Major League Soccer has made many improvements over the years but one area they still lag behind is in regards to player movement.  And this was once again made clear when the Wizards opted not to pick up the option year for goalkeeper Kevin Hartman and Soccer 365's Richard Snowden has his say on the matter.

By Richard Snowden

Until very recently, one would hardly have expected Kevin Hartman to serve as the poster boy for pretty much everything that is wrong with how Major League Soccer treats its players. Yet that is exactly what Hartman has become.

Despite being arguably the top goalkeeper in MLS history, currently boasting league records for shutouts (84), wins (146), and saves (1,235), Hartman suddenly finds himself without a team after the Kansas City Wizards declined to pick up the option on his contract.

As Soccer America's Ridge Mahoney reported recently, Wizards coach Peter Vermes asserted that his decision to drop Hartman in favor of signing veteran Danish netminder Jimmy Nielsen ultimately boiled down to unacceptable delays in negotiations with Hartman over a new deal.

"At some point you have make a decision and I didn't want for our team to be without a player in a very important position," Vermes said. "The salary really wasn't the problem; there were other things that we couldn't agree upon, and so we started looking around for other options. It was frustrating in that we kept trying, trying and trying and couldn't seem to get it done."

At first glance, Hartman's situation might seem unremarkable; such changes are quite common in the world of professional sports, after all. Unfortunately for Hartman, there's nothing at all common about MLS's iron-fisted rules regarding players' freedom of movement.

According to league rules, its players - all of whom are signed to contracts by the league rather than individual franchises - belong exclusively to the team to which they have been allocated. So exclusively, in fact, that the rights to a player remain with his last team even after his contract expires, essentially in perpetuity.

In other words, as Mahoney explained, Hartman "is a man without a club … even though he isn't under contract, isn't with the team, and isn't going to be." Short of moving abroad or retiring, neither of which the 35-year-old Hartman will likely be inclined to do at this point in his career, there's basically nothing he can do about it.

If Hartman wishes to remain in MLS, for all intents and purposes, he is a slave to the whims of the Kansas City technical staff, which is unlikely to simply give away the rights to a player of his caliber. And current conditions don't look especially promising, Vermes told Soccer America.

"We've talked to a few teams but there don't seem to be any opportunities out there," Vermes said. "In our league at least, nobody is looking for goalkeepers. At some point, somebody is going to be looking for a player, so we'll see how things go."

Until and unless that eventuality comes to pass, in the circumstances Hartman would almost be better off working at Wal-Mart.

The world's largest corporation and hands-down 700-pound gorilla of big-box retailers has certainly taken its share of heat for its treatment of employees over the years, much of it well deserved. But say what you will about Wal-Mart - their employees at least have much more freedom than MLS players do when it comes to movement.

If a Wal-Mart employee wishes to move from, say, New York to Dallas while continuing to work for the company, the store in New York won't demand compensation from its counterpart in Dallas to sign off on the move. Nor would the company's corporate office in Bentonville, Ark., ever be likely to forbid the employee from making such a move.

And if an employee should quit working for a Wal-Mart in Boston, move to Denver to work for a different employer, and then later decides he or she would like to go back to working for Wal-Mart in Denver, the Denver store where the person has applied doesn't have to get permission from either the Boston store or Wal-Mart HQ to hire the person.

Moreover, if a Wal-Mart store in one city hires or accepts the transfer of a company employee from a store in another city, the employee's new store generally has broad latitude in deciding how much to pay the employee, according to its own unique needs and consistent with the demands of the local market.

Not so in MLS, where Hartman could end up screwed out of gainful employment even if another MLS club wants him unless Kansas City opts to waive him, which is unlikely to happen if the Wizards organization believes it might be able to demand compensation. At some point, league rules might force the Wizards' hand, but by that time other teams will most likely have locked in other options.

Small wonder, then, that the MLS players' union has persisted so stubbornly with its demands for some form of free agency, as well as greater contract guarantees, in its negotiations with league brass on a new collective bargaining agreement. When their situation as MLS employees is such that they are actually worse off than even Wal-Mart workers in some significant respects, it's not difficult to understand why.

If things keep going on like this, Hartman may want to consider trading in his bright-pink goalkeeper's jersey for a blue smock with a smiley face on it at some point. Even in light of MLS's modest wages, he would take a whopping pay cut in so doing, but at least he would be able to choose from a wide range of job options with the company for once.

Meantime, perhaps MLS brass would do well to ask themselves if treating their most important employees worse than Wal-Mart is conducive to healthy labor relations, not to mention a positive public image.

As a concluding aside, your humble scribe would like to take this opportunity to raise his hand and offer up a sincere "my bad" for a recent misstatement in this space. (For our purposes here, you may assume that my current facial expression resembles that of Eliot Spitzer while standing at the podium to confirm his alternate identity as "Client 9.")

In the last installment of this column, this writer had asserted that U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati was the brains behind MLS's single-entity setup. That, however, is not the case; MLS president Mark Abbott is in fact responsible for the league's business structure.

Turns out yours truly managed to misremember a particular statement in an old column by Jeff Rusnak of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and that's how the mistake came about. In any event, this writer offers sincere apologies for the error to all readers (yes, even to those who love to hate on him with considerable napalm!) and hereby promises to be much more careful moving forward. Peace out!  

Do you think Hartman's career should have demanded better treatment? What can the league do to allow more player freedom? Talk about this in the Soccer 365 and Big Soccer message board by CLICKING HERE.