why would the players' association care how transfer fees are distributed, nevermind have a say over it?
I just read
this excellent analysis (I scoffed initially at that guy's Patreon request at the top, but after reading it, he's got a case...), and I'm still left quite cold. Gulati himself was incredibly disingenuous, it seemed to boil down to him not feeling like he had leverage over MLS given that's where his bread got buttered. But
this quote by the MLSPU, man...
“We have said consistently that training compensation and solidarity payments are bad for players, and would treat players differently than employees in any other industry, including sports,” Foose said. “For example, it’s absurd to think that a business school could demand a fee from a company that hired one of its students. Yet, that’s the kind of payments the youth clubs seek.
“No player should have the market for his services adversely affected by these payments. This is not to say that players and the Players Union don’t believe in and support youth development. We do, but it should not be funded through a tax on randomly selected professional players’ contracts.”
IT DOESN'T AFFECT WHAT YOUR PLAYER GETS PAID TO HIMSELF PERSONALLY. It's a team dividing the pie for selling an asset. YOU LIVE IN P&L LAND, THEY'RE NEGOTIATING A BALANCE-SHEET TRANSACTION. TAKE SOME FUCKING ACCOUNTING 101.
And that's before we get into how junior-high-school level his analogy is, to say nothing of his idea that the set of players who attract interest from buying clubs are "randomly selected". Has he heard of headhunters? They're paid a bounty for bringing to a company a new employee meeting their exacting standards. It's a pretty big industry, and clearly a company's willingness to pay is fixed, and thus zero-sum between the headhunter and the employee, so any employee hired under those arrangements must have seen their compensation go down accordingly. So Foose must have heard of the vicious antitrust lawsuits that HAVE NEVER EXISTED BECAUSE THEY'D GET LAUGHED OUT OF COURT. Most particularly because the bounty is one-time whereas an employee's compensation is ongoing, so the longer and more successful the employment arrangement proves for both sides, the greater the time over which that bounty amortizes, meaning that the ultimate financial affect on successful employees approaches zero.
You can find as many situations as you like in which an employee's services have multiple parties making financial dealings over them - and in basically no case can the employee themselves complain of having their compensation affected, nevermind being illegally restrained. E.g., some non-compete agreements are bought out by either an employer or an employee sufficiently willing to meet a (when reasonable) rights-holding ex-employer's terms. Multi-level marketing schemes see participants willingly join into a situation where their commissions on sales "rolls up the food chain". Has Foose ever heard of the contractual conditions that music labels impose on young talent? Or perhaps heard how literary agents are compensated? If only he were there to sue an entire industry over it!
...as you might suspect, my patience runs thin with this sophistry. But even that nonsense doesn't explain why the MLSPU would think that their players' compensation would be affected by a
foreign club purchasing the contract of an MLS player. Like, he's not your player anymore. He's going to a different federation, and is probably fucking thrilled about it. So you have standing to sue because... he
used to be in your union? And your decision to sue BW Gottschee or whoever-the-hell youth club when they want a share of NY Red Bulls selling to Paris Saint-Germain is based on the legal theory of... what, exactly? We get some indication farther down from the
Dempsey/Yedlin/Bradley suit:
52. Mr. Foose stated that the imposition of any training compensation or solidarity fee, either internationally or domestically, is an illegal restraint of player trade. Mr. Foose argued that the purchase and professional signing of a soccer player involves a "finite amount" of money, and that any money from that transaction that is forced to go to the youth training clubs is money that is directly taken from the player in the transaction. Mr. Foose's position was, in essence, that a player transaction is a zero-sum game between the player and the youth training club, and that US antitrust law inures to the benefit of the player to block the imposition of a solidarity fee or training compensation.
There are no better answers I can find, and this amounts to "we don't like it and we have greater resources to pursue frivolous lawsuits than some rinky-dink youth club who could
really use that 20 grand we don't want them to have".
Better lawyers than I populate these boards, but my amateur reading is that Mr. Foose has no fucking idea what he's on about. In the status quo, the selling club receives 100% of the transfer fee (absent sell-on provisions that complicate the math, but never mind that), and the player receives nothing. In the FIFA DRC / solidarity world, the selling club receives, whatever it is, 80%-95% of the transfer fee, and various youth clubs receive the remainder according to a complex formula - and the player still receives nothing. The player gets what wages they negotiate under their playing contract, regardless of who they're playing for, and when that contract is up they are free to negotiate whatever else they can get a club to pay them. And if they don't like those arrangements they can hold out or otherwise whine in the course of a transfer to get a bump in exchange for accepting the transfer - at least, if the transfer is to a team with greater financial resources who might expect to be shaken down in such a fashion, and will price the transfer fee
lower accordingly. But in no case, from what I can tell, would player wages go up or down based on who is receiving a transfer fee.
The buying club has a set willingness to pay. First theorem of marketing: demand is exogenous. And while the selling club more or less needs to take the best offer, what fraction of that offer they keep (vs have to give down the food chain) has absolutely no influence on their decision to accept the offer or not. And one thing it
certainly doesn't influence is the player's wages, because the player is under contract (or else they'd just be signed on a free transfer).
Basically, I'd like Foose-ball here to explain to me whose trade is being restrained, when the market for a player's services is not even being
consulted on the transaction (his compensation is fixed under contract - nobody is giving
him bids for his services, as he is already promised to the holder of his contract). Restraints on free-agent player movement? Sure thing. I buy Bosman. But these are players under contract; there are trades of players under contract in every damn pro sport, which is something players accept because it increases overall demand for their services (in growing the league / fan interest / less 'wasted' salary on the books), while leaving total wages unaffected.
The article I linked to goes into legal standards of review for restraints of trade, but moves on assuming Foose is correct, which I think is very fucking arguable.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the
stupid lawyers.
edit: wait, we do have an antitrust lawyer here. I'd like to invite
@bowiac to wade into this morass if he's so inclined.