Commissioner now allowed to have talks with players

For the first time ever, MLS commissioner Don Garber sat down Friday afternoon with Real Salt Lake's players and had a candid discussion about life and soccer. It was the sixth such conversation he'd had with an MLS team in the past month, talks that were impossible in previous years.

The players recently approved the first collective bargaining agreement in the league's 10-year history, a move that increases the minimum salary from $24,000 to $28,000, establishes a pension plan and creates a neutral arbiter for grievance hearings.

"Prior to the new CBA, we were in litigation with our players for many years and were unable to sit with them in an organized fashion and talk about life and talk about their issues," said Garber.

Now, however, a player like Clint Mathis, who was fined $1,000 Thursday by the league for his egregious foul in last week's game, has a way of appealing the fine.

Mathis, who is emerging as the team's vocal leader, also has a way of standing up for his rookie teammates. Garber said that nearly 15 minutes of his 45-minute discussion with Real Salt Lake's players involved Mathis telling the commissioner how the league could provide better benefits for the young players.

"That's just not the way professional sports work," said Garber. "You don't have your highest paid guy, and arguably your most successful national team player, not sitting there talking about himself but how we can raise the benefits for the developmental players."

After meeting with the team, Garber met with various Salt Lake City media members at Rice-Eccles Stadium to discuss expansion, player salaries, the collective bargaining agreement and much more. Here are a few highlights of that discussion.

TORONTO EXPANSION: Garber reiterated that Toronto is the front-runner for a team when the league plans on expanding to 14 teams in 2007.

The league has been involved in detailed discussions with the Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment group, which owns the Raptors and Maple Leafs, about placing a team in Toronto.

A soccer-specific stadium is already under construction at York University, which the Canadian Soccer Association plans to use as its training home, much like the U.S. National Team uses the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., as its home.

That stadium is being publicly funded, which Garber points out is the way the majority of soccer stadiums under construction in the United States are funded.