Photo credit: Casey Valentine/isiphotos.com, San Jose Earthquakes
For people like me, who maintain spreadsheets of my favorite team’s contracts, and obsess over games like Football Manager to the point we write articles based on its insights, the job of an MLS General Manager can seem to be a bit more like fitting players into formulae: merely a skilled feat of financial engineering.
In other sports, particularly baseball with its SABRmetrics revolution, or Basketball, with NBA teams hiring “Capologists,” that might actually be the reality.
For Quakes GM Jesse Fioranelli, and likely the soccer world writ-large, it’s not. Talking to him about his roster building philosophy, he focuses intently on “value,” and most particularly on creating value. Value comes from finding the right tactical, technical, and personality fit, then developing it as far as you can with the best resources and coaching staff you can muster. Simply put, it’s about generating more on-field value than other teams would get by spending the same amount.
All that accounting nonsense that I tend to focus on? While important, those are details to be ironed out once a good fit has been identified, not the other way around. During our hour-long conversation about the subject, I almost got the sense I was being told not to put the cart before the horse.
So it’s unsurprising that San Jose’s top front office man doesn’t see the terms of the new MLS CBA as changing his approach much at all. Maybe certain things will make certain players more valuable than they used to be, and others terms might create specific unexpected accounting challenges to navigate, but as much as players may stand to benefit from it personally, the approach Fioranelli advocates will stay the same.
Let’s take a look at some of the big emphasis areas of the new CBA, how they match up with San Jose’s approach, and what Jesse Fioranelli had to say about them. Oh yeah, and I might throw in a few of my own thoughts here and there too:
Younger Players
One of the most interesting aspects of the new CBA is actually not yet resolved: two mechanisms that will give an even greater advantage to teams that acquire and develop young players. While the details are not yet clear, it seems that young DP-level signings will be incentivized, and a few Under-22 spots will have some form of cap relief.
Both of those developments do nothing but bolster the Quakes’ existing focus on young talent, both homegrown and acquired.
While Fioranelli wouldn’t speculate on the final mechanisms, he did acknowledge the alignment of interest: “We have already made quite an emphasis on younger players. So I don’t exclude the possibility [it will benefit us].”
It’s not hard to see why the GM might think so: “The earlier that a player breaks through, the more value it brings…younger players tend to hit the cap less hard.”
While the homegrown mechanism is essentially unchanged in the new CBA, the new cap will impact drafted players, which should benefit the Quakes: “We were very satisfied with the last drafts,” according to the Swiss. “Jackson has provided lots of value. We really like Tanner Beason and others. We’re trying to have a roster that is not only focused on the older generation, but will sustain a natural development.”
While the mechanisms might give advantages to putting such players on the roster, one of my long-standing concerns has been that to get real value out of the players, they need to be playing for the first team, both developing them and putting them into the shop window. That can be difficult if there are a large number of older veterans in the way, and I’ve long advocated against signing decent veterans at positions with exciting young prospects in order to get them on the field faster.
That’s not how Fioranelli sees it: “It’s not about clearing out a space for them,” but rather demanding that younger players clearly beat out the incumbent veterans for the job.
One key example of this is in goal, where incumbent Daniel Vega looks set to retain the starting gloves ahead of JT Marcinkowski, who was long regarded the best prospected of his generation to come out of the academy. According to Fioranelli, “we very much believe that Vega has provided a lot of value to our locker room, and stability on the field. He’s earned his respect inside of the team.” To me, that said loud and clear that it’s Vega’s job to lose, especially considering that Marcinkowski will likely miss a significant chunk of the season due to Olympic commitments.
That’s not to say Fioranelli isn’t palpably excited about the 23-year-old’s talent: “We are really encouraged to see how quickly he has progressed and we’re getting the same feedback from the Olympic and national team staff…[His ability with his feet] really stands out, and he’s increasing his confidence directing the line.”
Extensions and Free Agency
One of the things players fought hardest for in the CBA was expanded free agency, which is now available to players who are both over 24 years old and have 5 years of MLS service. Unfortunately, that likely means that Tommy Thompson is eligible for full free agency after this season (Credit to Mike Kleeman for first noticing this).
While I didn’t notice this in time to ask Jesse, it’s hard for me to imagine the Quakes homegrown, who owes his career resurgence to the current coach, and who has really leaned into the Quakes brand and community work, being particularly motivated to leave. I don’t have any inside info, but I would be surprised to see him leave after this year.
