2026-05-23, 04:49 PM - Word count:
Warning: here there be math.
A recent discussion in the Shanghai/Magyar Locker Room got me thinking about the Salary Cap in the SSL, and wondering where it sits in terms of how restrictive it is. I spent a long time on the BoDs of various sim leagues, and one of my main interests was in salary caps. Salary caps are a great way for leagues to enforce a competitive balance in the sport. One reason that I think that some people don’t like football (soccer), is the lack of parity. Sure, relegation and promotion are fun, but especially outside the premier league, parity is hard to come by. For example, the 1994-95 season was the last time that Bayern Munich did not place in the top 3 teams in the Bundesliga, and in the seasons since then, they’ve won the Bundesliga 21 of them.
Sim league salary caps are a different kind of animal than salary caps in the real world, because sim leagues have fewer constraints than real world leagues. When you look at the motivations of real world players when it comes to negotiating salaries, there are factors like pride and ego (am I getting paid as much, or more, than people that I think I’m better than), location (I want to live near a beach on the Mediterranean, not on a frozen island of 400,000 people), career brevity (I only have 3-20 years to earn ALL of the money I can in this career), and, of course, trophy chasing. On top of this, there’s the pressure of players’ agents who are trying to get their clients to earn a maximum amount of money, to maximize their own profits. When it comes to sim leagues, people will almost always be willing to take the minimum, because there really only tend to be 2 motivations for people in sim leagues:
1. Do I get to be in a locker room with people I like?
2. Can I win trophies?
Since factors like player agents, athletes trying to earn an entire life-time of salary in a few years, and living conditions aren’t factors in sim leagues, the salary cap is not a self-solving problem, like it is for professional leagues.
For sim leagues, we therefore must tie salaries to TPE, and use them as a proxy for TPE to try to encourage parity as a result. Unfortunately, this can push teams to have to trade away homegrown, loyal talent. This can cause a lot of hard feelings towards organizations, and from organizational management towards the league itself.
So, what I’m looking at from here is where does the SSL stand on this front? Is our salary cap where it should be, too high, or too low? Here are some things to consider as we examine the results of my study:
-I’m focusing exclusively on the Majors’ Salary Cap of 55mil.
-I’m not going to be considering positional TPE counts, largely because trying to examine what position every player is capable of playing would be an enormous amount of work, and not every team plays players at every position.
So, let’s take a look at where the league stands.
Here is the official league salary schedule:
TPE Interval Minimum Salary
250 - 350 $1.0 million
351 - 500 $1.5 million
501 - 650 $2.0 million
651 - 800 $2.5 million
801 - 950 $3.0 million
951 - 1100 $3.5 million
1101 - 1250 $4.0 million
1251 - 1400 $4.5 million
1401 - 1550 $5.0 million
1551 - 1700 $5.5 million
1701+ $6.0 million
Given the use of “supersubs” there’s not a lot of reason for teams to be carrying extra roster players, so for my final calculation of where I believe the salary cap should be, I’ll assume that a team only carries 11 players. However, looking at the current state of the Majors organizations from the official league budget sheet, there are 12 Majors teams, with 138 players rostered, for an average of 11.5 roster players per squad. With each Majors team having a $55mil salary cap, that brings the League Cap to a grand total of $660mil. When you look at the minimum salary cap hit of the rostered players, you arrive at a minimum league payment of $675mil. So how are teams affording these players?
In order to help teams manage the budget a little more easily, the league does make a few concessions. First, regressing players are eligible for “VET” contracts, in which they can still sign a multi-year deal, but their contract value is reduced to match their new, lower, salary minimum each season.
The second, and far more impactful, concession that the league makes is that teams can sign players to a maximum of a 3 year duration for a contract, and only the first year must be compliant with the Minimum salary. Using myself as an example (as one of the highest earners of the S23 class, I feel that this gives a reasonable “upper bound” for what’s possible from this benefit), I have been earning around 230-240 TPE per season. Now, to be fair, I’ve been getting the 24 TPE training camps, whereas Majors’ players are getting 18, 12, or 6 TPE, so we can reasonably move the projection down to 220 TPE. In the most optimal scenario, I would land a contract renewal just under a cap threshold (e.g., sign a new deal with 799 TPE, qualifying me for the $2.5mil cap hit). At the start of my second season, I’d be around 1120 TPE ($4mil), and at the start of my third, I’d be at 1340 ($4.5mil). So, depending on timing, a team is likely saving $1mil in cap in a player’s second season, and $2mil in cap in the player’s third season.
