Welcome to a new segment that will hopefully be more regular in the future called “Kicking Some Numbers” where we take a look at the stories behind the numbers. We start with the Major League Soccer Players’ Association’s semiannual release of player salaries.
Yours truly has created a dashboard where you can go in and take a look at your team’s wage bill and see who’s getting paid how much.
The first tab features three different ways to view player salaries by team. The box-and-whisker will help you see who are the outliers in terms of salary like the league’s highest paid player in LAFCs Carlos Vela at $6.3M in base guaranteed compensation. The bottom left features lists by each team and the bottom right has a polygon view to see whose’s piece of the block is biggest. Filters are available by position and by team.
Team wage bills are in the second tab and it lists each team’s wage bill from most expensive (Inter Miami at $17.8M) to least (Vancouver at $8.7M). Below is a median wage for each team by salary and you see that Toronto FC have the second biggest wage bill at just over $17M, but the lowest median salary at $143,256.50 (US Dollars). FC Cincinnati are fifth in team salary and fourth in median salary, though last in the league table right now. Again, there is a filter fo position so you can see which team spends how much on a certain position.
For instance, if you filter on goalkeeper, you find that three teams–Red Bulls, Columbus, and Atlanta–have over $1 million invested in keepers. The medians adjust according to the filter.
The third tab is salaries by each player which features Carlos Vela on top, followed by Chicharito and Gonzalo Higuain. Filtering by goalkeeper shows that Atlanta’s Brad Guzan is the highest-paid keeper in the league. There’s also a filter by club.
So this is a unique way to view player salaries in MLS and we expect to update it toward the end of the season to see if teams continue to over or underachieve in relation to their wage bill (*cough* FC Cincinnati */cough*). Hopefully, the dashboard will answer your questions.
