The new MLS season doesn't start until March 6 (we hope -- more on this later), but the offseason has already taken on a different feeling.

With the players back on the training field for preseason camps and reporters lurking around looking for stories, the time has come for the focus on the current collective bargaining agreement talks to go into overdrive.

The MLS news ticker delivered a few interesting non-CBA items over the past week, including the signing of a handful of notable names like...

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. -- Some of the biggest names in Major League Soccer made the rounds Tuesday at a media event put on by the league in advance of its 20th season.

Former Ballon d'Or winner Kaka was in the house. So was Bradley Wright-Phillips, who tied the single-season scoring record last year with 27 goals, as well as several starters from the U.S. team that captured the country's imagination during its run to the second round at last summer's World Cup in Brazil.

To a man, they were engaging....

CARSON, Calif. -- From a distance, Robbie Rogers wears the mantle of role model with enviable ease. After coming out in 2013, Rogers remains the only active gay male athlete in North American team sports; his book "Coming Out To Play" has proven to be inspirational to readers, regardless of their sexual orientation.

But a closer vantage point reveals that for Rogers, wearing the role model cloak has been accompanied by periods of discomfort and distraction from his primary vocation, that of...

CARSON, Calif. - The jet lag appeared to weigh heavily on Jozy Altidore as he eased into a chair at StubHub Center. After all, it was just two days since he arrived in Southern California to join the U.S. national team for its annual January camp. A few days prior, he was still in England, ready to finalize his move to Toronto FC.

But looked at another way, Altidore had recently shed plenty -- though by no means all -- of his baggage. His nightmarish spell with Sunderland is over. He is now back...

News this week that Gedion Zelalem has gained U.S. citizenship set fans certainly got fans of the national team talking. For Graham Parker, it triggered a walk down memory lane to the late 1990s.

I was in a hotel bar during a conference in Chicago in early 1997, when a Liverpudlian academic attending the same event began to regale me about a young kid who was just coming through the Liverpool reserves and was going to be "just amazing. Amazing. His speed, Graham ... and the finishing ... this kid...

He was just 17 and he was asleep on the top deck of the bus. The bus was heading up the A2 motorway towards Zaragoza, where Raul Gonzalez Blanco was about to make his debut. If the kid was nervous, a teenager about to play for the biggest club in the world, he didn't show it. "I couldn't have done that," admitted then-Madrid manager Jorge Valdano, but he already knew this kid was different. Valdano had told him that he was thinking of including him and wanted to know what he thought. "If you want...