Twice a year, the MLS Players Union drops a great big dump of player salary information in our laps, and we're all happy to writhe around in the numbers and make assumptions and guesses about the state of a team's salary cap.
But if the 2015 MLS Collective Bargaining Agreement document released today by that same union teaches anything, it should be that we can't count on those numbers actually equating to a salary cap budget.
First, this line should be entirely instructive as to our guessing efforts:
The League will determine, in its discretion, a Player’s Salary Budget Charge according to the following formula, provided, however, that MLS retains discretion to lower a Player’s Salary Budget Charge in individual cases.