MISL Goes Forward as Players, Owners Agree By Deadline
The Major Indoor Soccer League remains alive.
Negotiations went down to the 9 p.m. (PDT) deadline Friday night before the MISL Players Assn. agreed to a new two-year agreement in which it accepted most of the cost-cutting measures the owners said were necessary to stay in business.
The league’s owners had said that if the players did not accept a salary-cap reduction, elimination of guaranteed no-cut, no-trade contracts and numerous other cost-reduction measures by Friday’s deadline, they would have folded the 10-year-old league after Sunday’s final regular-season games.
Now the Sockers will conclude the regular season against Wichita at the San Diego Sports Arena Sunday (6:05), then open the playoffs at home against Tacoma Thursday night.
“I knew it wasn’t going to go under because the players have no choice,” Socker midfielder Branko Segota said. “Where are they going to go? What are they going to do?”
Socker president Ron Cady said he was “very pleased” with the agreement, “even though it affects (the Sockers) the hardest because we’re within a couple of hundred dollars of the salary cap . . .
“It will take us a couple of weeks to really analyze the numbers, but it’s very severe on San Diego.”
There was an agreement in principle Friday night, but Cady said a written document will be formalized Monday. Will Bray, a MISLPA spokesman, said the players still must vote on the agreement.
The two sides met for approximately 11 hours Friday in Washington, where the MISLPA has its headquarters.
The players were represented by John Kerr, MISLPA executive director, and seven player representatives, including Kevin Crow of the Sockers.
The owners were represented by MISL Commissioner Bill Kentling and a four-member committee of owners.
At 8:30 Friday night, during the third quarter of the Sockers’ game against Kansas City at the San Diego Sports Arena, Cady got off the phone after a 35-minute conference call among the owners.
“It’s down to two issues, and we’re going back to finalize them,” Cady told reporters. “They have to do this in 30 minutes, or we walk away. We’ll have a deal at midnight (EDT).”
And they did with five minutes to spare, according to Kentling. Cady said the final conference call came at 9:05 San Diego time.
The final two issues in question--which Cady said took the better part of eight hours to settle--were:
- The right of first refusal on non-guaranteed contracts. Cady said the two sides reached a compromise under which a team can terminate a player under a non-guaranteed contract but then have the option to re-sign him as long as they offer him at least 75% of what he was earning. The owners wanted it to be 70%, the players 80%, Cady said.
- The future after the new, two-year amended collective bargaining agreement runs out June 30, 1990. The agreement will be in effect until Oct. 1 of that year. At that point, if another agreement hasn’t been reached, there will be no salary cap.
“That was a major compromise on the part of the owners,” Cady said.
The other major issue that was settled was the salary-cap reduction itself.
It was reduced from $1.275 million to $900,000 per team, with $875,000 for 18 professionals and $25,000 earmarked for two, three or four developmental players (paid $1,000 a month). Originally, the owners proposed a $898,000 salary cap ($850,000 for 18 professionals and $48,000 for amateur players).
“We felt that the players association’s $900,000 proposal was symbolically important,” Kentling said of a union counteroffer. “We feel the healing process must begin.”
Other issues include:
- In contracts that contain guarantees, a team and player will agree to a formula for dealing with those guarantees by June 1. If no agreement is reached, the team may cut a player 15% to retain his services. If the cut is between 16-30%, the player has the right to declare himself a free agent.
“Forcing the guaranteed guys to take cuts is silly,” Segota said. “Why am I paying the union to work for me, and now they go against me?”
Agreements that had previously been reached, but for which Cady did not have details late Friday, included:
- In return for the two-year moratorium on guaranteed contracts, the MISLPA asked that players with four or more years in the league (three with the same team) have the right to veto any trade once the season begins.
- Any player in his fourth year or more will be entitled to a full guarantee of his contract from the third game of the regular season through June 30, or the final salary period. Under the current collective bargaining agreement, the guarantee begins after 12 games plus 48 hours.
- The MISLPA agreed that teams may terminate or renegotiate any contract not guaranteed or without a no-cut provision as long as it was necessary to meet the salary cap and it happened between June 1 and June 30 of a given year.
- In consideration of the MISLPA agreement on these issues, the MISL is to guarantee two additional years of existence of the league (1988-89 and 1989-90) and to agree that revenues from expansion be placed in a trust to be administered jointly by the league commissioner and the executive director of the MISLPA.
Other issues that were said to be resolved include increases in team letters of credit (from $250,000 to $400,000 per team for each of the next two seasons) and in the players’ playoff pool (from $100,000 to between $222,000 and $250,000), registration of player agents, number of new foreign players entering the league each year (one per club instead of 12 for the whole league) and compensation for injured players.
So, a league that began with six franchises in 1978-79, expanded to a league-high 14 teams in 1982-83 and is now at 11 teams, survives.
“I’m going to try out for the Padres,” said Socker defender Fernando Clavijo.
