What the USL Championship’s first CBA means for the league and its players (2024)

On Tuesday, the USL Championship announced that its board of governors and the USL Players Association had ratified the first collective bargaining agreement in North American lower division history. The news came just shy of three years after the league voluntarily recognized the USLPA to kick off CBA talks.

Last month, The Athletic broke the news of the initial agreement and highlighted four key tenets of the pact, which establish standards for minimum compensation, contract terms/language, per diems and public appearances, and a grievance procedure for players. All are significant developments for al league that has up to now operated without significant league-wide standards in place, leading to frequent malpractice of many varieties throughout the circuit.

The ratified CBA, however, spans a far broader range of topics: the full final draft, which was obtained by The Athletic via sources, makes up a 135-page PDF including the new standard player agreement (SPA) and addendums. In a call with The Athletic, USLPA executive members Connor Tobin and Tommy Heinemann as well as lawyer Steve Gans (who has helped the players through this process) estimated that the group, which has yet to collect dues from its members per numerous sources, spent “over tens of thousands of hours” pulling the deal together.

“I’m not sure people realize how hard it is to make substantial change within a system,” Tobin said, “and how involved that process is, how many people you need to get the buy-in. It’s really easy to think you can just snap your fingers and things have to be the way you want them and all this. The reality is that moving the needle significantly is a Herculean effort.”

On the USL side, talks were managed by the league’s labor committee, which is a mix of club presidents, technical staffers and owners, as well as league executives and their attorneys.

To labor committee member Birmingham Legion president and general manager Jay Heaps, it helped ensure a holistic range of perspectives as the league handled its side of the bargaining table. Heaps also has the reverse perspective after being elected to the MLSPA Executive Council in 2005 during his playing career, as well as being involved in league operations as manager of the New England Revolution. And while the league’s at-times tumultuous talks around a return to play after COVID-19 paused the 2020 season, it also highlighted the potential of ensuring players’ voices are included in major league decisions.

“We were able to navigate return-to-play talks and COVID with a recognized labor committee on our side and on their side and were able to work through issues to get players back to play even though we didn’t have a CBA finished,” Heaps said. “We had already started to work through the details on it, but having that dialogue really allowed the two groups to actually have a season in 2020. That could be lost in this: there was a lot of work done by both sides to have that season in 2020.”

USL Championship CBA’s minimum compensation (per month)

Of the standards established by the CBA, the SPA may be the most significant. Even this season, players’ contract lengths range from just seven months to a full-year term, depending on the club. Teams will still be encouraged to offer twelve-month contracts, but the newly-imposed minimum of ten months will give players more financial stability while establishing a base league calendar of February 1 to November 30.

Crucially, players have also retained free agency rights for all, with no waiver mechanisms and no restricted free agency. USL players will continue to be able to move clubs at the end of their deals without hurdles.

As Heaps alluded to, the CBA also provides a framework for clubs to structure options in contracts. For instance, a player contract won’t be able to include more than two options adding to a total of three years (in that event, one of the options would cover a two-year period). Contracts will run no longer than six years, but that term still represents significant control for clubs looking to lock down players who are either key to the roster or have potential transfer upside.

“When you’re talking about a CBA, you’re talking about structure,” Heaps said. “On the league and club side, you now start thinking about the future of your team, not just in the short term, but now we can think about it three and five years, because now you have structure to contracts and what it looks like if you do multi-year contracts. There’s an investment certainly on the owners’ side, but what they’re getting is that structure to really think longer-term on a bigger picture.”

But while owners and players both expressed satisfaction with the deal, some agents familiar with the details of the CBA see some mechanisms as harmful to the league’s aims to join the global transfer market.

One is the potential introduction of a maximum benefit spend, which a few agents called a fancy way of labeling a salary cap. The pact says that the league “may establish rules” to implement a ceiling for clubs’ spending on salaries, health benefits, per diem, housing and agent’s fees. It sets a minimum value for any spending caps for each of the next four seasons, starting with $1.88 million in 2022 and increasing to $2.25 million in 2025. While a source said that no team in USL Championship history has ever hit that $1.88 million mark, simply giving the league the option to implement a limit could discourage significant club roster investment. This could be a specific threat to some agents who could stand to lose some money on agents fees as teams acclimate to potential limitations.

