Wednesday, March 3, 2010

CBA Expiration

The MLS CBA expired last Thursday. The Players, as of now at least, are continuing with normal preseason activities as if the season will start when it's supposed to.

I wrote a piece for PremiershipTalk.com about this over the weekend, which you can see here. The gist of the article is that there's a lot of uncertainty about what happens now; the league hasn't operated without a CBA since 2004, and there were some key issues that would have been settled in the new CBA.

I have a feeling something big will happen soon; they can't operate without a CBA forever...that's terrible for the Players because it means they don't have the rights that a CBA would have given them. Ives Galarcep cautioned that a strike is still possible. Until then, the League has won the power battle over the Players.

Overall, this is a bad situation MLS finds itself in. Even if the League holds the growth of the sport as its top priority, it generally likes to go about it much more conservatively than I would like it to. I don't like the centralized structure. I want free agency, along with a CBA-dictated salary cap.

I also want to use my Revolution season tickets in 2010. A strike would pose a threat to this. In fact, during the duration of the strike I definitely could not attend Revolution games. But I could still go to the Gillette parking lot at 4pm on would-be game days and drink beer and grill burgers. So my reaction to a strike, if it happens, will be a balancing act between these things, and maybe others.

Hopefully something good happens soon. In the meantime, take a look at the link in Taylor Twellman's awesome tweet, "Me and My Bitches in latest issue of Boston Magazine". I didn't know he was that kind of guy.

-John

5 comments:

  1. My roommates had a beer with Twellman during the US-Canada gold medal game down at Game On near Fenway. He didn't mention anything about his bitches. Irrelevant to the story, but noteworthy I think.

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  2. Yeah that's really cool. I'm not a huge fan of Game On. It's a nice place, but it's too cool-clean-open-sports-bar for me, if that makes sense. Maybe I just don't like sports bars that are designed specifically to be sports bars. I like bars/pubs that show sports. Like McGreevys is good, on Boylston St. There's a surprising number of bars that show soccer in Boston, that I've just stumbled upon by walking around doing other things.

    McGreevys may not show Revs games or Prem games regularly (I don't know), but I saw a Spain Conf Cup group game there last summer.

    -John

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  3. Do you think the MLS is ready to drop its centralized structure? I'm sure that the centralized structure was good for the league while it was in its fledgling state, but has it reached a point where it can let its teams run free without Big Brother watching over them?

    The league can take the NFL route or the Premier League route. The NFL has parity, mainly due to the salary cap, revenue sharing, and a sound economic structure. The Premier Leage lacks parity and a salary cap. It's also divided into several factions; the uber rich, the rich, and those who try to keep up with the uber rich and ultimately find themselves bankrupt and seeking investment from oil tycoons/Arabian princes.

    Both the NFL and Prem are wildly entertaining but have taken different paths to get there.
    What the NFL and the Premiership share is an inherent passion for their sport within their fan base. Achieving popularity was effortless for those leagues. The MLS is playing by different rules. They have to constantly hone their product and convince America that soccer is worth its time/money.

    Not the most coherent comment, but maybe some future posts material. Keep them coming. They entertain me at work.

    And Andrew's slacking on the posts.

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  4. I shall contribute my fair share of posts after 3/31. Hopefully I have time to fit one post in before then in regards to fantasy MLS, which you should sign up for!

    MLS players union just voted to strike if no deal is in place before opening day. Lets hope there is no strike, but I'm not feeling too good about it.

    -Andrew

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  5. I saw Chris Tierney on my bus today into Boston. He looked pretty hungover.

    -Chris

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