Late last month, I spoke at some length with Dallas Texans club president Paul Stewart for a story I was writing on Emerson Hyndman and the club’s ongoing battle for compensation to visit these shores (you can read that here if you’re so inclined).

In the course of our conversation, I could sense a kind of resigned battle fatigue in Stewart’s words. He was hopeful but not optimistic that the fight between the players’ representatives (training compensation is bad because it takes money from our players) and the youth clubs (we need and deserve compensation for the hours of development we spent on these players) would resolve itself with a settlement.

Less than two weeks later, the Texans officially joined together with Crossfire and Sockers FC in a class action lawsuit against the MLS Players Union for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’d be owed anywhere else in the world.

When I talked to Stewart, the Texans’ solidarity guru in their front office, he seemed to think resolution wouldn’t come in this case until we had a landmark court case in the U.S. to explicitly determine that youth clubs are owed the money FIFA dictates under its incredibly simple-to-understand 21st Article.

Now that we have an official, blustery response from the MLSPU to this class action lawsuit, Stewart’s words seem more prescient than ever. The trenches have never been deeper.

The MLSPU, through executive director Bob Foose, went straight for the jugular by calling this “a shakedown for money.” If you don’t see warning bells, you are not looking hard enough.

To their credit, U.S. Soccer and MLS HQ as broader entities have both been conciliatory over the past 12 months. While both stand fast in their convictions to a degree, at the least both have expressed a willingness to come to the table. The MLSPU, meanwhile, exists outside that construct, the proverbial attack dog braying at the leash in an attempt to cow their opposite number into submission with fire rhetoric.

Foose has been strong-willed before in his public comments. But this? This is blind viciousness.

“What this amounts to, regardless of how it’s being couched by the clubs, is the clubs are just seeking a piece of pay from former players,” Foose said. “For high profile players who are lucky enough to get abroad it just means they are going to make less. And for most of our players in the U.S. this is going to mean they are not going to have opportunities to go [overseas] because clubs won’t sign them because the cost of signing them will go up substantially. So they just won’t bother. That’s going to have a horrible effect on our players.”

There is a lot to unpack here. And much of it is diseased.

Foose and by extension the MLSPU’s primary claim underwriting everything they’ve ever said on this topic is that the clubs are money hungry. Legally, attempting to establish no basis for youth clubs’ claims by discrediting their aims is taught in prosecutorial rhetoric classes from sea to sea. So by saying Crossfire doesn’t care about DeAndre Yedlin and merely wants to profit on his success? It plays in some judges courtrooms.

The problem is that there is global precedent for what the Texans and Crossfire and Sockers and others are striving for. FIFA itself supports it, as does literally every country on earth that does not lean back on an antitrust ruling in 1998. Which is all of them except one.

I don’t know where Foose’s argument about American players being cut out of transfers abroad based on training payment comes from, or on what basis it is founded. Based on FIFA’s sliding scale, the Texans would’ve been in line for a $180,000 windfall off Clint Dempsey’s $9 million sale to MLS in 2013. Had it been in the opposite direction, would a European club really kill an entire deal on a down-scaled American budget player (all American players are budget players) because it had to pay 2-5 percent of the overall transfer fee to a youth club that developed him?

Lest we forget, all this rose to a bubbling roar in the first place because Tottenham reached out to Akron in 2014 about Yedlin’s solidarity payments. European clubs are literally asking where they send the money.

And then there’s this.

“The rules for training compensation and solidarity payments were intended to compensate small professional clubs when big professional clubs took their players and signed their players,” said Foose. “That’s what the system is for. It’s not for what this is, which is an attempt to double-dip by nonprofit U.S. youth clubs that don’t even have professional teams.”

The MLSPU has gone to great lengths to separate themselves from the world when it comes to training solidarity. The U.S. is different, they claim, because of our antitrust laws, and so all of this is quite illegal. So for Foose to then compare the U.S. back to the rest of the globe when it suits the argument is rich. I also don’t think it suits their purpose. At all.

In truth, the U.S. is different from the rest of the world because most of our youth players don’t originate from professional clubs, of which there are comparatively few in this country that also have working academies. So yes, while Spanish international Pedro’s minuscule fifth-tier youth club in the Canary Islands also had a “pro” side – one that was handsomely paid upon his recent sale to Chelsea – it’s nearly impossible to latch onto a youth club overseas that doesn’t.

