invertigo hayfever

If there's any piece of MLS news that I would expect people on cohost to know about, at least peripherally, it would be the current PRSA labor dispute and lockout.

There are two big things that happened since the start of the last MLS season and now. The first is, of course, that Lionel Messi was signed to play for Inter Miami, a signing of such significance that it completely altered their fortune in the league once performed and gave them a qualifying spot for the Champion's Cup. It's done a lot to bring attention to the team, and, correspondingly, to the league itself. A once-struggling team now finds itself having sold out of its season tickets, drawing massive attendance levels.

The other big thing is that the collective bargaining agreement for the labor union representing professional referees in the US, the Professional Soccer Referees Organization (PSRA) expired. The last one was ratified in 2019, and the one before that was ratified in 2014, so these are 5-year agreements. The agreement signed in 2014 also was the product of a labor dispute, and a decade later it's not terribly hard to understand why there's a new one.

These things are related. MLS has an unusual structure for a professional soccer league, in that it is managed a bit like, say, a national store chain. Individual owners pay a franchise fee in order to get a team, and the league's finances are, essentially, collectively owned and managed by team managers, league executives, and stockholders. You can find a good summary of the details of the structure (and why it exists) at lexsportiva, which emphasizes that one of the reasons this structure was adopted was to prevent the league, which was for a sport that was relatively low in popularity in the US, didn't expand out in a way that was unsustainable. That sort of thing tends to doom a business; see, for example, what happened to Subway.

For the individual team, this means that there are a number of relatively complex rules regarding actually managing team rosters and player compensation, with a tight salary cap. If, however, a team like Inter Miami finds a player who's as significant of a draw to the game as Messi is and are able to fund his transfer and wages, the entire league benefits from it financially, not just Inter Miami.

There is of course an interesting lesson to be taken here: for as much as the US's propaganda machines may go on about the evil nature of communism, organizations are happy to adopt principles of communist organizing as long as they can be used in service of the investor class. This also means that players may also need to have their own lockouts to ensure their collective bargaining agreements are in their interest, like what happened back in 2021.

It's fairly easy to understand how these labor agreements work for the players. Players work for a team, which trains them up in the skills they need to play the game, and it's up that team's management to determine what the roster will be for any given match. These teams are all part of the larger MLS organization as franchisees. Players have a union, the MLS Players Association, that they're part of that helps them negotiate better terms in these CBAs. When players go on strike/lockout, they're organizing against the teams and the league for better terms.¹

It will not surprise you to find that there's a similar structure in place for referees. The MLS has an organization that is, in effect, a team for referees -- the Professional Referees Organization (PRO). This organization is the one that's responsible for managing the referees, training them, paying their salaries, and for assigning referee rosters to games. As with the players, the referees have an organization, the PRSA, that represents them as a unit for bargaining terms with groups like PRO².

As a relevant aside, and a post I meant to make back when these issues were fresher, is that this isn't the only dispute between PRSA and PRO in recent history. There was one a couple years back between the PRSA and PRO2; PRO2 serves the same purpose as PRO, but manages referees who primarily officiate leagues deemed lower-status than the MLS, such as the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL)³ and both of the top two USL leagues. When that dispute happened it was over fairly straightforward things: better pay, better training (i.e., the ability to review calls for accuracy after a match in order to get better experience for future matches), and better scheduling. While I might complain about the quality of a PRO2 referee during a match, the general consensus would be that they agreed, and the quality issues were at least partly due to a lack of institutional support. PRO2 was not unionized at the time. Fortunately, the PRO2 unionization under PRSA was recognized, and a CBA was ratified near the start of the season last year.

All of this is to say that it's not terribly difficult to see what it is that the PRSA wants out of this dispute, and why they stage protests outside of the PRO offices as well as MLS. With the new money coming into the league, they want their fair share.

MLS is trying to continue despite the lockout and are hiring referees who lack the training and experience to be competent officials. For very obvious reasons, the players' association has spoken out against the league as well, calling it a threat to player safety.

The MLS and commissioner Don Garber have, as you'd expect, tried to pain the deal as lazy referees seeking overcompensation for their work. Naturally, the PRSA says this is a gross mischaracterization of their dispute. Which isn't surprising -- they're speaking to the public, not the union. If this was an accurate characterization of the union's demands, they'd be settling it privately with them. The MLS would have you believe that the PRSA's proposal would make them the highest-compensated referees in the world. The PRSA's demands are worth stating explicitly, as taken from the press releases linked in this paragraph.

