That SuperLiga “Bonus,” Or When Is $1 Million not $1 Million?

By: Laurie | July 14th, 2008

When is $1 million not $1 million?

When you’re dealing with MLS of course!

Quick background: SuperLiga is the tournament that was created last year to ~~showcase David Beckham~~ provide a place for the best of MLS and the best of Mexico to meet up. The first set of games in the group stage was played this weekend, and MLS did okay — New England and Houston won, Chivas USA and DC United lost. So we’re at .500.

A few more details: All of the games are played in US venues. And the prize money for the winner is $1 million — by far the biggest purse available for US soccer.

Except it’s apparently not available for US soccer. At least not for the players. Last week, the MLS Player’s Union filed a grievance over the prize money. Apparently when the Mexican team Pachuca won last year, they gave out the entire $1 million to their players. If MLS wins, the players want similar treatment. MLS is saying that’s not part of the deal.

From the Players Union press release:

MLS has consistently touted that the winner of SuperLiga will win a $1 million prize. The implication in this tagline is that those who win the tournament take home $1 million. In reality, however, that statement is true only for the Mexican players.

MLS is misleading its great fans. What has not been revealed by the league is that its New York office has unilaterally set its own bonus structure for players, who will receive only a small fraction of the $1 million. On top of that, the league has gone even further by prohibiting its teams from providing their own bonus pool for their players, despite the fact that this right is protected under the league’s CBA. The Union has filed a grievance regarding this issue, which will be arbitrated later this year.

As a result, if an MLS team wins SuperLiga the players on that team won’t split $1 million. Instead, they will receive only 15% of the prize money. This puts MLS players at a significant competitive disadvantage as the Mexican clubs are not operating under the same rules. Indeed, it is our understanding that the players on last year’s winner Pachuca split the entire $1 million prize amongst themselves.

MLS is saying that the players were never scheduled to get the entire amount, and that some of it needs to go to MLS because SuperLiga is financially risky.

“The MLS collective bargaining agreement provides that player bonuses for a tournament such as SuperLiga are purely voluntary,” the league said in an e-mailed statement to the Chronicle. “MLS is at financial risk with respect to the SuperLiga tournament.”

Beginning with the inaugural edition of SuperLiga in 2007, both MLS and the Dynamo disclosed that the most players would get to share would be $150,000 of the first-place prize. MLS teams receive monetary compensation for stages reached, with the tournament winner totaling $1 million.

Nonetheless, the fact is often omitted when referring to the cash awards, prompting the union to accuse MLS of misleading its fans.

My thought: We don’t have nearly enough information to make a decision about who’s right about this one. Here’s the thing, though. Every single game is played in the US. Therefore every single game brings in gate revenue, concessions revenue, parking revenue, and probably some TV rights and/or advertising revenue as well. My guess is that some of these revenues are split with the visiting Mexican teams. But because MLS (as far as I can tell) never reveals details of its finances, we’ll never know how much revenue SuperLiga brings into MLS, or what kinds of expenses are incurred to bring in this revenue. And if we don’t know what the revenues and expenses are, there’s no way to figure out if MLS needs that “prize money” to keep from going broke, or if it’s making a profit on the backs of the players.

Even if MLS is making a profit on SuperLiga, they says that, as a whole, they aren’t scheduled to make a profit league-wide until 2010. So perhaps they’re using this revenue to offset other, league-wide losses? (MLS doesn’t go public with any financial details, so we don’t know.) If this were the case, though, we don’t know how much goes to the teams that are actually risking exhaustion and injuries with these extra games vs. how much is going to other areas of the league.

Or, in other words, we know nothing. Different day, different issue, same MLS.

The one thing that interests me, though: If Pachuca gave the entire $1 million to its players, that means that all of the money last year went to the team, right? This apparently means that MLS only gets the money if an MLS team wins. So if a Mexican team wins, MLS gets nothing, but if an MLS team wins, MLS gets the $850,000 that doesn’t go to the players? ($1 million minus the stated $150,000.) So it seems that MLS is relying on the players to play their guts out so somebody besides the players can make an extra $850,000?

Does this feel right to you?

I’m curious to see whether the grievance filed by the Union will bring any of this out into the open.