MLS: Pay cuts grim business but necessary for league

MLS is trying to survive the financial implications of the COVID-19 global pandemic. To do so, executives and players will conduct wide-ranging pay cuts.

Major League Soccer will pay staff and players without furloughs or layoffs, but to ensure the league survives from now through a hoped-for June 8 restart, executives will take a deep pay cut.

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Commissioner Don Garber and deputy commissioners Mark Abbott and Gary Stevenson started 25% cuts on April 16. Other top staff will accept cuts from 10%-20%. Lower-salary employees are exempt, but those exemptions do not include the players on the pitch.

MLS suspended the season after completing the second match on March 12. Sports leagues have gone dark to ensure social distancing to reduce the infection rate of the coronavirus and are now abiding by the health guidelines of their respective.

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Next on the pay cut agenda are the players. League officials doing the calculations say they will have to make significant financial sacrifices, not just now but even after play resumes.

The league and Players Association just agreed on the framework of a new five-year Collective Bargaining Agreement signed last Feb. 6. Then came the pandemic and the agreement never got ratified. That must seem like years ago to the stakeholders as the collective health and financial nightmare of this pandemic continues to crawl through millions of households.

MLS announced that, like other leagues, they have launched negotiations with the players association to see how much they will absorb from the pandemic’s financial impact. Like lower-paid MLS staffers, the announcement emphasized lower-paid players would be protected.

Any agreement the players association signs would grant full salary should all matches get played before paying fans when the season resumes. Some information has leaked but the fine details of calculations and their wording are not being officially disclosed by MLS. Neither is the players association commenting publicly on how well they’ve received initial negotiations.

So far, neither party has gotten close to formal proposals. However, the bulk of players would take up to 50% in pay cuts if games are canceled, with the negative-percentage reducing by how many games get played before fans. The calculation would go differently per games played with no fans. The cut-off for salary cuts is below $100,000.

Negotiators for both sides will take whatever measures are necessary to ensure the league survives and regains health after this pandemic. But for now, it seems as though pay cuts on the way, in one form or another.