If you look at the league approved budgets for these teams, 103 of the 138 players (74.6%) are actually being paid less than their minimum contract hit. This number is a little higher than I would have expected, as I would think that it would only be two-thirds of players (91 out of 138) for whom that would be the case, but that’s ultimately only 12 total players outside of my projection of two-thirds.
So, given that teams are currently able to fit everyone under the salary cap, is there a problem? Well, one of the indicators that the cap may be too restrictive for teams would be if there are players who are playing in the Minors, even if their TPE values would merit their play in the Majors. According to the budget sheet:
-17 total players were under 1100 TPE
-7 of those players, were under 1000 TPE
-3 of those players, were under 900 TPE
-1 of those players was under 700 TPE
Now, far be it from me to decide how teams manage their assets or where players want to play. It’s entirely possible that a 1400 TPE player WANTS to play in the Minors for whatever reason, whether it’s chasing records, stat-padding, trying to push for a Minors’ promotion, stave off Minors’ relegation, or just enjoying the Minors teams more than the Majors team. I’m sure there are other reasons that I haven’t even considered. But, especially if there are teams who are playing higher TPE players in their Minors’ affiliates, this would suggest to me that the cap might be too restrictive. Overall, there are 32 players who have more than 1100 TPE but are playing in the minors, and 7 of those players seem to be listed as eligible for a spot on the Majors squad where a lower TPE player is playing. That being said, for NONE of these players, would moving the player to the Majors’ team push that team over the salary cap. This makes me skeptical that the salary cap is actually too restrictive. More than anything, I suspect that the Salary Cap may actually be too permissive, especially in the Minors. I mostly say this because there are 2 organizations, Reykjavik/North Shore and USP/ASP, who are carrying 17 total players who have more than 1100 TPE on Minors rosters, and neither team is even close to the $45 million salary cap (though both are right up against their Majors’ salary cap.
So, for all that I said I wasn’t going to look at minors teams, I feel that I now have to, especially as I transition to how I’d approach setting a salary cap for the league, were I tasked with it.
To start with, I’m using the Budget Sheet’s values for all players’ TPE values, and I’m going to sort them by TPE. Again, I’m not including positional TPE values, so something weird could conceivably happen on that front, but this is largely for illustrative and experimental purposes, so I’m not terribly concerned about it.
If we take the top 132 players, we will get 12 teams worth of the best TPE players in the league, which would presumably give us who we WANT our Majors’ players to be. These 132 players need $676.5mil in salary, if they were all signed to 1 year contracts, which would come out to a cap hit of about $56.4mil per team, so we’ll round up to 56.5mil. This looks great, and like our current cap of $55mil might be too restrictive, until we remember the issue of savings which stem from multi-year contracts. One third of these 132 players is 44, so we can approximate $44mil in total savings from players on their second season of their contracts, and $88mil from players in their 3rd season, but just to be conservative, we’ll estimate $1mil in savings per player (when we look at the real data, it actually averaged out to $1.15mil per player, so this seem fair). Therefore, we’re looking at an $88 mil reduction of the total league cap, which, spread across 12 teams, would lower the individual team cap from $56.5mil to $49mil. Now, this would absolutely evenly divide the talent of the top 132 players across all teams, and we’d like teams to have a little more flexibility than that. My next move in setting the cap would be to add wiggle room, but I want to do this very carefully, such that it wouldn’t be possible for any one team to be TOO top-heavy. Of the Majors’ players, the minimum salary hit would be $4mil, with the maximum being $6mil, and a median of $5mil. Let’s say, just for the sake of it, that we’d like “top teams” to be able to afford to have 3 additional max contract players, which would bring my final proposed salary cap to $52mil for majors teams. Just as a sanity check, we want to make sure - again - that we don’t make it possible for one team to be too top-heavy. We have 39 players who qualify for the maximum cap hit of 6mil, and assuming those same contract savings are in play, a total cap of 59mil would conceivably allow a team to have a starting 11 composed entirely of top tier players. Thus, we can say that we absolutely CANNOT allow the cap to increase to 59 mil, but my cap of $52mil would be well below that.
