Toronto FC teammates Lorenzo Insigne AND Federico Bernardeschi take home more than all 11 lists MLS teams – and no player is the league’s top scorer either.
On Tuesday, the MLS Players Association released salary information for every player in the league after the recently closed transfer window. Despite the staggering sums taken home by Toronto’s champion forward duo at Euro 2020, it is Chicago Fire Players xherdan Shaqiri who leads all MLS players with a salary of $8.15 million. His club isn’t particularly benefiting from the outlay, according to head coach Ezra Hendrickson was fired due to poor results earlier in May and the Swiss has alternated in and out of the lineup this season.
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The combined guaranteed compensation of Insigne and Bernardeschi was greater than the entire 2023 first team payroll for Charlotte, ColoradoSan Jose, PhiladelphiaVancouver, MINNESOTA, The real Salt Lake, Orlando, New York Red Bulls, Saint Louis and Montreal, in order of decreasing expenses. At the other end of the spectrum, three teams have built their rosters without a single player earning more than the maximum salary that can be purchased with target allocation money (TAM): New York, San Jose and St.
It’s important to remember that guaranteed compensation amounts are not the full amount a team spends on its roster. The numbers do not take into account the transfer and loan fees clubs pay for individual players; those totals can run into the tens of millions. This season sees increases in the caps for both the high salary cap ($651,250) and the maximum salary that can be purchased with target allocation money (TAM) ($1.651 million) after those caps were frozen over the past two seasons for due to modifications made to the CBA due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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2023 guaranteed compensation for MLS teams
While higher salaries drive the headlines, it’s worth considering how teams budget for the back half of their rosters as well. No team spends more on the salaries of players below the senior cap Houston Dynamowinning this employee’s category with $7,935,446 spent. New York City and San Jose lead the rest of the league in terms of salary committed to players earning in the TAM range, at $9.26 million and $9.08 million, respectively.
Talking to Athletics regarding the release of salary information, MLS Players Association executive director Bob Foose believes this information represents a good first step toward achieving the goals that were set during the most recent round of collective bargaining talks. Many key elements of that pact from the beginning of 2021including raising the high salary cap and reducing discretionary target money, finally went into effect this season.
Overall, Foose takes pride in the earnings made by players outside of the top tier of league winners.
“Looking at what our goals were in the last negotiations, a lot of them were focused on increasing compensation and basic fairness in terms of compensation across the entire player pool,” Foose said. Athletics. “We’re very pleased with how the salary cap has developed over the course of this deal – particularly as we’ve seen growth in the middle and back end of the senior list accelerate and outpace growth at the top of the list. This is something we’ve been stressing about the league for a long time now: how the money is spent across the roster is actually absolutely critical to the quality of our teams. Having a lot of salary concentrated at the top of the roster was not the way to maximize quality on the field. We’ve seen real growth there.”
It is important to note that while this salary data is the only publicly available information from a primary source regarding MLS Player Compensation The formula the MLSPA uses for guaranteed compensation is not a perfect reflection of a player’s actual earnings in a given year. The MLSPA annualizes the bonuses in a contract over the total years of the agreement to get guaranteed compensation, which can inflate or deflate a salary in any given year over the life of the contract.
More importantly, these salary figures are also not the numbers that players hit a team’s budget with. These budget fees also include an annual portion of transfer or loan fees associated with an individual player. This is a very important part of budget calculations for clubs, considering that many of them are active in the global transfer market.
In terms of salary, Toronto leads the pack in all spending differentials, with $25.7 million being shared among the 29 players taking part in the second year of Bob Bradley’s rebuild.
In 2023, four teams put 10 players on their roster over the high budget cap: Atlanta, DC, New York City and Toronto. The New York Red Bulls are the only team to build its roster with just three players making more than $651,250, while Houston and Montreal were tied with four such salaries on their books. Ten teams found a way to dedicate more than half of their total salary to cover the rest of the roster beyond the top five earners: Charlotte, Colorado, Kansas City, Minnesota, Montreal, New York Red Bulls, New York City FC, Philadelphia, Real Salt Lake and San Jose.
