Revs Will Play This Weekend as MLS Narrowly Avoids Strike
The New England Revolution, and the rest of Major League Soccer, will start the league’s 20th season this weekend after all. According to multiplereports, the league and its players have reached an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, just two nights shy of the scheduled first game of the season between the Los Angeles Galaxy and Chicago Fire. The Revolution are scheduled to play Sunday night in Seattle.
The league and its players spent the past month negotiating over a new CBA after the previous agreement expired at the end of January. Players have been fighting to increase the league’s salary cap and its minimum wage, but most of all they wanted to earn free agency. Since MLS formed, in virtually all cases, players have had no say in which teams they play with even after their contracts expire. Players had threatened to strike if a new CBA was not agreed to ahead of the start of the season.
Reports in the lead-up to the agreement suggested players who had been in the league for eight years, and who were 28 years old or older, would have some say in where they played on their next contract. According to The Orlando Sentinel, this system will indeed be part of the deal, and there will be a cap on the size of the raise players can earn when they become free agents. (Read more details on the deal from the Sentinel.)
Such an arrangement would be a big step for players compared to the previous system, especially with the league having said it was against any form of free agency at the outset of negotiations. But it would still set a relatively high standard for players to meet before they have say over their futures. It may have been a tough pill for some to swallow; soccer journalist Ives Galarcep reported some teams’ player representatives were in dissent of accepting the new deal.
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The new CBA will run for five seasons, as did the last agreement. The league’s growth in that period gave the players enough ammunition to inch into free agency territory. If similar growth colors the next five-year increment of league history, the new deal creates a pretty strong precedent for players to push things further. Players may have wanted more and owners certainly wanted less, but hey, they’ll be playing soccer this weekend. Or, as former Revolution and U.S. National Team player Alexi Lalas, now an analyst for FOX Sports, put it:
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There were signs throughout Wednesday that things were moving toward resolution. The Fire boarded a flight for Los Angeles in preparation for Friday’s game, and MLS Commissioner Don Garber told reporters mid-day that talks in Washington, D.C. were “productive.’’
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