Leicester, Chelsea and Salaries in Major League Soccer

As the 2015/16 season enters the final stretch, we're watching a fascinating run-in to the Premier League title - Leicester, of all people, Spurs, Arsenal all in the hunt; defending Champions Chelsea way out of the race. What happened to rule #1 of Soccernomics? You pay the highest wages, you get the best results?

It's tough to get accurate numbers for Premier League teams expenditures, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that Leicester are probably not paying their players as much as Manchester United are, and Chelsea, the defending champions, are probably paying even more than United.

I live in Los Angeles, and our national Major League Soccer (MLS) 2015 season is done and dusted, so I thought I'd look at the spend, the final position in the regular season, and the disparity between the two. Satisfyingly for the fans of the underdogs, this last MLS season matches, or even surpasses the "Leicester" phenomenon.

Before we get into too much detail, there are some things we need to understand about the MLS, the player's salaries, and the "salary cap" which attempts (badly) to enforce financial equality between the teams.

1. Each team has a cap on total salaries of $3.49M
2. Player-minimum-wage is $50,000 per year
3. Player-maximum-wage is $465,000 per year
4. Each team may nominate up to three "Designated Players" who may earn more than the maximum, but only the player-maximum-wage of $465,000 counts against the cap, irrespective of how much said player earns. The salary which is actually paid is at the discretion of the club.

Basically, the Designated Player rule allows you to pay three players as much as your club can throw at them. There also are other ways to pay players more than Rule 3 above, to whit:

• You can finagle some salaries by subsidizing them downwards to fit under the cap with a thing called "allocated money" and other wheezes, but you don't have a whole lot of wriggle-room. (FFP might be a lot more effective with a salary cap.)
• You can ignore what you pay players ranked from nos 20-28 in the squad - they don't count against the cap
• You can also ignore what you pay players coming into the squad from the "Generation adidas" youth development program

So - if you are wise with your youth players, nimble with your use of "allocated money" subsidies and you have a shedload of money to spend on Designated Player salaries, you should be as  happy as a clam in the sand where no-one's digging, right?

So, swissramble style, here's the 2015 MLS table ranked in order of total salaries paid:

What the hell happened here? Of the top-spending clubs, only the LA Galaxy managed to struggle to a league position of ninth, and then were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the Cup. The other top two didn't even make it into the play-off stages. These are the three clubs with by far the largest payroll of the 20 clubs, and they had a collective brain f*rt. Their average final league positions were almost 11 spots below their money ranking.

Now look at at the bottom three salary-spenders - talk about punching over your weight. The average final league position is more than 15 spots over the money ranking. The bottom-spending team (and coming in under the salary cap to boot) finished first in regular-season standings and made the semi-finals of the Cup. The second-bottom finished second and made the semis. The third-bottom finished eighth and made the quarter-finals.

Clearly, there's something at work here. Let's look at my own local team, the Los Angeles Galaxy.

We've already seen that with a salary outlay second only to Toronto FC they finished 11th and were eliminated in the first play-off round of the Cup.

So let's go and look at the individual numbers. (The total salary is different from the table above due to player movements in and out during the year).

Right off the bat, it's startling that Gerrard earns more than 41% of the total payroll of the Galaxy, and his nearest monetary competitor, Robbie Keane, earns 30%. That leaves the remaining 29% to be split with the other 26 players in the squad. Aside from Keane, only one other player makes more than 10% of Gerrard's salary.

Keane has been a fan favorite and a committed Galaxy player since 2011 and has earned his money - Stevie Me, I'm not so sure. The players themselves seem to agree:

In ESPN's anonymous survey of current MLS players - "Most Overrated Players in MLS" these six from the top three spenders made the list:

[Drum roll]

- Representing New York City - Mix Diskerud!

- Also representing New York City - Andrea Pirlo!

- Also representing New York City - Frank Lampard!

- Representing the LA Galaxy - Steven Gerrard!

- Representing Toronto FC - Michael Bradley!

- Also representing Toronto FC - Jozy Altidore!

You have to assume that in order for a player to appear in this list, at least one of his own teammates must have voted for him.

Which leads me to believe that many of the top paid are the most worthless. Sound familiar? I think if you surveyed players in the Premier League you'd find quite a few Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City players on that list.

But what about the "stars of the underdog club", the New York Red Bulls? Here are their details:

They have one franchise player earning a decidedly modest $600,000, and one other player who is making more than the maximum (by using an "allocated money" subsidy).

What pops out are two things compared to the Galaxy: the total earnings of the players, and the much more gradual percentage drop-off in the "Actual Earnings as a % of" column than LA. The New York team has 16 players earning at least 10% of the top earner. The Galaxy? Two.

Maybe there is something in that democratic esprit de corps mentality that has seen Leicester do so well and possibly why Chelsea are doing so poorly this Premier League season.

I've never been in a professional locker room, but I've been in a lot of amateur ones. In my locker rooms, no-one was earning a penny and so we played our best for ourselves and our teammates, (or the best we could muster, hangover permitting), in every match.

If I was suspicious that Stevie in midfield was taking life easy "because, well, why not, la? I'm studying for me badges and practicing me punditry" I'd wonder what the hell I was doing working for 0.7% of his money, especially when he tells us that he was surprised in his first season to find that it was hot in Houston and he didn't expect the travel.

Bottom line - ditch your under-achieving top earners, get some earnings parity back in the dressing room and start winning stuff.