Soccer newsletter: Winners and losers in the new MLS deal

Hello, and welcome to the L.A. Times’ soccer newsletter. I’m Kevin Baxter, The Times’ soccer writer, and we start today with the freshly minted collective bargaining agreement approved Monday by the MLS board of governors and the players union.

The deal clears the way for MLS training camps to open later this month and the regular season to kick off in early April — although there were indications Monday both dates could be pushed back slightly. The league promised individual team schedules will be released shortly.

A week ago in this space, I told you the labor talks would not end well after the league twice threatened to lock the players out if a deal wasn’t reached. And just because a deal was reached, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a happy ending.

For starters, the deal marked an overwhelming victory for the owners, who strong-armed the players into agreeing to the seven-year deal the league insisted on and also got the OK to freeze salaries at 2020 levels for two more seasons. In exchange, the players — who had threatened to fight but instead surrendered — will receive their full pay this season after giving back more than $100 million worth of concessions on salaries and bonuses last season in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The players also got modest changes to free agency in the final two years of the deal.

In the end, though, it was the league’s promise to make those 2021 paychecks whole again that appeared to carry the day. Oh, and its promise the players won’t be locked out. At least not now.

But stay tuned, because the force majeure clause, which the league invoked in December to force the union back to the bargaining table, can be implemented again ahead of next season.

A force majeure, a common contractual clause, basically frees both sides from obligations they agreed upon in the event of an extraordinary crisis such as a global pandemic. MLS, which threatened a lockout to get the clause inserted into the CBA in June, invoked its language in December to reopen negotiations, then threatened a lockout again to accelerate the talks that led to Monday’s agreement.

There’s no reason to think the league won’t consider a lockout again next winter, because MLS believes the COVID-19 pandemic represents an existential threat.

The league gets the vast majority of its revenue from game-day sales and sponsorships, and the pandemic not only shortened its season to 23 games in 2020 but also forced most teams to play before either empty stadiums or limited crowds. As a result, the league’s total attendance was just 637,020, according to Soccer Stadium Digest; Seattle and Atlanta United each drew that much by themselves in 2019.

The outlook isn’t good for this year either, with public health officials estimating it could be late summer or early fall before anything resembling a crowd is allowed back for live sporting events.

That set off alarm bells in the league’s New York offices.

“I don’t think any business could sustain the kind of impact we sustained in 2020 for two years in a row,” said Commissioner Don Garber, who has said COVID-19 cost the league nearly $1 billion in lost earnings last season.

So Garber approached the latest CBA talks, the third in 13 months, as if the league’s future depended on them.

The union had an even worse hand to play — especially after the league threatened a lockout. Because while playing before empty grandstands would cost the owners revenue, the prospect of a lockout would rob the players not only of their livelihood but also of their best bargaining position. Without fans clamoring to get back in the stadium to see their teams play live, the union had no way to exert pressure on the owners.

In fact, a lockout might have been in the owners’ best interest because if the teams had no player payrolls to meet, it might have proved wiser to keep the stadiums empty and the lights off.

There was one issue the players appeared firm on, however, and…