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Reports: MLS owners, players avoid work stoppage, agree to new CBA

Reports: MLS owners, players avoid work stoppage, agree to new CBA

The 20th Major League Soccer season will start on time after all.

On Wednesday night, several soccer reporters tweeted that a new collective bargaining agreement had finally been reached in the contentious negotiations between the MLS owners and the Players Union. The two sides had been engaged in a months-long standoff – with free agency being the chief point of friction – and were holed up in meeting rooms in Washington, D.C. for the last several days with the bargaining running deep into the night.

The league announced an "agreement in principle" later in the evening. So the 2015 season will kick off, as scheduled, on Friday night when the defending champions Los Angeles Galaxy play host to the Chicago Fire in Carson, Calif.

"This agreement will provide a platform for our players, ownership and management to work together to help build Major League Soccer into one of the great soccer leagues in the world," commissioner Don Garber said in a statement.

For a time, it had looked like a strike was a real possibility as, according to various reports, owners would not budge from their refusal to include free agency into the new CBA. And when they finally did, the initial terms – being 32 years old and having served 10 consecutive years with the same team – were so prohibitive that the players dismissed it. The owners reportedly came down from those demands and a deal was finally struck.

Soon enough, the Orlando Sentinel reported that the new CBA is for five years. The free agency applies to players who are at least 28 years old and have spent eight years in the league, according to the Sentinel's Paul Tenorio.

The raises they are eligible to accept in the free agency process, however, are capped. Players initially earning less than $100,000 are entitled to a 25 percent raise. Those making $100,000 to $200,000 can earn 20 percent more. And those taking home $200,000 or more are limited to taking a 15 percent raise.

Almost as big as the news about free agency is that the minimum salary will increase from $36,500 in 2014 to $60,000, changing the life of rookies and fringe players significantly. Naturally, that means the overall salary cap – $3.1 million in 2014, plus the overages on the designated players – will rise as well. How much it will go up by is unclear.

Twitter, naturally, was quickly embroiled in a hot debate about whether the players had leveraged enough from their bargaining power. It would seem to this observer that full free agency was never going to happen at this stage, and that the mere act of opening that Pandora's Box, as the owners viewed it, is a big win. There will be more CBAs, and the players will make gains.

The minimum salary, meanwhile, is another major victory. It wasn't so long ago that MLS rookies could be paid as little as $12,900 a year. A solid, middle-class wage will help professionalize the back-end of the rosters and benefit the league as a whole.

On the whole, it appears both sides made considerable compromises and delivered a framework that will allow the league to continue growing as rapidly as it has. And that's a fair deal.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.