The CBA will also allow teams to buy out a player’s contract “for any reason or for no reason” for a minimum of 50% of their base salary across the remainder of their deal. Players who wouldn’t yet be 20 years old on November 30 of that season won’t be eligible for a buyout. Clubs could only buy out two players in one season, and no more than three over any two consecutive seasons. Another provision requires players and agents to negotiate no-trade or no-loan clauses into the SPA, where the baseline will be that a player waives rejection rights.

“My concern is that by introducing mechanisms like semi-guaranteed contracts, contract buyouts, and players consenting at the outset of a deal to the club trading or loaning them unilaterally, the USL is losing the high level of player autonomy that gave it potential to be a great development league for players with European aspirations,” one agent told The Athletic while requesting anonymity to not complicate future negotiations.

Another agent pointed to the ten-month contract term and some buyout clauses as going against FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP). However, it’s worth reiterating that leagues throughout the United States soccer pyramid (including MLS) often fly in the face of FIFA. Take FC Cincinnati, for example. In 2018, the club was found to have wrongfully terminated a contract with Heinemann. FIFA’s RSTP states that “(t)he club shall be banned from registering any new players, either nationally or internationally, for two entire and consecutive registration periods.” Instead, the club was allowed to move into MLS with full freedom to operate in the transfer market.

While the sequence was difficult for Heinemann and his family to navigate, it helped reinforce the importance of establishing greater baseline operating standards in the USL. His arbitration process was handled by Gans, who then continued to work with Heinemann alongside players Tobin and Trey Mitchell, with the assistance of labor law expert Paul Kelly. Together with representatives from every locker room, it ensured that all club practices were considered as the players were formulating their proposals.

“The norms and the protections that have been achieved are what I think we’re really proud of,” Gans said. ”The protections that we have negotiated for are so practical. They address the realities that players face in this game. I give credit to the guys, because they come out with their experiences. They’re so thoughtful, they’re so well thought out. There’s language in there that addresses even the most intricate, beyond-the-pale experience that someone has had. They will have an immediate positive effect as opposed to some other on-paper protections that in practice, are more about optics than anything else.”

One practical addition is the new grievance process, which will see the USL, its clubs and the USLPA handle things internally before bringing something to a FIFA tribunal in the event of dissatisfaction with the result. It significantly tightens the timeline for these types of grievances, from mandatory windows to notify the club and league of any infraction, to a three-day window for the player and club to attempt to remedy the situation, to a more time-sensitive approach to any grievance hearing involving the USL and USLPA.

Now ratified, several provisions in the ne CBA have immediately taken effect, while the financial elements will kick in as teams plan for the 2022 season. In total, it gives unprecedented operational structure and stability for the United States’ second division, potentially ending decades of turmoil and cross-league feuding at the level beneath MLS.

In the past, there were no such guardrails — and players and employees often bore the brunt of club mismanagement. The second division has seen at least one club cease operations in each of the past six seasons, often citing financial hardships or a lack of local support. One NASL player was traded for a game’s worth of travel and lodging. An NASL club operated for just one year and changed before practice in a storage container — and still won the title. Some USL clubs used punch-card payment models, while others sent players to “public appearances” which ended up being hours of unpaid babysitting on a soccer field.

Stabilizing the second division can only help the broader men’s game in this country. It creates more stable jobs for players and staff alike in clubs which must operate at a baseline level of functionality. It clarifies a second rung of the pyramid (we’ll get to the three-league third level another day). With this deal set to run through the 2025 season, it also incentivizes the USL to help support planning for the 2026 World Cup in North America, as they’ll renegotiate terms with that tournament’s expected spike in fan interest in mind,

Ultimately, the real victory is closing a three-year bartering process with a ratified deal. The Championship’s Board of Governors approval shows that clubs believe this won’t be a bad deal on their end, while a supermajority of players gave the same vote of confidence on their side. Whether or not this is a true “win-win,” as Gans said, will take time to suss out. For now, though, the league can look toward longer-term visions (like an All-Star game, for which the CBA spells out player availability and bonuses) with their players’ opinions taking greater significance – truly a first for the American lower divisions.

“I think it just shows how steadfast the organization has been in trying to do things the right way,” Tobin said. “Have we been flawless and not made mistakes? No, but I think we’ve gone about it with the right intent. The piece that we’ve always come back to — for players by players — has always been front and center.”

(Photo: Andy Mead / ISI)