As Major League Soccer begins its 21st season, its single-entity structure is often pointed to as a continued driver of its success. J. Todd Durbin, MLS’s executive vice president of competition and player relations, is the one who directs that process of player contracts being centralized at the league level. Durbin joined MLS in 1995, and he’s personally signed more than 1,500 player contracts since then. He also manages the day-to-day operations of the league’s player department, its on-field competition and its relationship with the players union.
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Today, players know who we are, they know what the standard is, and they know that we’re an exceptionally high-quality league, so we don’t have to sell the league today the way we had to five or 10 years ago.”
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Photo by: WILLIAM WALSH / MLS
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On how international player negotiations have changed: If you look back where we were seven to 10 years ago, the negotiations would also tend to be in two parts. One was explaining to them what our league was about and why it makes sense for them to be here, and why it’s good for their career. And then you’d have that second part about their particular contract terms. One of things that is happening today is that we’re being called a lot more by international players than was the case three to five years ago.
On free agency, which began with the 2015 collective-bargaining agreement: It’s allowed the players the flexibility and freedom that they haven’t had historically, but it also provides another mechanism for our teams to make themselves better. The players are exercising their rights to move from club to club, and I think that’s created a few new dynamics. You have some players that will want to wait and play their contracts out, but by the same token you’ll have clubs that don’t want that to happen, and we’ll see more clubs negotiating contracts earlier and negotiations for longer terms.
On youth development: I believe over the next few years not only are you going to see the benefits of that investment in terms of the number of high-quality players coming out of those [team] academies, but I also believe that will really help push the quality of the play on the field forward. We’ve been at it for a few years, and I think we are turning the corner and all of that investment and all of that hard work by our clubs is beginning to pay itself out. We’ve had north of 150 players come out of homegrown academies, and the number of minutes they’ve played has tripled in the last two or three years.
On MLS and the global transfer market: It is our goal to be among the best leagues in the world by 2022, and part of that is competing in the transfer market. I think that’s the sign of a healthy league. I would be far more concerned if we weren’t part of it, and the fact that we have these high-profile international players coming in, and players like Matt Miazga getting transferred to Chelsea and one of the best leagues in the world, I think is a testament to how far we’ve come and how well we’re doing on the world stage..
