With the possibility of a work stoppage averted, Sporting KC’s season set to start on Sunday

Sporting Kansas City fans got a double dose of good news at a pep rally at the Uptown Shoppes on Wednesday night.

First, fans got a look at the team’s new uniforms, which have this graph-paper-style design, that make for a substantial upgrade over last year’s primary jersey.

Then they learned that the Major League Soccer regular season would, in fact, start on time after the league and its players union reached an agreement on a new five-year collective-bargaining agreement.

A work stoppage was a distinct possibility this week after the league threw out proposals that it had to know players would reject out of hand.

The issue with the new collective-bargaining agreement rested mostly on the players’ desire for free agency. 

In MLS, unlike other sports leagues in North America and elsewhere, the league owns player contracts. People like Cerner executives Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig are less like team owners in the traditional sense and more like investors in MLS who manage the league’s asset in Kansas City.

In the MLS’s single-entity structure was an innovation concocted when the league launched in 1996 and was meant to curb the costs of running a soccer league during a time when the sport barely registered a blip in most people’s minds. Previous professional soccer leagues in the United States went out of business when owners extended lavish contracts that didn’t match the country’s appetite for the sport.

The single-entity structure kept player salaries low and allowed the league’s early investors to manage several teams at once (Lamar Hunt’s family used to “own” the Kansas City Wizards, Dallas Burn and Columbus Crew at the same time).

It has served the league well, which has mostly lost money since it started, but has been successful in recent year in improving attendance and landing a new television deal last year that doesn’t pay MLS the pittance it received from its previous broadcasting rights deal.

But the structure is far less lucrative for players. Good players can make far more money if they can latch on with clubs in Europe. Those who can’t get on in other continents play under MLS’s depressed wage structure, some receiving below-median wages for playing professional soccer. It also restricts their ability to find better contracts with other teams in MLS.

Players this year wanted free agency so they could negotiate directly with other teams once their contracts expired.

The compromise reached on Wednesday allows players who have plied their trade in MLS for eight years and are at least 28 years old to become free agents. It also limits how much of a salary increase players can receive on their new contracts once they become free agents.

The new agreement still screws the players. Any arrangement that caps the salary increase that a player can receive in free agency isn’t really free. But players held such little leverage in the negotiations, the new arrangement is still better than the old one.

And it lasts for five years, which sets the table for another showdown in 2019.

But for now, it’s game on for MLS. Sporting KC launches its 2015 campaign on Sunday on the road against the New York Red Bulls.