"How good are you?" America vs. The World

There's a line in the movie, Major League, where the main character, Jake Taylor, is chatting it up with some hoity-toity types.  When Taylor's career as a Major League Baseball catcher becomes the topic of conversation, so, too, does the amount of money that professional baseball players make.

"Well it all depends on how good you are," Jake says.

"How good are you?"

"I make the league minimum," Jake replies, halfway between glum and resolved.

Money talks.  Especially in the sports world, quantifying worth is accomplished on a financial scale.  The best players make the most money.  The best teams are valued at the highest dollar amount.  Other variables are also taken into account, of course, but let's say that your goal is to compare and contrast different professional soccer leagues around the world.  You want to know where America's Major League Soccer stands?  Follow the money. 

Starting at the top, the best talents play in the European Leagues.  Unlike in the United States, where you will find the world’s preeminent (American) football, basketball, baseball, and hockey leagues, there is not a single soccer league in Europe that can regularly be pinpointed as heads above the rest.  England's Premier League and Spain's La Liga might be the deepest, but Italy's Serie A and Germany's Bundesliga regularly produce winners of the yearly European club team championship.  Nonetheless, Europe is where the finest players ply their trade.

You may or may not be surprised to find out that soccer's biggest stars make better money than any other team sport athletes on Earth.  Cristiano Ronaldo, who recent World Cup viewers best know for bursting Team USA's bubble with a killer cross that his Portuguese teammate buried into the back of the net to tie the game with just seconds to play but who soccer enthusiasts know as one of the three best strikers on earth, earned $52 million in salary for a single season with Spain's Real Madrid in 2013/2014.  Barcelona's Lionel Messi, who you just saw flame out in the World Cup Final for Argentina, earned $42 million last year just to play soccer.  LeBron James made less than $20 million.  Kobe Bryant is the NBA's highest paid player at $30.5 million/year, Matt Ryan tops the NFL at $42 million (seriously, Matt Ryan?), and Cliff Lee earned an MLB best $25 million.  Take out the anomaly that is Matty Ice's ridiculously overpriced salary and it would take awhile to reach the first non-soccer player (in Europe) on the list of highest salaried team sport athletes (source: Forbes).

The highest paid player in Major League Soccer is Clint Dempsey, whose $6.7 million per year salary is 7.5 times less than Cristiano Ronaldo's.  Dempsey's pay is certainly respectable, but if you want to know how far away we are in the USA from having teams on-par with the world's elite, compare our American captain’s salary to FC Barcelona’s $8.6 million per season mean wages paid to each player.  Most of the top four European league teams pay their players in a matter of a few weeks what an MLS player, on average, makes in an entire year.  So, there’s a wide gap.

It's barely worth mentioning that the English Premier League winner last season, Manchester City, paid its players combined wages of $413 million.  That's insane and so much astronomically higher than the MLS team with the biggest payroll, the New York Red Bulls at just under $10 million - 41 times higher!  Instead, look at one of the lower tier EPL squads, Southampton.  Their $75 million total salaries paid is still seven times that of the Red Bulls, 2.5 times higher than the top three MLS spending teams combined when you add the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles Galaxy to the mix, and just $9 million less than the entire payroll of the league, but it gives you a better idea of where we stack up. 

The Premier League is the richest in the world, but MLS would find itself in a similarly meager position against the other top European leagues.  Against the second tier European leagues, however, MLS would be pretty comparable, with the exception of outstanding teams like Scotland’s Celtic, Holland’s Ajax, or Turkey’s Galatasaray.  The same could be said of MLS versus Mexico's Liga MX and the South American leagues, though financial data is, admittedly, a lot harder to verify in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.  Major League Soccer has an advantage over all but the “Big Four” Euro leagues, though, in the ability to offer attractive contracts to world-renowned players (regardless if they’re on the decline) with the added bonus of giving them exposure to the vast American sports and entertainment media.    

Perhaps the most important thing to note in concluding the economic statistical analysis between MLS and the rest of the world is that we’re on the rise.  The advantages of leagues with more money is obvious, namely that they can afford to pay higher wages for talent in demand.  In the past, MLS could not keep pace.  Popular American stars, often homegrown in MLS, would make bigger names for themselves in the World Cup, parlaying their time in the spotlight to a transfer overseas.  MLS teams simply could not afford to keep their best players.  That is changing.  As the league has improved, Americans are coming back.  Dempsey was not the only US National to return home last year; Michael Bradley did, too.  They’re each making over $6 million.  Landon Donovan started that trend last decade, with an understanding that as the face of the sport in our country in those days, he could better help American soccer and MLS grow by staying.  What was once an exception is not yet the rule, but it is, now, becoming more common.  Word has it that Jermaine Jones, he of the rocket shot from outside the 18 yard box against Portugal, is on his way to Chivas USA in Los Angeles.  This weekend, World Cup starters Matt Besler and Graham Zusi were locked up to stay put in Kansas City.  Even a few years ago, they both would have been gonners. 

So, “how good” are we? 

We’re no longer the world’s “minimum.”  Major League Soccer is growing. 

The topic of MLS player earnings deserves greater exploration in this blog.  The fact is that MLS relies on higher paid players to improve viewers, interest, and quality of play, but it still can’t afford to pay consistent salaries; such is why the league average is still below $150,000/year.  80% of the money goes to 30% of the players.