Percentage of spending on top earners
(Note: Clicking on the column headings will sort the table above by that measure)
No team comes closer to total salary cap spending for a single player than Chicago with Shaqiri, by a margin of 41.8%, which is more than Colorado spends on its top five earners (40.8%). Toronto FC devotes the highest percentage of total salary expenditure to a trio of players, with the Canadian national team Jonathan Osorio joining his two fellow Italians to make up 59% of the Reds’ overall bill.
Imagine a world where each MLS team can spend upwards of $25 million on player salaries, but a world where they can now spread that total evenly across their roster. Rather than spending more than half that on two or three players due to certain player limitations, as Toronto does with Bernardeschi and Insigne, they can spread that outlay across their projected lineup, as well some essential depth options. In this scenario, the team’s top earner could earn $4 million, the second- and third-highest could earn $2 million apiece, and the remaining seven players in their top 10 could each receive a average annual salary up to 1.5 million dollars. Even that would leave $6.5 million of that $25 million budget for players 11 through 30, with an average salary of $325,000 — not far off the difference between the minimum and maximum this season.
A team in that scenario might lose some star power, but the club would be able to sign more high-quality players if allowed to spread the money more evenly. Instead, the rules favor the group’s less ambitious owners, ensuring that their freer-spending peers cannot gain a serious competitive advantage. It’s certainly limiting the league’s potential on a global scale, but it helps ensure that nine teams per conference look worthy (or most of them, anyway) of earning a playoff spot.
Over time, the new CBA should help give teams more freedom to maneuver differently from one another. It’s an area Foose feels is crucial to helping the quality of play in this league improve faster.
“We’ve seen TAM become less important,” Foose said. “This was very intentional on our part. We want to see all player spending be unlimited from year to year and allow teams the flexibility to make their own decisions about how they structure their roster, and we’re working towards that. But at the same time, we’ve seen double-digit compound annual growth in every country on the aging list over the past 20 years or so. Then, at the bottom of the pay scale, minimums continue to progress. We will get them to a minimum of over $100,000 before this deal ends (in 2027), which is always the goal.
In all, 204 players earn as much or more than MLS’ maximum budget fee of $651,250 — nearly 25 percent of the league. This makes sense, since the players who earn that much are either DP (three per team) or TAM players (usually around three or four per team). The league lists 112 players making $1 million or more in guaranteed compensation, up from 91 players in 2022 and 78 in 2021. A handful of those players (Leandro Gonzalez Pirez, Taty Castellanos, Alexandru Mitrita, Ezequiel Barco) do not play on the MLS.
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It’s no surprise that most of the big-money signings can be found on the attacking end of the pitch. The numbers are a little skewed because the MLSPA ranked defensive midfielders as defenders, but teams concentrated their spending on forwards and midfielders — about 70 percent, according to the salary release. Nearly 40 percent of that was focused on attackers. This is by design, of course. Better attacking players should theoretically lead to better attacking football, and when the balance is tipped against defenders, it should lead to higher scoring games.
Only two defenders – NashvilleS ‘ Walker Zimmerman and NYCFC Thiago Martins – earn more than 1.5 million dollars per season. Another 13 defenders earn $1 million. of Toronto Richie Laryea is the only defender in that group. Every other player in the top spending bracket has been signed to score or create goals.
Similarly, MLS teams have historically tried to keep goalkeeper spending low, and that remains true this year. Only 5.3 percent of total expenditures in guaranteed compensation were spent on goalkeepers. Expansion team St. Roman Burki for a contract that pays him $1.63 million this season, and so far he is goalkeeper rated by American Soccer Analysis in terms of added goals, thanks a lot because he was rated as MLS’ best scorer in this position.
Every other goaltender earns less than $1 million, and only four (including Bürki) earn $700,000.
(Featured photos: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images; Angel Marchini/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images. Design: Eamonn Dalton)
