Major League Soccer has gone along for the ride. While its revenue and ratings still lag far behind billion-dollar behemoths like the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball, M.L.S., which opens its postseason this week, has minted its own crop of multimillionaire players, has established attendance records and is set for an infusion of television money starting next year.

Yet in some ways, salaries in the league show how far the sport has to go. While the best-paid players in M.L.S. — American stars like Clint Dempsey ($6.7 million) and Michael Bradley ($6.5 million) along with a smattering of imported stars — command salaries comparable to or better than what they would make in Europe’s best leagues, they remain American soccer’s 1 percent. According to figures released annually by the league’s players union, only 23 of the 572 players listed had a base salary greater than the minimum salary in the N.H.L., a league that M.L.S. has been trying to overtake in popularity. Nearly a third of the league’s total payroll of about $130 million goes to the seven best-paid players, and for each of them there are dozens of others making $50,000 or less.

For that much larger group, the payoff for soccer’s recent rise has been negligible — and negotiations this winter for a new labor agreement could determine how much that changes.

“Rosters cannot be built solely at the top,” said Bob Foose, the executive director of the Major League Soccer Players Union. “In addition to investment in designated players, the middle of the M.L.S. salary structure needs to be substantially improved in order to retain and attract talent and reward those players who contribute on the field every week.”

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Berner’s salary this year is $36,500, the M.L.S. minimum for players under the age of 25. The money does not go far. He devotes several hundred dollars a month to repaying student loans and paying the bills on his 2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee. His income is sufficiently low that he qualified for an affordable housing unit in his Denver apartment building.