General MLS Discussion

“He took his shirt off, kind of pointed to his chest, to the crest and was like, ‘This is what we saved. This is the Crew. What am I supposed to do with this? You just took this away from us,’” said now-former Nordecke creative director Ethan McKinley, who was at the meeting on Friday and resigned from his position on Monday afternoon.

IT’S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT
 
Reading Doyle's column today I notice he says that Cincinnati's record excluding their first 4 games is 8-10-38 which is of course in W-D-L order. MLS has always used W-L-T. So I checked the standings and they too are now in W-D-L format.

I think this just happened today but for my own curiosity wondering if anyone noticed the switch earlier?
standings.png


I don't know about you but this was this morning 5/13/21 and it still shows the WLT format. Its on google chrome and windows 7 so I'm not sure.
 
MLSPA salary data is out. Have at it folks. But word of caution (cribbing from the Athletic’s explanatory notes and analysis):
While this salary data is the only publicly-available information regarding MLS player compensation, the formula the MLSPA uses for guaranteed compensation does not give a perfectly accurate indication of what a player is making this season. Because of the way the MLSPA annualizes bonuses across the total years of a contract to get guaranteed compensation, a salary may be higher or lower in any given year across the life of the contract. In addition, these salary numbers are not the numbers at which players hit a team’s budget charge. The budget charge also includes acquisition costs, most notably transfer fees. The guaranteed compensation figures provided by the MLSPA also do not include performance bonuses.
 
We really don't have a ton of terrible contracts. Gudi is making too much, but aside from that, we seem to have done a lot of good business.

Yeah. I think the biggest complaint from the forum is not that the club is spending its money wrong, but that it's not spending enough. Truth be told, we're spending like a mid-table team with maybe one aging star in Maxi, and last match showed that even he is not indispensable. If Maxi retired tomorrow and his salary were scrapped from our books, Medina or Parks would deputize as a 10 and we would be solidly mid-table and quite inexpensive to run. It all makes sense from a biz perspective, it just sucks for fans.
 
This is paywalled, but...

Interesting analysis of the MLS salary list.
In 2016, MLS had 7 players making $5M or more (3 of them were on NYCFC).
In 2021, MLS has only 3 players making $5M or more: Vela, Chicharito and Higuain.

But, in 2016 there were only 23 players making $1M or more, and in 2021 that number has tripled to more than 72 players. So mega-salaries are on the decline (arguably that's basically due to NYCFC), but there are a lot more pretty damn substantial salaries.

Who has the most players making $1 million?
Cincinnati with six.
SKC has 5
4 teams have 4 >$1M players.
Dallas, Minnesota, RB and SJ trail with one each.
NYC is not in the article but we have 2: Maxi and Medina.

The article goes on to discuss transfer fees/acquisition costs, but I don't want to give away too much of a subscription article.
 
Hmm, New England back into 1st place, and Columbus continues its slow start, only 1 win in 5 games now.
 
Hmm, New England back into 1st place, and Columbus continues its slow start, only 1 win in 5 games now.

Someone mentioned that after every season that Caleb Porter won MLS Cup his team has missed the playoffs. That might continue again this season.

And if DC-ORL result holds (0-1 through 82'), we'd drop to 3rd behind NE (11 pts, 6 played), ORL (9 pts, 5 played), NYC (8 pts, 5 played).
 
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Well, the Crew’s new new logo is much better than the old new logo. Still think the circle one is infinitely better than the new new one though.
Classic change it to something much, much worse overall so that there isn't too much angst over the final change.
 
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An excerpt from the Athletic Zlatan
article. It’s pretty funZ

“Zlatan spoke up and said something along the lines of: ‘In games like these we need to have more bite, we need to be nastier. Like Kevin,’” says Perry Kitchen. “And he pointed to me, over in my direction. I was like, looking around, to my left, to my right, making sure there wasn’t a Kevin on the team. I said, ‘Are you pointing to me? My name is Perry. It’s right above my locker.’”

“Yes,” replied Ibrahimovic. “You are Kevin.”