That’s not the case in the U.S. Take a peek at the development history of the notable majority of MLS Homegrowns and you’ll notice they were not really developed by their ultimate parent MLS club. Many – including in this case DeAndre Yedlin – latched onto MLS academy sides as high school juniors or seniors to harvest the benefit. There is nothing patently wrong about that. It happens all over the world, and in many cases the players are ultimately better off for it.

But to then ignore the club that put them in that position in the first place is a grave disservice to a high end youth soccer production system we have tried and failed to produce in this country. The marginalization of the youth clubs identifying and developing these players to put them in position for bigger things is the ultimate problem with our system. We don’t value youth producers enough. We push them aside and assume they’re money grubbing and not instead that they are genuinely trying to improve.

My bet is the MLSPU will press this basic tenet laid plain by Foose earlier this week.

“In this case, if you think about, the clubs that are pursuing this action they didn’t even have anywhere [else] for those players to play,” Foose said. “They didn’t lose anything. They were fully compensated for the training for those three players. And they had no professional team for them to offer them a contract on. They’re simply now going back and asking for money on top of the deal that they struck at the time when they agreed to train the kids.”

Foose’s earlier points were, to me, non-negotiable, false and easily refutable. This is not. And I suspect that if the MLSPU wins its case in American courts (for now), the notion that pay-to-play has already compensated these clubs will probably be at the heart of it. So the clubs are essentially negotiating on premise and not legal bedrock.

What I would argue is that pay-to-play only really exists because payment mechanisms from the top down for player sales don’t exist in any form in this country. MLS pockets them. This creates an intractable cycle the clubs will be unable to escape without help. When I spoke with Akron coach Jared Embick on this topic in April, he made a point that has rattled inside my head for months.

Incentive.

“A huge part of it I think is, there’s no incentive in this country for the development of players,” Embick said. “In Europe, that’s how some clubs survive. They promote youth, they stay mid-table, sell their kid off for $20 million when they get a special one and that funds the club for a while. They might not have the funds to compete and win it all, but they can develop. “Here, the Cleveland Internationals have I think eight guys in MLS. Well, their kids have to pay to play in their academy because there’s no funding to help it. If they would’ve gotten money for those eight kids in MLS, that means another 40 kids don’t have to pay. Those things I think over time help. The message is hey, we might not win this, but we can produce maybe another Darlington Nagbe we can sell, and things are different.”

Whether you can build a legal case on something like that? I don’t know. But I do know that providing that incentive makes everyone better, most of all MLS and U.S. Soccer and the top of the ladder everywhere else. If the MLSPU wins because their argument is that it’ll take dollars out of players’ pockets in the interim, well, I’d say that view is myopic and shortsighted. It also does not take into account that most of the best players in the country are on scholarships or play for a free-to-play academy. Like the Dallas Texans’ Development Academy setup.

Of course, both sides are flowing into the argument with tilted logic. So it goes. Crossfire DoC Bernie James told ESPN they aren’t “interested in money,” which is a stretch to the extreme.

“I can absolutely tell you from our club’s point of view, we’re not interested in money,” James said. “We’re interested in clarification of the rules, of FIFA rules. Just give us a simple clarification, once and for all, and do FIFA rules apply and where do they apply? That is the absolute truth.”

To say the clubs aren’t interested in money isn’t necessarily true – they need it to stay alive – but it is true that the money isn’t the point. Talk to any club and spend time watching them train and mold and create relationships with their players and you’ll see as much. The MLSPU can easily sit in a lofted seat and say these clubs are merely shaking down their former players for money, but they aren’t on the training fields with them when they’re 14. The vision is necessarily constricted.

The MLSPU will lose this fight. Maybe not this year, or next, but the clubs will win as they have everywhere else. What we might see is an Americanized version of what exists elsewhere, where the two sides sit down at a table and work out their own solidarity packages inside a uniquely American construct.

The trouble now is that the MLSPU and the clubs are both as unbending as ever. It does not take 20/20 vision to see which side will eventually break.