One thing that Fioranelli brought up with me on this point is that all MLS teams, given the structure of the salary rules, are primarily focused on retaining their best players, rather than swapping them in a liquid internal market (more on that later). For him, that’s a big focus too, and the number one target for retention is Jackson Yueill, who is going into the fourth year of his rookie contract. I confirmed with the club that Yueill has a club option for 2021, which gives the club a bit of time, but the new CBA means that he would be a full free agent at the end of that season, whether he stays in the league or goes abroad.
However, Fioranelli seems unconcerned with retaining his ex-UCLA starlet: “We’ve already started to have conversations with him, not only on a contractual front, but to visualize what kind of role he can have in our team. We want him to visualize himself carrying even greater weight for San Jose”
“I’m confident that he’ll be part of our squad”
Regardless of his confidence in the extension, there’s no doubt the stock they put into the young Minnesotan: “Jackson has grown technically and tactically but especially in terms of confidence. If you look carefully at last year, a dozen games if you saw not only his offensive role, but his defensive role, you’d see him directing traffic.”
Intra-League Transfers
To date, Dominic Oduro is the only player Fioranelli has acquired from within MLS, and that was more about giving Quincy Amarikwa an opportunity at playing time elsewhere than it was about long-term roster building. I asked Jesse about whether the problem with the internal market was to do with available talent/value, or with structural impediments, and he clearly views it as the latter:
“MLS has never proposed less talent than other markets. It’s never gotten less attention from us than any other market. But the trade market is stale.”
The new CBA didn’t necessarily have the goal of improving that market, but the conversion of TAM to GAM might create a larger “liquid” pool of resources to make acquisitions. Matching up value of players, without cash considerations, is extremely difficult, which is why trades are (relatively) rare in major American sports where “buying” someone’s rights isn’t possible. Now with a large portion of tradeable GAM, which is usable for more purposes than TAM, we might see a bit more of it.
But I wouldn’t count on it. Given Jesse’s focus on creating value, I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought mechanisms like homegrowns, the draft, and young Latin American transfers are more likely to be undervalued by the market than established MLS players. That being said, I think that this new infusion of more-flexible allocation money might lubricate the stale internal market, and we might see our first meaningful intra-league transaction in the Fioranelli era.
New TAM thresholds, and New TAM
One thing many fans (including myself, for a time!) didn’t understand about mandatory TAM is that it effectively just became additional on-cap dollars, with the only difference being that they could only be spent on a specific category of players: those making more, but not significantly more, than the “maximum budget charge” also known as the DP threshold.
The new CBA folds this TAM into GAM, meaning it can now be used in far more ways on far more players. That’s fantastic for the existing player base, who were routinely excluded from TAM (which is one of the victories they won over the league: that no such new spending mechanism would be introduced without their consent). Its impact on the strategy of San Jose is unclear, although it certainly would appear to favor a deeper, more balanced roster rather than a “studs and duds” model. That should be to their advantage, as that was already the approach, and depth has improved markedly over the last 5 years.
However, discretionary TAM remains (at $2.8M). That fact, combined with the raised DP threshold of $612,500, will essentially just create a new class of TAM players whose particular cap hits are more “valuable”, albeit a class only accessible to bigger-spending teams who dip deep into their discretionary TAM.
For the Quakes, this means TAM players under the old system (such as Danny Hoesen and Guram Kashia) may well no longer count, and therefore the special advantage they enjoyed as the only players on the roster able to tap into mandatory TAM are gone. That means that going forward, their value will be assessed against all non-DPs, rather than just the pool of TAM players, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them moved on or had their deals reworked.
Of course, the remaining discretionary TAM and new threshold merely creates a new “privileged class” of TAM players: Andy Rios and Carlos Fierro, both transactions I roundly criticized at the time given the large wages and limited on-field production. With the new CBA, however, they won’t be at the expense of any other part of the roster (rather, just hypothetical players the Quakes haven’t signed), so the impact won’t be quite so bad. They’ll also have a chance to improve their production after a full offseason in Almeyda’s system.
I should note that Oswaldo Alanís could perhaps also fit into this privileged category, depending on where his salary falls, but we won’t know that for several months.
For what it’s worth, my projection currently has the Quakes using about $1.6M of their $2.8M discretionary TAM, which does not count the over-the-cap dollars spent on DPs wages and transfers. Overall team salary remains about the same as last year, but spending is notably up after the Quakes broke their transfer record to acquire Cristian Espinoza.
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Stay tuned in the coming days, for my next article about how the Quakes managed to get better by (more or less) staying the same, and whether that’s enough.
