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At this point, to describe Major League Soccer as anything but “thriving” is to either be unrealistic, unfair or willfully ignorant of the enormous ground the 21-year-old circuit has made up in just the last few years.

Two more highly anticipated teams – Atlanta United and Minnesota United – join the new season that starts on Friday. The level of play is noticeably improving every season. The playoffs invariably make for great theater. Star power has multiplied. Average attendance is now the sixth-highest of any soccer league in the world – ahead of the Italian and French leagues. New ownerships are falling over themselves to buy expansion franchises for $150 million apiece, plus stadium construction. TV viewership has finally risen and sharply. And the youth academies are starting to bear fruit.

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This is not some overly friendly assessment. It isn’t cheerleading our domestic league. These are either facts or widely-held and well-supported opinions.

MLS is taking off.

Yet in the middle of this boom, the league is holding fast to the caution and considerations that brought it this far. That is, the things that made MLS the first truly viable and sustainable professional soccer league in American history, for men or women.

As ever, MLS – which holds a kind of veto power over its clubs’ major transactions – remains willing to spend big on established stars who bring attention, quality and credibility. And it has made increasing funds available to sign or retain tomorrow’s stars as well. But its control on the wages of all other players remains strict. An impossibly arcane system of acquisition mechanisms, rules and limitations shackles teams and all but the highest-value players to tight salary limits.

Ever wondered what #MLS' player acquisition rules look like in a flowchart? Here you go. (zoomable version here: https://t.co/hgDcLbFU2h) pic.twitter.com/4yTZFUK1PL — Alexander Abnos (@AnAbnos) February 8, 2017





This jumble of budgets and allocations, in the MLS parlance, creates something of an optical illusion, though. It makes the league look cheaper than it is, even if it only really wants to spend on elite talent. This, in turn, creates an optics problem.

Take, for instance, the salary cap. This season, it will be about $3.8 million – per team. This makes most casual observers assume that the 22 teams participating this year will spend a combined $83.6 million, or about half of what one of the juggernauts of the European leagues might lay out on player salaries by itself. Yet every single MLS team will almost certainly spend more. Multiples more.

Because in addition to the salary cap, clubs get $1.2 million in Targeted Allocation Money to spend on difference-making talent, as well as an unknown amount of unrestricted General Allocation Money – two mechanisms to bring teams under the cap. And three Designated Players per club, of course, can earn as much as teams are willing to pay them and only count towards the cap at $480,000.

Last year, two teams – Toronto FC and New York City FC – had guaranteed payrolls in the $21 million range, per MLS Players Union figures. Five teams were above $10 million.

Two years ago, salaries in Mexico’s older and more established Liga MX were, on average, still twice as high as in MLS.

.@MailSport study comparing average player salaries for the world's top soccer leagues:http://t.co/zLivSc7cIl pic.twitter.com/Q1S685cn3s — MLS Players Union (@MLSPlayersUnion) November 14, 2014





Now, payrolls at the high end of MLS would seem to be comparable to a lot of those south of the border – although it’s hard to get exact numbers – with the top salaries far higher stateside. “It’s competitive with what’s happening in Mexico and exceeds what a lot of countries in our region are spending,” MLS President and Deputy Commissioner Mark Abbott confirmed.

What few numbers are available to the public don’t quite reflect what is really being spent in MLS. In a sport where fans judge teams and entire leagues by how they spend money – lacking some other global metric – that’s an issue.

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