Galaxy captain Maya Yoshida gets a pay cut because of antiquated MLS rules
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INDIO — Maya Yoshida led the Galaxy in starts and minutes played last year. Counting the playoffs, no player in the league was on the field more than Yoshida during a season that ended with the Galaxy captain hoisting the MLS Cup.
For the team’s oldest player, it was among the gutsiest seasons in franchise history. And for that he was rewarded with a pay cut.
“That’s bulls—,” he said last week.
Yoshida’s base salary was $800,000 last season while six teammates had contracts worth more. As for how much the cut was, he wouldn’t say. However, it obviously cut deep for a proud man who came to MLS after playing in three Olympics, three World Cups and starting nearly 300 times combined in four of the top leagues in Europe.
“It’s very unfair, to be honest,” he said. “I become a champion and my salary is less. Everybody knows this shouldn’t happen.”
Yoshida, 36, doesn’t blame the Galaxy. OK, maybe just a little bit.
Former Galaxy and U.S. Soccer star Cobi Jones said “it’s such an honor” to be immortalized with a statue in front of Dignity Health Sports Park.
But he saves his most virulent criticism for a league whose strict salary cap and Byzantine roster rules make it difficult for teams to reward excellence for more than a handful of players each season.
Of the 14 players the Galaxy used in the MLS Cup final, Yoshida, a center back, was the only one who had to renegotiate his contract this winter. The timing couldn’t have been worse because the team had more than $1 million in additional payments to fit under the 2025 salary cap after U22 signee Dejan Joveljic and young designated player Gabriel Pec aged out of U22 initiative contracts that limited their hits against the league’s $5.95-million budget charge.
That left general manager Will Kuntz between a rock and a hard place. After squeezing every penny he could out of that rock, he still had to trade defender Jalen Neal, midfielders Mark Delgado and Gastón Brugman — the MLS Cup MVP — and Joveljic, who scored six times in five playoff games last season, to make the numbers work.
“This was a math problem, not a soccer problem,” Kuntz said after getting rid of more than a quarter of the players the Galaxy used in the MLS Cup final.
Yoshida isn’t buying that distinction because for him it isn’t a problem at all. For him, the whole premise of the argument is simply insane and is one reason why he thinks MLS is undermining its own success.
The MLS could have rewarded the Galaxy by letting them keep a young, talented homegrown player like Neal. Instead, they were forced to trade him. It could have found a way to reward the team for discovering and recruiting a player like Joveljic to come play in the U.S. Now he, too, is gone.
”The fans want to see the player who grew up locally and succeeded in the club,” Yoshida said. “This is very normal.”
Also very normal is the penchant for team owners to spend like drunken sailors in an effort to outdo one another. That’s what led the North American Soccer League (NASL) into bankruptcy. So MLS has purposely put some brakes on spending.
Teams can give unlimited amounts of money to three designated players, whose salaries count only partially against the salary cap. And they can soften the salary-cap hit for others with allocation money. But teams aren’t given a blank check, and the pain of balancing their budgets often falls heaviest on veterans like Yoshida.
The decision by Alyssa and Gisele Thompson to re-sign with Angel City is a reflection of the direction the team is heading under new ownership.
The rules are fair, emphasizes Christina LaBrie, the MLS senior vice president for player relations, because they’re the same for every team in the league. But, Yoshida answers, MLS is competing in a global marketplace where everyone else in playing by different rules.
“For other sports — basketball, baseball or American football — there is no competition from outside countries. But soccer is different,” Yoshida said. “You have to think about the worldwide competitors.
“The better the contract, [that’s where] the player goes,” he continued. “That’s why the Middle East is very popular now. That’s why China was very popular like five years ago. That’s how capitalism is. And I was thinking America was a very, very capitalist country.”
The fact America’s single-entity soccer league is more co-op than capitalist is hurting MLS, said Yoshida, who went back to Japan this winter and found interest in the league had spiked.
“Everybody asked me about MLS. That’s getting very, very popular,” said Yoshida, one of six Japanese players in MLS last season.
“But at the same time, it needs to grow up financially because the salary cap, it’s different compared to the salary in Japan. A non-DP player has nothing different. That is the key: no money, no one comes.”
So why did Yoshida, who said he had offers to play elsewhere, choose to come back?
“This is very complicated,” he said.
Weighing heavily in his thinking was his grade-school-aged daughter, who was born in the U.K. when her father played for Southampton, then followed him to Italy and Germany before coming to the U.S. 19 months ago.
“I don’t want to change my daughter’s school,” he said. “The last couple of years she’s changed every one, two years to a new environment, which is very sad for her. She’s getting older.”
Yoshida, who turns 37 in August, said he could have made more than what the Galaxy agreed to pay him in 2025 but the Galaxy offered a second season and that was worth more than money since it meant another year in the same school for his daughter. That second year will also keep Yoshida in the country through the World Cup, which will be played in the U.S. next summer, followed by the Olympics, which are coming to L.A. in 2028.
“It’s not bad for the future, having this kind of network, relationship and experience in America,” he said. “So I was thinking not [for] this short period, but longer.
“It was a difficult decision, to be honest. It’s hard to compromise your financial [situation] but we’ll see. I need to earn money outside of soccer.”
Because in MLS, leading your team to a championship doesn’t mean you won’t have to take a cut in pay.
