Major League Soccer has taken a hard look at itself, and, like many observers, concluded that in order for it to reach its stated goal of being one of the best soccer leagues in the world by 2022, the level of the players it can attract needs to go up.

To that end, the league announced on Wednesday that it was committing a total of some $37 million in new salary budgets to its 20 teams over the next two seasons. As usual, the mechanisms for doing so are complicated. Each team will receive a fund of $800,000 in so-called Targeted Allocation Money in each of the next two seasons. That's in addition to the $500,000 they had already been given earlier this year to spend in addition to their salary caps over the next five seasons, whenever they saw fit.

In 2015, the salary cap per team was $3.49 million, but that does not count allocation money – doled out by the league for performance, participation in the CONCACAF Champions League and exchanged by teams in external transfers and internal trades – TAM, or what designated players were paid over the $436,250 maximum salary cap hit per player. In all, MLS Executive Vice President for Player Relations and Competition Todd Durbin says, there were 10 teams spending at least $7 million on player payroll and four spending at least $15 million. He claimed the league as a whole actually spends some $200 million on player development and salaries beyond the $70 million or so in salary cap space.

The Designated Player program, in particular, has enabled a vast influx of high-profile talent since David Beckham's arrival in 2007, with total annual DP expenditure mushrooming from $32 million in 2011 to $115 million in 2015.

So what's changing?

The salary cap is expected to be about $3.7 million in 2016, not counting all of those extra funds. Somewhat oversimplified, the TAM will essentially allow teams to raise it to $4.5 million. But they can't spend it as they please. The new money has to go towards players making over the increased maximum salary cap hit of $457,500 but no more than $1 million annually. The TAM will buy their salaries down to make the teams cap compliant – just as regular allocation money can. TAM can also be traded to other teams.

Teams can carry over the 2016 money to 2017, but not the other way around. And they can't spend the entire sum at once, like the initial $500K TAM allowed them to. Teams will also be given an additional $125,000 over each of the next two years with which to sign homegrown players.

The expanded TAM program will essentially create a second class of Designated Players – of which each team can have just three – which the league hopes will allow its clubs to add two or three impactful signings apiece.

"By injecting an additional $37 million into the system, our clubs will be able to strengthen the depth of their rosters by signing more high-quality players," said MLS Deputy Commissioner Mark Abbott in a statement. "We saw immediate dividends this past season with the initial investment in Targeted Allocation Money, and our owners believe that additional spending – especially for players who will impact the middle of our rosters – will make MLS even more entertaining and compelling."

The Timbers could add another impactful player like midfielder Diego Valeri. (AP Photo) More

About a year ago, MLS analyzed every single one of its players. "We want on a team-by-team basis," Durbin explained in a conference call. "We had our [team] technical staffs and our [league] technical staff go through this exercise and had some international experts go through it as well. We measured and literally gave a player rating to every single player in the league. We have to measure ourselves against the international standards so we benchmarked ourselves against the rest of the world."

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