NEW YORK - Taking advantage of the latest news that Lionel Messi is dissatisfied with his situation at Paris St. Germain (PSG) and wants a new contract and a new team, Major League Soccer (MLS) Commissioner Don Garber put together an innovative proposal to land Messi in MLS - requiring all MLS season ticket holders to pay an additional fee, to be used to pay for Messi's contract. Under Garber's proposal, each season ticket seat will be charged an additional, annual, $1,000.00 league development surcharge with the money from that fee being used to fund an MLS contract for Messi.
Although MLS does not release statistics of the total number of season ticket holders for all 29 MLS franchises, it is believed that there are approximately 300,000 season ticket holders across the league with a league average of 10,000 season tickets per team. Charging each season ticket holder seat an annual $1,000.00 fee would yield a healthy additional $300 million per year.
Published estimates of Messi's current contract with PSG puts the player in the $75 million per year range - if his signing bonus, annual salary, and image/kit sales licensing rights are combined. If the extra fee proposal is approved by the MLS Board, Garber would be able to offer the 35-year-old Messi a multi-year MLS contract in the $300 million per year range, eclipsing the current highest sports contract - Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr contract estimated at $225 million per year.
Although details of Garber's proposal are still being worked out and would require a likely perfunctory MLS Board approval vote, concerns have been raised about how the fee would be administered. When reached for comment, an MLS insider - speaking on condition of anonymity - told The Nutmeg News that the proposal would asses the fee per seat, not per ticket holder, so a family of four with four season ticket seats would be assessed $4,000.00 per year by the league. Additionally, there will be no scaling of the fee based on the cost of the season ticket itself. Upper deck seats and pitch side seats would pay the same fee. And perhaps most controversially, season ticket holders from teams in conferences that might see Messi's team once every two years would still be charged the fee annually even in years when Messi never plays in their team's stadium. Apparently Commissioner Garber will justify these rules by arguing that signing Messi with any MLS team, "elevates the entire league at a global level, and thus the rising tide of MLS lifts all season ticket holders' boats."
Another aspect of the plan that might surprise MLS ticket holders in the near future is that SeatGeek - the official ticket partner of MLS through which all season tickets are distributed - will be assessing a $200.00 "service fee" on the $1,000.00 per seat league development surcharge. When asked for comment, the same MLS insider responded, "Hey, it's the contract we signed with them; nothing we can do about that."
The Nutmeg News will have more on this as Major League Soccer insider Twitter accounts claim, "you'd have to pay more than $1000 to see Lionel Messi play a game, at this point, between all the flights, hotels and ticket prices in France so this is really a discount."