The other piece of this would be changing the salary cap for the Minors. After we remove the top 132 players from the pool of Majors and Minors players, we are left with 159 players to be spread across 12 organizations, or 13.25 players per team. Applying the same methodology as before, we find that all players are due $452.5 mil, or $37.7mil per team. Again, multi year contracts should produce approximately $106mil in savings (106 players is two-thirds of the player base, and an average of $1mil savings for these two-thirds of players), which would lower the Minors’ Cap from $37.7mil to $28.875mil, which we’ll round up to $29mil. Again, we’ll try to provide some flexibility to teams. The minimum Minors’ salary hit is $1.5mil, the maximum hit is $4mil, and the median is $3mil. If we again say that we want to have room for an additional 3 top end players - especially given that these are “farm” systems, then we’ll add an additional $3mil, to allow for 3 median players to be replaced with top talent. This would bring our final cap to $32mil.
Thus, my final proposal would be a reduction of our cap from $100mil ($55mil Maj, $45mil Min) to $84mil ($52mil Maj, $32mil Min). Now, I would also propose that there be a separate “Bonus budget” available to Minors players only, or a free-to-teams $1mil per player awarded by the league to players in their first 3 seasons to off-set some of the money that new players would probably be getting from their teams’ via bonuses.
I would also propose that these salary caps - for the Minors only - may be considered to be a “rostered” cap. Meaning that teams that would not otherwise be cap compliant could participate in a loan system, such that the teams could retain the rights to that player for the Majors, but trade them season-by-season, to help spread the player base around the league in the Minors.
If we applied these changes to the current league, Hollywood, Reykjavik, and Sao Paolo would be over the cap, with Tenochtitlan hitting the cap exactly. On the other end of the spectrum, the following teams are more than 6 mil under the cap (chosen for being under the “equitable distribution” value by the same amount that the cap was set over it): Black Forest, Buenos Aires, Catalunya, Liffeyside, Rome, Shanghai, Tokyo, Xelaju. This list is… the REST of the teams in the league.
Meanwhile, it would be very difficult to say precisely who would not be cap compliant in the Minors, as many players who are currently playing in the Minors would likely be pushed into other organizations, and pushed up to the Majors. Under this model, the split between a Minors’ player and a Majors player happens between 1150 and 1200 TPE, and we’re trying to spread the talent somewhat more equitably. Therefore, we would be seeing far fewer instances of VERY high TPE players playing in the Minors. Under this model, there are approximately 20 players in the Minors who are Majors caliber, and the lower Minors’ cap would force them up into the Majors’, and yes, possibly force teams to move their players to other teams, especially aging veterans.
I don’t know that I think that this system should actually be implemented, but if it was, I would also propose that this be a dynamic model, where these calculations were basically run every season (maybe post trade deadline) such that these values could fluctuate to mirror league health.
Anyway, I hope this was an interesting read, and if nothing else, I’ll say that I don’t think that the salary cap is unreasonably restrictive. If anything it could stand to be reduced. For those people who are concerned about losing home-grown talent, I suppose that there could be a further discount for players who have played on a team for 6 consecutive seasons (maybe allow them to sign their 3 year contract for one tier lower, or allowing this player to sign for 5 seasons to lock in a longer benefit of the lower cap hit?). The other potential solution that I see, would be to increase the TPE schedule, and continue the pattern 150TPE per rung scale past $6mil. If you do this, my calculations say this would give us 12 players with a maximum $7mil cap hit, and would also push the modified cap calculations up to $53.5mil per Majors team.
This may all be a solution in want of a problem, I don’t know how many people actually think the cap is good or bad. But, this is how I’d tackle solving the problem if people felt like there was one.
