FILE - In this June 11, 2014, file photo, MLS Commissioner Don Garber speaks to reporters prior to an MLS soccer game between the Montreal Impact and DC United in Montreal. Garber says he doesn't see the MLS Cup final between two small market teams _ Portland and Columbus _ as less-than ideal. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Graham Hughes)

Commissioner Don Garber was, as usual, feeling bullish about Major League Soccer's past year and its future in his annual State of the League conference call with the media on Thursday, ahead of Sunday's 2015 MLS Cup final between the Columbus Crew and the Portland Timbers.

And quite rightly so.

Because the 2015 season gave us two more wildly successful expansion teams, a new television deal that has finally given MLS fixed weekly slots, a slew of big-name players crossing the Atlantic in this direction, attractive soccer and, thus far, rollicking playoffs.

Prospective ownership groups continued to fall over themselves to pay nine-figure expansion fees and cities offered to help build state-of-the-art stadiums. Garber boasted that the league has gone from a total valuation of $50 million in 1996 to an average value of $157 million per club today, affixed to it by Forbes – suggesting a $3.14 billion total valuation, before further expansion from the existing 20 teams.

Crucially, the league also set another record for its average attendance at 21,500, which ranks ninth in the world behind the Indian and Chinese leagues and their mega-population markets, but ahead of legacy nations like the Netherlands, Belgium, Scotland, Argentina, Brazil and Portugal.

But for all of its obvious and incontestable success, Major League Soccer remains a frustratingly opaque company. It's clearly a well-run outfit that has been practically immune to the scandal that seems to permeate just about every other soccer organization. But there is no real sense of how the sausage is made. Even the league's published rulebook is dense and vague and prone to being amended on the fly if the men in the corner offices deem it convenient.

Yet on Tuesday, Garber told SI.com it "surprises me that people don't accept at this point that the salary budget is one component of what we spend on players."

"So there's the designated player spending that's outside the budget," Garber said. "There's [Targeted Allocation Money] spending that's outside the budget, there's allocation money that's outside the budget, there's youth development spending that's outside the budget. We're spending infinitely more than the $4 million a club across all of our teams, even those that aren't spending a lot on designated players."

The $4 million figure was in reference to the league salary cap for 2019, when the collective bargaining agreement runs out, and is actually slated for $4.2 million that season. In 2015, the salary cap was $3.49 million.

This boils down to the essence of the problem – and it is most definitely a problem. People don't accept that the league spends more because they don't know how much it spends and has no way of verifying anything. We don't know what MLS spends because it obstinately refuses to put a number on it. (Whereas the MLS Players Union releases its salary figures several times per year, giving us a check on the payrolls, even if the numbers aren't always accurate.)

Garber mentioned in his State of the League that, presently, "investment in [the 20 MLS teams' youth] academies represents more total spending than the league was spending on player salaries just four or five years ago." But again, this was willfully nebulous.

In the Q&A with Garber on the call, Yahoo Sports asked him why the league wouldn't just make public what it spent on its clubs, rather than make vague allusions to it. "Wouldn't that," we asked, "be a better look?"

"I don't think it's a better look," responded Garber. "There isn't a major league that's talking about all the money they spend. I mean, we're a private company. I think it's important that we inform the public about our deep commitment and you can see the result of those commitments with new facilities that are being built on the academy level and training grounds and stadiums and the kinds of players that we're bringing in."

But we know with a fair amount of accuracy what other soccer clubs from major leagues around the world spend on their players – Liga MX is the notable exception, although it's believed the average salary is just under $400,000 per player. And we know precisely what every single MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL team spends. That information is out there and readily available.

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