Players reject MLS owners’ offer on Club World Cup bonuses
The fight over MLS players’ share of the Club World Cup prize pool remains unresolved less than a week before the Seattle Sounders are scheduled to play their first match. Although there has been incremental progress in the sense that the league has submitted its first proposal, the two sides may actually be growing farther apart in their demands.
Late Friday, the league’s owners sent a proposal to the MLS Players Association that offered to add 20% of any potential performance bonuses to the $1 million players were already set to receive just for participating, as stipulated in the CBA that was signed in 2021. In essence, the new proposal would mean each team’s players would receive $200,000 for any group stage tie, $400,000 for any group-stage win and $1.5 million for advancing to the Round of 16. Put another way, players could get anywhere from $2.9 million to $3.7 million for getting out of the group stage. If an MLS team were to miraculously win the tournament, players would likely divvy up a bonus of close to $20 million.
As part of the offer to the players, a source indicated that the league included language that implied the offer was lowered in response to the Sounders players’ protest on Sunday.
The players rejected the league’s offer, calling it “retaliatory” and issuing a statement that read in part, “MLS’s refusal to negotiate in good faith has created a major distraction for the players who should be focusing on preparing for a major international competition. However, players will not be silenced by threats from MLS. The players remain united in using their collective voice and demanding a fair share of the rewards earned from their hard work.”
The full statement:
Although the players have not yet formally submitted a counter-proposal, they have communicated that they intend to ask for more than they had previously indicated during more informal discussions with the league. In essence, the two sides are moving farther apart than they were prior to any offers being formally submitted.
One main component to the disagreement appears to be what constitutes an “international standard." There is precious little information publicly available about how much each team plans to pay players to participate in this tournament, with one of the few being Real Madrid’s boast that players will receive a $1 million bonus if they win it. Liga MX, to which MLS players have pegged their performance bonuses previously, has made no announcements about how players will be compensated.
This situation has apparently been simmering for months, dating back to when FIFA first announced the details of their $1 billion tournament prize pool. Of that money, MLS teams are each set to each receive $9.55 million for participating in the tournament, $1 million for each group-stage tie, $2 million for each group-stage win, $7.5 million for playing in the Round of 16, tens of millions more for advancing to each subsequent round and about $100 million if they were to win the tournament.
Sounders players started openly talking about their frustrations a few weeks ago, expressing frustration that owners had been dragging their feet on a proposal. League officials have countered that they had been waiting on the players to provide evidence of the “international standard” that was being cited. In any case, the players’ frustrations came to a head on Sunday when the Sounders wore protest shirts during pregame that read “Club World Ca$h Grab,” which prompted a profanity-laced postgame rebuke from Sounders majority owner Adrian Hanauer.
Prior to the protest, a source indicated that the league planned to submit their offer to the players on Monday but then delayed delivery until Friday in an apparent attempt to avoid the optics of responding directly to the protest.
Although the players have not openly threatened to boycott the tournament — they recognize that there’s a no-strike clause in the CBA — sources have indicated that failure to come to an agreement on this issue is likely to result in pushback on instances where the league is seeking to get waivers on other parts of the CBA. In previous years, for instance, the MLSPA has granted waivers that allow training camps to start early in exchange for other vacation time and compensation.
That leaves the two sides rather far apart with both the Sounders and LAFC set to play league games on Sunday and the Club World Cup set to kick off next Saturday.