A recent discussion in the Shanghai/Magyar Locker Room got me thinking about the Salary Cap in the SSL, and wondering where it sits in terms of how restrictive it is. I spent a long time on the BoDs of various sim leagues, and one of my main interests was in salary caps. Salary caps are a great way for leagues to enforce a competitive balance in the sport. One reason that I think that some people don’t like football (soccer), is the lack of parity. Sure, relegation and promotion are fun, but especially outside the premier league, parity is hard to come by. For example, the 1994-95 season was the last time that Bayern Munich did not place in the top 3 teams in the Bundesliga, and in the seasons since then, they’ve won the Bundesliga 21 of them.
Sim league salary caps are a different kind of animal than salary caps in the real world, because sim leagues have fewer constraints than real world leagues. When you look at the motivations of real world players when it comes to negotiating salaries, there are factors like pride and ego (am I getting paid as much, or more, than people that I think I’m better than), location (I want to live near a beach on the Mediterranean, not on a frozen island of 400,000 people), career brevity (I only have 3-20 years to earn ALL of the money I can in this career), and, of course, trophy chasing. On top of this, there’s the pressure of players’ agents who are trying to get their clients to earn a maximum amount of money, to maximize their own profits. When it comes to sim leagues, people will almost always be willing to take the minimum, because there really only tend to be 2 motivations for people in sim leagues:
1. Do I get to be in a locker room with people I like?
2. Can I win trophies?
Since factors like player agents, athletes trying to earn an entire life-time of salary in a few years, and living conditions aren’t factors in sim leagues, the salary cap is not a self-solving problem, like it is for professional leagues.
For sim leagues, we therefore must tie salaries to TPE, and use them as a proxy for TPE to try to encourage parity as a result. Unfortunately, this can push teams to have to trade away homegrown, loyal talent. This can cause a lot of hard feelings towards organizations, and from organizational management towards the league itself.
So, what I’m looking at from here is where does the SSL stand on this front? Is our salary cap where it should be, too high, or too low? Here are some things to consider as we examine the results of my study:
-I’m focusing exclusively on the Majors’ Salary Cap of 55mil.
-I’m not going to be considering positional TPE counts, largely because trying to examine what position every player is capable of playing would be an enormous amount of work, and not every team plays players at every position.
So, let’s take a look at where the league stands.
Here is the official league salary schedule:
TPE Interval Minimum Salary
250 - 350 $1.0 million
351 - 500 $1.5 million
501 - 650 $2.0 million
651 - 800 $2.5 million
801 - 950 $3.0 million
951 - 1100 $3.5 million
1101 - 1250 $4.0 million
1251 - 1400 $4.5 million
1401 - 1550 $5.0 million
1551 - 1700 $5.5 million
1701+ $6.0 million
Given the use of “supersubs” there’s not a lot of reason for teams to be carrying extra roster players, so for my final calculation of where I believe the salary cap should be, I’ll assume that a team only carries 11 players. However, looking at the current state of the Majors organizations from the official league budget sheet, there are 12 Majors teams, with 138 players rostered, for an average of 11.5 roster players per squad. With each Majors team having a $55mil salary cap, that brings the League Cap to a grand total of $660mil. When you look at the minimum salary cap hit of the rostered players, you arrive at a minimum league payment of $675mil. So how are teams affording these players?
In order to help teams manage the budget a little more easily, the league does make a few concessions. First, regressing players are eligible for “VET” contracts, in which they can still sign a multi-year deal, but their contract value is reduced to match their new, lower, salary minimum each season.
The second, and far more impactful, concession that the league makes is that teams can sign players to a maximum of a 3 year duration for a contract, and only the first year must be compliant with the Minimum salary. Using myself as an example (as one of the highest earners of the S23 class, I feel that this gives a reasonable “upper bound” for what’s possible from this benefit), I have been earning around 230-240 TPE per season. Now, to be fair, I’ve been getting the 24 TPE training camps, whereas Majors’ players are getting 18, 12, or 6 TPE, so we can reasonably move the projection down to 220 TPE. In the most optimal scenario, I would land a contract renewal just under a cap threshold (e.g., sign a new deal with 799 TPE, qualifying me for the $2.5mil cap hit). At the start of my second season, I’d be around 1120 TPE ($4mil), and at the start of my third, I’d be at 1340 ($4.5mil). So, depending on timing, a team is likely saving $1mil in cap in a player’s second season, and $2mil in cap in the player’s third season.
