Quick Salary Report Thoughts

It’s my favorite time of year: the MLS Players Union salary guide release day! I thought I would put down a couple thoughts about what we learned about the San Jose Earthquakes based on this release:

• I had previously estimated that the Quakes had genuine under-cap room to play with, given their surfeit of GAM, but these salaries make it clear there’s not much on-cap wiggle room. To create space, players will either need to move out, or the ownership will have to dip into their pockets and use “Discretionary” TAM.
• After a few seasons in a row of keeping up former Quakes President Dave Kaval’s promise to be in the top half of league spending, San Jose plummeted to just 18th out of the 23 MLS clubs in 2018 (and will soon slip to 19th once Wayne Rooney signs with DCU). This does not take transfer fees into account, however, although it’s unclear how dramatically that would shuffle the rankings.
• Joel Qwiberg, at $167,999.96, is making “MLS Starter” money. They clearly signed him to be the solution at left back, and he has made almost no contribution. That’s a notable mistake from Fioranelli & Co.
• Anibal Godoy’s extension is, as expected, much higher than his previous figure. However, at $473k total comp, I wonder why they didn’t just add another 30 grand so that he was eligible for TAM, and might have a lower cap hit?
• Magnus Eriksson, as expected, doesn’t have a large salary number (just $399k), so he’ll only be a DP as long as his transfer fee hits the cap, which likely is only 2018.
• Most salaries bump up a little bit every year automatically. The one that I noticed that took a bit of a jump was Francois Affolter, who tacked on about $80k more to a total of $232k.
• JT Marcinkowski is the team’s best-paid keeper, at $132k. The club clearly was aggressive about making sure he signed a homegrown deal rather than losing him to Europe.
• Once again, the total compensation load at CB is unusually high for the league (about a million dollars if you don’t count Flo, and $1.5M if you do), yet has been one of the weakest positions thus far.

As always, my complete spreadsheet of salaries is available here on Quakes Epicenter.

For your reference, here are the Quakes players with their total 2018 compensation listed in order of their cap hit: