John Berner, 23, qualifies for the affordable housing program in his apartment building.
Joe Nasco, 30, holds multiple part-time jobs so that his wife, Amber, can stay home with their newborn daughter, Caroline.
Clint Irwin, 25, is sharing a three-bedroom house with two roommates while chasing his dream career.
The three men are not much different from thousands of young Americans trying to make ends meet, and their financial struggles, in this way, are unexceptional. But the men also happen to be professional athletes, goalkeepers on the Colorado Rapids in Major League Soccer.
In many ways, this year has been a high-water mark for soccer in the United States. After years of fighting to gain recognition alongside the more established major sports in the country, soccer reached an unprecedented level of public consciousness during last summer’s World Cup, where an intrepid run by the American team charmed a fresh crop of casual fans.
Major League Soccer has gone along for the ride. While its revenue and ratings still lag far behind billion-dollar behemoths like the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball, M.L.S., which opens its postseason this week, has minted its own crop of multimillionaire players, has established attendance records and is set for an infusion of television money starting next year.
Yet in some ways, salaries in the league show how far the sport has to go. While the best-paid players in M.L.S. — American stars like Clint Dempsey ($6.7 million) and Michael Bradley ($6.5 million) along with a smattering of imported stars — command salaries comparable to or better than what they would make in Europe’s best leagues, they remain American soccer’s 1 percent. According to figures released annually by the league’s players union, only 23 of the 572 players listed had a base salary greater than the minimum salary in the N.H.L., a league that M.L.S. has been trying to overtake in popularity. Nearly a third of the league’s total payroll of about $130 million goes to the seven best-paid players, and for each of them there are dozens of others making $50,000 or less.
For that much larger group, the payoff for soccer’s recent rise has been negligible — and negotiations this winter for a new labor agreement could determine how much that changes.
“Rosters cannot be built solely at the top,” said Bob Foose, the executive director of the Major League Soccer Players Union. “In addition to investment in designated players, the middle of the M.L.S. salary structure needs to be substantially improved in order to retain and attract talent and reward those players who contribute on the field every week.”
Berner’s salary this year is $36,500, the M.L.S. minimum for players under the age of 25. The money does not go far. He devotes several hundred dollars a month to repaying student loans and paying the bills on his 2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee. His income is sufficiently low that he qualified for an affordable housing unit in his Denver apartment building.
Nasco makes about $53,000, a shade more than the senior player minimum of $48,500. He and wife just had their first child. To supplement his salary, he gives private goalkeeping lessons to middle school students during the week, and on the weekends, when not traveling with the Rapids, he works as an instructor at a soccer academy. Like many M.L.S. players, he takes home leftover food, snacks and drinks from the club’s practice complex to save money on meals.
Irwin, who made the minimum salary last year, had his average yearly compensation raised to $87,000 this season after he established himself as the Rapids’ No. 1 goalkeeper. Over the summer, he wrote a magazine article — for which he received a freelance fee — that argued that the United States’ popular national team, with its considerable contingent of M.L.S. players, should serve as an indicator of how much the league has grown and evidence that its players might deserve a raise.
Players in the past have had strong words about the league’s financial imbalance, but Irwin and his teammates made clear this month that they were not complaining about their situations, just pointing out that things could still improve.
“It’s not poverty by any means,” Irwin said of the league’s low-end salaries. “But at the same time, it’s not as comfortable as you’d like, especially with the way that your body is your tool.”
Mark Abbott, the president and deputy commissioner of M.L.S., said the league, which does not have an established minor league system, must devote part of its clubs’ 30-man rosters to the development of players. He said such players, like minor leaguers in other sports, make justifiably lower salaries while being given the chance to ascend to a higher level. And, Abbott said, minimum salaries were raised over 41 percent since the last collective bargaining agreement five years ago.
Foose, the head of the players union, argued that even established veteran players “have consistently been underpaid for their contributions.”
Such points will be argued in the labor talks, which will help shape the future of soccer in this country. While butting heads over player compensation and other issues, the two sides are also expected to clash on the subject of free agency. Since beginning play in 1996, M.L.S. has always operated as a single-entity structure, with the league controlling all player contracts and movement.
But players’ salaries will be the most visceral battle. The league’s median salary is about $92,000, with an average of about $226,000 in guaranteed money, and there is a belief in the union that the number must be considerably higher to attract and retain better talent, which in turn would ensure the future of the league. In contrast, the average salary at the top level of the English Premier League is about $2.57 million, though it is considerably less at lower levels.
Minimum salaries represent only a portion of the M.L.S. financial picture. Yet those figures have a strong symbolic value as benchmarks of prosperity and must also “increase significantly,” Foose said, “so that all M.L.S. players can focus solely on maximizing their development and performance.”
The minimum salary in the N.F.L. is $420,000; in Major League Baseball, it is $500,000; in the N.B.A., it is $507,336; and in the N.H.L., it is $550,000. Those leagues — and their players unions — are far more established, but the difference in salary compared with M.L.S., especially at the bottom, remains striking.
Michael LeRoy, a labor expert at the University of Illinois, said soccer’s situation today was reminiscent of what many other sports went through in the 1970s. Professional athletes, who often worked part-time jobs in the off-season to supplement their salaries, won collective bargaining victories over time, but often only after strikes and other difficult actions. M.L.S. has never had a work stoppage.
“This is a players association in its relative infancy,” LeRoy said of the M.L.S. union, “but they’re on a well-worn path.”
The union, in its proposal, will cite indicators of the league’s health. It procured a $90 million television contract this year. After the 2013 season, Forbes reported that the average M.L.S. franchise was worth $103 million, a 175 percent increase since the magazine’s previous valuation of clubs in 2008.
The league would counter that it is still losing money.
“On a combined basis, M.L.S. and its clubs continue to lose in excess of $100 million per year,” Abbott said. “As a result, we are not in a position where we are discussing how to divide profits with the players, but rather what is an appropriate level of investment and where the investment should be made given the reality of our financial condition.”
In the midst of all this, according to Ted Philipakos, a soccer agent and lecturer on sports law at New York University, there is less discontent around the league than one might expect. He surmised that young players — many of whom emerged from the college system — had grown up accustomed to the single-entity, slow-growth structure of M.L.S. This, he said, possibly echoed a wider millennial mind-set of valuing the pursuit of work that one loves, even if compensation is not immediately lucrative.
As Nasco said, “When you compare this to anything else in professional sports, you really are playing for the love of the sport, and you’re hoping, if you can stay in it and stay healthy, you can eventually get the money you deserve.”
Until that day arrives, players do what they can to get by. In other major sports leagues, for instance, public appearances are often seen as a chore. In M.L.S., young players clamor to do them because they can often pay an extra couple of hundred dollars. Competition on the field also has a deeper meaning: Players on minimum contracts earn $500 every time they enter a game as a substitute, and $1,000 for every game they start.
Irwin unexpectedly made 31 starts last year while on a minimum deal after the Rapids’ starting goalkeeper at the time broke his arm.
“I pretty much doubled my salary,” he said. “That’s big. But it’s an anomaly.”
It also helps explain why this month will be especially disappointing in the Rapids’ locker room. The team missed the playoffs, meaning there will be no chance to earn postseason bonuses.