If you look at the league approved budgets for these teams, 103 of the 138 players (74.6%) are actually being paid less than their minimum contract hit. This number is a little higher than I would have expected, as I would think that it would only be two-thirds of players (91 out of 138) for whom that would be the case, but that’s ultimately only 12 total players outside of my projection of two-thirds.
So, given that teams are currently able to fit everyone under the salary cap, is there a problem? Well, one of the indicators that the cap may be too restrictive for teams would be if there are players who are playing in the Minors, even if their TPE values would merit their play in the Majors. According to the budget sheet:
-17 total players were under 1100 TPE
-7 of those players, were under 1000 TPE
-3 of those players, were under 900 TPE
-1 of those players was under 700 TPE
Now, far be it from me to decide how teams manage their assets or where players want to play. It’s entirely possible that a 1400 TPE player WANTS to play in the Minors for whatever reason, whether it’s chasing records, stat-padding, trying to push for a Minors’ promotion, stave off Minors’ relegation, or just enjoying the Minors teams more than the Majors team. I’m sure there are other reasons that I haven’t even considered. But, especially if there are teams who are playing higher TPE players in their Minors’ affiliates, this would suggest to me that the cap might be too restrictive. Overall, there are 32 players who have more than 1100 TPE but are playing in the minors, and 7 of those players seem to be listed as eligible for a spot on the Majors squad where a lower TPE player is playing. That being said, for NONE of these players, would moving the player to the Majors’ team push that team over the salary cap. This makes me skeptical that the salary cap is actually too restrictive. More than anything, I suspect that the Salary Cap may actually be too permissive, especially in the Minors. I mostly say this because there are 2 organizations, Reykjavik/North Shore and USP/ASP, who are carrying 17 total players who have more than 1100 TPE on Minors rosters, and neither team is even close to the $45 million salary cap (though both are right up against their Majors’ salary cap.
So, for all that I said I wasn’t going to look at minors teams, I feel that I now have to, especially as I transition to how I’d approach setting a salary cap for the league, were I tasked with it.
To start with, I’m using the Budget Sheet’s values for all players’ TPE values, and I’m going to sort them by TPE. Again, I’m not including positional TPE values, so something weird could conceivably happen on that front, but this is largely for illustrative and experimental purposes, so I’m not terribly concerned about it.
If we take the top 132 players, we will get 12 teams worth of the best TPE players in the league, which would presumably give us who we WANT our Majors’ players to be. These 132 players need $676.5mil in salary, if they were all signed to 1 year contracts, which would come out to a cap hit of about $56.4mil per team, so we’ll round up to 56.5mil. This looks great, and like our current cap of $55mil might be too restrictive, until we remember the issue of savings which stem from multi-year contracts. One third of these 132 players is 44, so we can approximate $44mil in total savings from players on their second season of their contracts, and $88mil from players in their 3rd season, but just to be conservative, we’ll estimate $1mil in savings per player (when we look at the real data, it actually averaged out to $1.15mil per player, so this seem fair). Therefore, we’re looking at an $88 mil reduction of the total league cap, which, spread across 12 teams, would lower the individual team cap from $56.5mil to $49mil. Now, this would absolutely evenly divide the talent of the top 132 players across all teams, and we’d like teams to have a little more flexibility than that. My next move in setting the cap would be to add wiggle room, but I want to do this very carefully, such that it wouldn’t be possible for any one team to be TOO top-heavy. Of the Majors’ players, the minimum salary hit would be $4mil, with the maximum being $6mil, and a median of $5mil. Let’s say, just for the sake of it, that we’d like “top teams” to be able to afford to have 3 additional max contract players, which would bring my final proposed salary cap to $52mil for majors teams. Just as a sanity check, we want to make sure - again - that we don’t make it possible for one team to be too top-heavy. We have 39 players who qualify for the maximum cap hit of 6mil, and assuming those same contract savings are in play, a total cap of 59mil would conceivably allow a team to have a starting 11 composed entirely of top tier players. Thus, we can say that we absolutely CANNOT allow the cap to increase to 59 mil, but my cap of $52mil would be well below that.
