Originally Posted by Wandering Red

The league owns contracts because when MLS started, you had more teams than there were owners, so multiple teams had the same owner. To prevent anything funny from going on, all the contracts had to go through the league. It was also a way of preventing one team from from amassing a large number of top players to the detriment of the rest of the league, which is what happened with the New York Cosmos in the old NASL. That type of system might work for Real Madrid and other clubs in other countries, but with a league that was not yet established, it would have been a huge risk.

The plan was always to go to a more free system once the resources became available and the league became more stable. Maybe that time is now.