Deal or no deal? At this point, it hardly matters. A players strike, which would surely be brief given the limited resources the union can bring to bear, will harm Major League Soccer less in the long term than the league’s failure to seize the moment.

MLS has been at the crossroads before, and the league has usually gone the right away. From near-death in 2001, the league rebuilt itself with surprising speed and strength. This country is never going to be easy for a soccer league — it competes domestically with four better-established team sports, and it competes globally with much better-established soccer leagues — but MLS has carved out a nice sturdy niche.

And even as the soccer-hating dinosaurs slowly die off, some people in this country will always be unreachable. Some fans will always be Eurosnobs, much in the same way that some people refuse to watch Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons because their cynicism won’t allow them to believe it could ever be as good as the old days. Some coaches will always insist MLS academies don’t mimic Germany’s or England’s or Bolivia’s to their satisfaction, and they’ll try to steer players away. Some people won’t be happy until the USA has a promotion/relegation pyramid like the one that took England 100 years to establish. You can’t please everyone, and trying to win over the crankiest people on Twitter is a fool’s errand.

Nor would a simple raise in salaries make MLS clubs the equal of Everton, let alone Manchester United. MLS could quintuple its salaries, and couch potatoes choosing between La Liga and MLS on TV may still opt for the former more often than not. There is no amount of reasonable spending that will build Barcelona in New England’s green and pleasant land.

But the league’s goal of being a “league of choice” for players and fans is still reasonable. MLS doesn’t have to be No. 1 — it just has to be worth seeing. Yet through its stubbornness in collective bargaining, the league is undermining its “league of choice” goals.

As former MLS player Bobby Warshaw put it: “The players will point out that there’s a strange contradiction here. The league talks about being a ‘destination league,’ both for players and for fans, yet they do nothing to make the league attractive for players, which would, ultimately, make it more attractive to fans.”

A league with no free agency and with bureaucratic restrictions on player rights will not be a “league of choice” for young players, many of whom are opting to go to Mexico, let alone Europe. It will not bring Herculez Gomez home from Mexico. It will not attract international players who are choosing between MLS and the Netherlands.

And the eagerness to play hardball with players sends a poor message to fans. How are fans supposed to believe the league is on the rise when it’s claiming poverty and insisting that the whole structure falls apart if an eight-year veteran is allowed to negotiate a pay raise or move to a city closer to his wife’s family?

The league’s stance is simply tone-deaf. No one believes that MLS will go broke if two teams bid up a veteran’s player to $200K when, thanks to the salary cap, that money simply comes from another player’s potential pay. No one understands why it’s OK to compete in every other sense — for Designated Players, in building youth academies, in worldwide scouting — but it’s not OK for teams to compete for a non-DP’s signature. The fan base is too sophisticated, and it no longer sees the need for MLS to take baby steps on player movement while it’s making bold investments in academies, stadiums and Steven Gerrard. And MLS has simply not made a plausible case for maintaining its grip on intraleague movement.

If MLS folded tomorrow, it would still deserve a ton of credit for building the game in the USA, just as we credit the decidedly non-traditional NASL of the 70s and 80s for stirring up some interest in the soccer-unfriendly country. What’s been done over the last two decades is remarkable. But that doesn’t mean the league can afford to stagnate. Over the years, it has evolved — allocations aren’t driven from the league office any more, clubs have more control, and the salary budget bends to include Designated Players. That evolution needs to keep going, and what the players are asking is far cheaper than the other investments the league is making.

I’m sometimes asked to write a sequel to Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer. At this point, that book would be Short-Term Thinking: How MLS Threw It All Away.

This offseason was the perfect time to demonstrate that MLS was stepping confidently into the modern soccer world, ready to compete for players and fans. That step forward would’ve required significant time to figure out how to move into free agency and perhaps toss out the vestiges of the league’s “allocation” system. They’ve run out of time to do it. MLS may eventually force its players back onto the field, but the league and its players will be poorer in the long run.

You can’t take public statements too seriously during a difficult negotiation. It’s posturing time.

But the apparent stumbling block of real, honest-to-goodness free agency is a concern. And this quote from MLS president Mark Abbott, a tough negotiator and the architect of single entity, is a puzzler:

“Because we function in an international market and the clubs that we are competing against for players are not subject to our salary budget, to have free agency within the league doesn’t provide us with the certainty that the union says it does,” Abbott explained. “When the union says they can offer cost certainty under free agency, it’s not true because we have to compete against clubs all throughout the world.”

(From Brian Straus’ detailed look at the state of collective bargaining)

I cannot make heads or tails of this argument, mostly because free agency within MLS has nothing to do with the realities of the global labor market. If FC Dallas is bidding against Pachuca for a particular player, it hardly matters whether D.C. United is also bidding.

So no, MLS can’t have “cost certainty” because it’s a global market. Globally, players are free agents, whether MLS likes it or not. MLS cannot control the market. And that’s a good thing. If the league could control the market, it might have lost when players filed suit in the league’s early days.

MLS won that suit because it claimed, correctly, that players had other options. The USA alone has other leagues — in those days, the A-League and indoor soccer; today, the NASL and USL. Mexico is raiding the USA these days. Then there’s Europe. Qatar. China. Australia. That’s why the idea of decertifying the union and suing again is a non-starter.

But it also means MLS has less leverage than the typical U.S. sport. The NFL gets away with all sorts of cruelty in its player contracts because players have almost no other options besides the Canadian Football League, which isn’t really comparable. The NBA and NHL have to spend enough on players to keep their status as the world’s top league in their respective sports. Major League Baseball had to bend to free agency to avoid antitrust problems, and cost-containment ideas haven’t gained much traction.

So the idea that MLS would risk a work stoppage to prevent free agency, when it’s already participating in a free-agent market globally, is horrifying and foolish. In a worst-case scenario, with MLS never conceding the point and players sticking together, you’d just see all the players going elsewhere. (Disclaimer: I have not reviewed the legalities of whether a striking player under contract can find another job. Someone with more legal expertise and no ties to either side in this negotiation will have to decide that.)

Even in MLS “wins” on this issue, it loses. From college graduates to mid-career veterans, players will be less inclined to sign with the league.

It’s also a matter of perception and confidence. When David Beckham signed his megamillion deal and other European stars followed, it was the sign of a confident league striding forward — a good step to entice broadcasters, sponsors and fans. That confidence is undermined when the league is going to such pains to prevent two of its teams from bidding Bobby Boswell or Brian Carroll’s salary up to $200,000.

Fans also are more demanding these days. Most people were willing to see some compromises to get the league up and running. Today, no one wants to see any vestiges of the days in which Sunil Gulati played hardball on salaries across the league. Clubs make their own personnel decisions — taken to the ludicrous extreme when Frank Lampard apparently signed with neither league nor club but some other completely different entity — and that’s the way fans like it. Players, too. Homegrown players are nudging draftees out of the spotlight on new talent, and that’s a big statement for club pride.

I’ve heard one mildly reasonable argument against free agency. The issue is that teams would end up paying more for their top players, excluding Designated Players, and would therefore have less to spend on the rest of the roster. Fringe veterans would be much more likely to end up in the NASL, which will be happy to snap up more Aaron Pitchkolans and Carlos Mendeses. The 15th-25th spots on the roster would get a little younger.

But that’s not the argument the league is making. And it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, anyway.

Does the league have some other super-secret reason for digging in its heels here? Or are some league officials just sentimentally attached to a system that, crucial as it was for the league’s first decade, is now outdated and redundant?