The other piece of this would be changing the salary cap for the Minors. After we remove the top 132 players from the pool of Majors and Minors players, we are left with 159 players to be spread across 12 organizations, or 13.25 players per team. Applying the same methodology as before, we find that all players are due $452.5 mil, or $37.7mil per team. Again, multi year contracts should produce approximately $106mil in savings (106 players is two-thirds of the player base, and an average of $1mil savings for these two-thirds of players), which would lower the Minors’ Cap from $37.7mil to $28.875mil, which we’ll round up to $29mil. Again, we’ll try to provide some flexibility to teams. The minimum Minors’ salary hit is $1.5mil, the maximum hit is $4mil, and the median is $3mil. If we again say that we want to have room for an additional 3 top end players - especially given that these are “farm” systems, then we’ll add an additional $3mil, to allow for 3 median players to be replaced with top talent. This would bring our final cap to $32mil.
Thus, my final proposal would be a reduction of our cap from $100mil ($55mil Maj, $45mil Min) to $84mil ($52mil Maj, $32mil Min). Now, I would also propose that there be a separate “Bonus budget” available to Minors players only, or a free-to-teams $1mil per player awarded by the league to players in their first 3 seasons to off-set some of the money that new players would probably be getting from their teams’ via bonuses.
I would also propose that these salary caps - for the Minors only - may be considered to be a “rostered” cap. Meaning that teams that would not otherwise be cap compliant could participate in a loan system, such that the teams could retain the rights to that player for the Majors, but trade them season-by-season, to help spread the player base around the league in the Minors.
If we applied these changes to the current league, Hollywood, Reykjavik, and Sao Paolo would be over the cap, with Tenochtitlan hitting the cap exactly. On the other end of the spectrum, the following teams are more than 6 mil under the cap (chosen for being under the “equitable distribution” value by the same amount that the cap was set over it): Black Forest, Buenos Aires, Catalunya, Liffeyside, Rome, Shanghai, Tokyo, Xelaju. This list is… the REST of the teams in the league.
Meanwhile, it would be very difficult to say precisely who would not be cap compliant in the Minors, as many players who are currently playing in the Minors would likely be pushed into other organizations, and pushed up to the Majors. Under this model, the split between a Minors’ player and a Majors player happens between 1150 and 1200 TPE, and we’re trying to spread the talent somewhat more equitably. Therefore, we would be seeing far fewer instances of VERY high TPE players playing in the Minors. Under this model, there are approximately 20 players in the Minors who are Majors caliber, and the lower Minors’ cap would force them up into the Majors’, and yes, possibly force teams to move their players to other teams, especially aging veterans.
I don’t know that I think that this system should actually be implemented, but if it was, I would also propose that this be a dynamic model, where these calculations were basically run every season (maybe post trade deadline) such that these values could fluctuate to mirror league health.
Anyway, I hope this was an interesting read, and if nothing else, I’ll say that I don’t think that the salary cap is unreasonably restrictive. If anything it could stand to be reduced. For those people who are concerned about losing home-grown talent, I suppose that there could be a further discount for players who have played on a team for 6 consecutive seasons (maybe allow them to sign their 3 year contract for one tier lower, or allowing this player to sign for 5 seasons to lock in a longer benefit of the lower cap hit?). The other potential solution that I see, would be to increase the TPE schedule, and continue the pattern 150TPE per rung scale past $6mil. If you do this, my calculations say this would give us 12 players with a maximum $7mil cap hit, and would also push the modified cap calculations up to $53.5mil per Majors team.
This may all be a solution in want of a problem, I don’t know how many people actually think the cap is good or bad. But, this is how I’d tackle solving the problem if people felt like there was one.
Code:
2679 words![[Image: OXZWxr2.png]](https://i.imgur.com/OXZWxr2.png)
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