The MLS teams who are getting the most bang for their salary bucks
Major League Soccer's Players Union released its twice-yearly salary dump on Tuesday – identifying base and guaranteed salaries of all stateside players – sending stateside Soccer Twitter into a frenzy of assessing who is overpaid and, less urgently, who is underpaid.
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But we're men of science over here at FC Yahoo (cough) and so, rather than superimpose totally subjective and artificial order over a ridiculously inconsistent pay scale (how, exactly, do you compare someone making $7 million to someone getting paid $150,000 to do the same job?), we thought we'd go about it differently.
Instead of comparing salaries of single players, we've cross-referenced total team payrolls of guaranteed money with their current points-per-game average. Because taking a salary in isolation can be deceptive. It's unclear which of the MLSPU's figures include amortized transfer fees or have been bought down with allocation money. Or which are just plain wrong, as plenty have been in the past. Take them as a unit, however, and you get a clearer and more reliable picture of a club's given outlay.
The MLSPU numbers are as of Sept. 15, 2015. The teams' records are as of Sept. 22, 2015. Total guaranteed payroll figures come courtesy of the heroic @TravisLuscombe.
Team | Points Per Game Record | W-L-T | Payroll | Payroll Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1. New York Red Bulls | 1.71 | 14-8-6 | $4.22m | 19th |
2. FC Dallas | 1.68 | 14-9-5 | $4.09m | 20th |
3. Vancouver Whitecaps | 1.66 | 15-11-3 | $6.26m | 8th |
4. Los Angeles Galaxy | 1.57 | 13-9-8 | $21.26m | 2nd |
5. Columbus Crew | 1.57 | 13-9-8 | $5.74m | 12th |
6. Sporting Kansas City | 1.57 | 12-8-8 | $5.88m | 10th |
7. New England Revolution | 1.53 | 13-10-7 | $6.51m | 6th |
8. Seattle Sounders | 1.50 | 14-13-3 | $13.28m | 4th |
9. D.C. United | 1.50 | 13-11-6 | $4.28m | 18th |
10. Portland Timbers | 1.41 | 11-10-8 | $6.05m | 9th |
11. Toronto FC | 1.38 | 12-13-4 | $22.13m | 1st |
12. San Jose Earthquakes | 1.33 | 11-12-7 | $5.33m | 15th |
13. Montreal Impact | 1.33 | 10-11-6 | $6.30m | 7th |
14. Real Salt Lake | 1.31 | 10-11-8 | $5.43m | 13th |
15. Houston Dynamo | 1.21 | 9-12-8 | $5.12m | 16th |
16. Orlando City SC | 1.17 | 9-13-8 | $11.29m | 5th |
17. Colorado Rapids | 1.17 | 8-11-10 | $5.05m | 17th |
18. New York City FC | 1.13 | 9-14-7 | $17.41m | 3rd |
19. Philadelphia Union | 1.10 | 9-15-6 | $5.40m | 14th |
20. Chicago Fire | 0.93 | 7-16-6 | $5.84m | 11th |
Plainly, the mega-salaries of many of the designated players – Kaka and Sebastian Giovinco's reported $7.1 million wages, Michael Bradley's $6.5 million, Steven Gerrard's $6.3 million, etc. – still throws off these numbers, as those four each make more than 13 teams do in their totality just by themselves. (Again, if these numbers are correct.)
But compare the total outlay to the results they have produced, and you'll find a much better feel for which teams are getting value for their money. You probably can't help but notice that the two teams with the lowest purported payrolls have also have the two best points-per-game averages in the league.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
