the right to sign Vargas.4 The change was necessary to allow the sales to happen; but each such sale now injects a significant amount of GAM into the system. Hence in the modern MLS, the way GAM is distributed is anything but judicious: it rewards the better teams.
In addition, this rule change introduced another uncomfortable unexpected consequence: it became far more valuable to sell promising players out of the league than within the league, even if there were a domestic team willing to pay more. To avoid unnecessary talent drain the MLS needed to facilitate internal transfers (within the MLS). So a year ago the league introduced “cashfers” – the ability to trade players for cash, or as people outside the league might term it, you know, “sell” them within the league. The fees for such trades can be converted to GAM like any other trade. This successfully allowed transfers within the league, but accelerated the disparity. As an extreme example, in theory two teams could exchange players with one another for $3MM apiece and create more cap space for themselves. (Note that such overt misbehavior won’t happen; the MLS reviews any internal transfer and would nix it. But what these trades do in fact isn’t that far removed from it.)
So where before GAM was used to improve parity, the new (and significantly larger) GAM does the opposite – teams with better players and/or a better academy get even better; those without fall behind.
What’s Next?
I think the league is going to have to do something about this. Eventually some teams will be pretty useless – as a Seattle fan, I think this is fine and good when we’re talking about Sporting Kansas City, who we’ve never forgiven for various reasons5 – but ok, fine. It’s probably not good for the league.
I only see two ways out. Most likely the league will increase the GAM they award to feckless teams, probably by putting some sort of internal “tax” on the GAM teams convert which can be used to help the less effective ones. This is the more likely future.
However, there is another solution, and I really like it. It occurs to me that as this trend accelerates, one might instead divide the league formally into haves and have nots (notice I didn’t say “good” and “rotten” but), and each year have the best of the second tier promoted into the top, while the weakest of the top tier are relegated to the bottom. This is known in soccer circles as “pro/rel” (promotion/relegation), and it’s standard for most leagues in Europe. It has the really positive side effect of making games for teams near the bottom of the league more meaningful. Long after you’ve been eliminated from playoffs, champions league, etc, you are still at risk of being sent to the lower league, so typically almost every game even at the end of the season still really matters.
Personally, I think the second option would be better for the league in the long run, and might actually be something the owners of the second tier teams might be interested in. Instead of being mired in the middle of the table with no shot at accolades, you are fighting for an opportunity to play in the bigs. I really want this for the domestic sport – and I’m fully aware it is almost certainly not happening. Regardless, the trend is clear, and the league will need to do something about it.
Footnotes:
- GAM stands for “General Allocation Money.” MLS is a salary-cap league, which means that every team starts out with the same salary budget. There are many complicated ways that teams can get additional budget. GAM is actually the simplest of these; it is simply money the team can spend on player compensation, effectively raising the salary cap for that team. ↩︎
- This is arguably a little unfair to the players since the contract minimum is around $80k. But they get to play soccer for a living and have potential for a lot more if they’re good enough. I’m not losing sleep over it. ↩︎
- Yes, yes, I know, Sounders fans. The Sounders were able to replace Vargas almost immediately with Snyder Brunell, an equally talented kid from the academy. But few teams (arguably no other teams) have the academy pipeline the Sounders do. ↩︎
- Yes, yes, I know, Sounders fans. Craig Weibel, the Sounders GM, pulled a rabbit out of a hat to get anything at all for Vargas, as his contract was up at the end of the season. ↩︎
- Sounders fans will never forget nor forgive this. ↩︎