The highest pay increases would have benefited few officials, not the whole membership. Averages are deceiving when workers are paid so little. For example, some officials are paid $2,000 for off-field work commitments. Increasing these 100% to $4,000 does not capture the increases in the workload and does not remotely keep up with the growth around them. Meanwhile, in the last 5 years, all referees have endured an additional 10% more days on the road.

When divided by team, the increase in wage costs in the rejected agreement would have been less than $40,000 per team in the first year of the agreement. This amounts to MLS/PRO putting less than $1M total into new wages in the first year for the workgroup of approximately 100 officials.

During negotiations, PRO rejected every comparator to referees across the world, instead comparing the referees to camera operators in terms of their value to the game. Meanwhile, now MLS is saying their offer is “among the highest in the world.” Contrasted with the referees of Germany, who are paid approximately 100,000 Euro base per season and 5,000 Euro per match, MLS/PRO’s offer was not remotely close to those kinds of wages.

MLS/PRO’s offer would have kept travel benefits for the 490+ regular season matches each year mostly unchanged from 5 years ago. PRO’s touted “improvement” would cover less than 4.5% of matches of the entire season.

MLS/PRO’s offer did not provide a proper health care plan or cost-effective benefits to 70 of the officials, as compared to benefits offered by serious employers to professional employees — especially those who live, train and work as athletes.

As of this week there has still been no agreement. 5 days ago, PRSA drafted an open letter to Don Garber about the dispute.

If I were a player, I'd be tempted to do a solidarity strike. Not just because of the obvious leftist arguments for a solidarity strike, but because the quality of the scab refs has been as bad as it is. Seriously, I'm linking the clip of Futbol Americas again because the blown call in the Inter Miami match are egregious. Stepping on a player's ankle like that is already a foul bad enough to be a red card in most leagues, and here the Miami player, Sergio Bousquets, simulates well enough for the scab ref to give LA Galaxy's Marco Delgado a red card. Not only is that opposite the call that actually happened, the shorthanded LA Galaxy let in a goal from Messi about 4 minutes later, down a man when they should have been up one.

MLS is saying to its players that they don't care about proper enforcement of the rules, and thus they don't care about the rules. If the rules don't matter, the competition has no integrity, and there's also no way to guarantee player safety. As it stands, these scab referees make the game meaningless.⁴

Not that I have any pull, but obviously I too am calling for MLS and PRO to do the right think and ratify the PRSA's CBA. The future of the league may well hinge on it, and without functional refereeing, it will be unwatchable.⁵

Here were the refs for the Inter Miami game.

1. This is different from most leagues in the world, because most leagues aren't collectively owned the way the MLS is. Teams make money and that money stays with the club. There are rules limiting where they get and how they spend their money (see, for example, the UEFA financial fair play rules), but teams are able to negotiate their own terms for player wages, transfer fees, and licensing rights. Real Madrid is possibly the most notable example, as they took much higher cuts of their players' licensing rights. This was done on the expectation that by signing as many of the best players in the entire world as they could, that they would sell more of the team's merchandise. Thus the relatively lower cut for the players themselves would be offset by the amount of merch the team would sell on the strength of their reputation, and the ability of their concentrated talent to win games.

2. The team analogy stretches reality a bit, though. PRO is not the only ref-managing organization in the US, and they're also not specifically tied to the MLS either, as PRO referees also supervise matches in other leagues, such as the USL Championship.

3. The NWSL is, of course, a division 1 league in the US, but is considered of lesser significance simple due to the relative amount of money it's able to draw in. Note that when the upcoming USL Super League starts in August, it will also have division 1 sanctioning.

4. And if you don't believe me when I say it's bad, believe me when I say that Alexi Lalas has gone to bad for the scab referees. If there's any clearer sign that a soccer opinion is wrong than seeing it espoused by Alexi Lalas, I don't know what would be.

5. Yes, there's an obvious joke here to be made by the version of the Statler and Waldorf who smugly announce they only watch LaLiga, and on that note do I invite you to come up with one yourself.