Bang per buck goes missing in MLS this season

By on November 23, 2015

When the Los Angeles Galaxy visited Avaya Stadium this August, it was Steven Gerrard’s first ever match in the San Francisco Bay Area. High in one corner of Avaya Stadium, a pack of fans in Gerrard’s renowned #8 Liverpool kit congregated. His name ably delivered butts on seats, but didn’t guarantee wins this season. Marc Pelosi, a twenty-one-year-old midfield and Liverpool academy graduate, outperformed Gerrard in the midfield as the San Jose Earthquakes defeated the Galaxy 1-0. One woman near that pack of Gerrard fans wearing a Pelosi kit must have felt very vindicated that night.

Gerrard makes $6,200,004-a-year at Liverpool, whilst Pelosi earns a paltry $72,000 annual salary with his Quakes for contract — one eighty-sixth the level of his counterpart. In the match, however, just one single Pelosi had a bigger effect than Gerrard, let alone eighty-six of him. In fact, the Quakes’ entire twenty-eight man roster collectively earn more than a million dollars less than Gerrard.

LA also pay the likes of Robbie Keane and Giovani dos Santos big bucks — their total wage bill capping out at a little under $22m-a-year, yet the club still crashed out of the Major League Soccer playoffs in the first round. Being the reigning champions, MLS will have a new winner this year. The final four in the playoffs are the Portland Timbers, the New York Red Bulls, the Columbus Crew and FC Dallas, whose combined wage bills aren’t collectively as high as LA’s.

Generally, it’s considered that the more money spent, the better a team does in professional sports, a correlation that certainly holds true in much of the rest of world football, yet MLS has always been quirky. Although LA have won three of the last four MLS Cups, they’re not even the highest spending team in the league, that’s Toronto FC. Toronto haven’t won a single MLS Cup, in fact, this year was the first in their ninth season of existence that they even qualified for the playoffs. They barely scraped through, finishing sixth place in the Eastern Conference, and were promptly dumped out of the playoffs by the Montreal Impact.

This season, there were five big spenders in MLS, who paid their squads between $11m and $22m-a-year. Nobody else spent more than $7m on their annual wage bills. Of those five big spenders — the Seattle Sounders, Orlando City FC, New York City FC, LA and Toronto, only three made the playoffs when in fact the majority of MLS teams made the cut.

Over the course of the regular season, the bang per buck from MLS teams’ spending is not at all impressive, indeed if anything, a slightly negative correlation exists between total league points and spending (charts below). Notably, the two best performing teams this year, FC Dallas and the Red Bulls, were also the two lowest spenders in the league. The LOWEST spenders (although, it admittedly isn’t looking good for them in the MLS Cup semifinals). Obviously, they overachieved the most in the league and had by far the biggest bang per buck.

These charts also provide clear examples of the extent of MLS’ parity, with all but four clubs clustered between goal differentials of +/- 10 points. The EPL, by contrast, had three times as many clubs with wider goal differentials last season.

So…why spend big bucks if it doesn’t pay rewards in terms of wins or net goals? In large-market cities such as LA, New York, and to an extent Toronto (with hockey and baseball) it’s harder to stand out and easier to attract star names. But if money doesn’t buy success in MLS, what does it buy? More on that in part two of this analysis of MLS.

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.