Major League Soccer has taken a hard look at itself, and, like many observers, concluded that in order for it to reach its stated goal of being one of the best soccer leagues in the world by 2022, the level of the players it can attract needs to go up.

To that end, the league announced on Wednesday that it was committing a total of some $37 million in new salary budgets to its 20 teams over the next two seasons. As usual, the mechanisms for doing so are complicated. Each team will receive a fund of $800,000 in so-called Targeted Allocation Money in each of the next two seasons. That's in addition to the $500,000 they had already been given earlier this year to spend in addition to their salary caps over the next five seasons, whenever they saw fit.

In 2015, the salary cap per team was $3.49 million, but that does not count allocation money – doled out by the league for performance, participation in the CONCACAF Champions League and exchanged by teams in external transfers and internal trades – TAM, or what designated players were paid over the $436,250 maximum salary cap hit per player. In all, MLS Executive Vice President for Player Relations and Competition Todd Durbin says, there were 10 teams spending at least $7 million on player payroll and four spending at least $15 million. He claimed the league as a whole actually spends some $200 million on player development and salaries beyond the $70 million or so in salary cap space.

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The Designated Player program, in particular, has enabled a vast influx of high-profile talent since David Beckham's arrival in 2007, with total annual DP expenditure mushrooming from $32 million in 2011 to $115 million in 2015.

So what's changing?

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The salary cap is expected to be about $3.7 million in 2016, not counting all of those extra funds. Somewhat oversimplified, the TAM will essentially allow teams to raise it to $4.5 million. But they can't spend it as they please. The new money has to go towards players making over the increased maximum salary cap hit of $457,500 but no more than $1 million annually. The TAM will buy their salaries down to make the teams cap compliant – just as regular allocation money can. TAM can also be traded to other teams.

Teams can carry over the 2016 money to 2017, but not the other way around. And they can't spend the entire sum at once, like the initial $500K TAM allowed them to. Teams will also be given an additional $125,000 over each of the next two years with which to sign homegrown players.

The expanded TAM program will essentially create a second class of Designated Players – of which each team can have just three – which the league hopes will allow its clubs to add two or three impactful signings apiece.

"By injecting an additional $37 million into the system, our clubs will be able to strengthen the depth of their rosters by signing more high-quality players," said MLS Deputy Commissioner Mark Abbott in a statement. "We saw immediate dividends this past season with the initial investment in Targeted Allocation Money, and our owners believe that additional spending – especially for players who will impact the middle of our rosters – will make MLS even more entertaining and compelling."

The Timbers could add another impactful player like midfielder Diego Valeri. (AP Photo)

About a year ago, MLS analyzed every single one of its players. "We want on a team-by-team basis," Durbin explained in a conference call. "We had our [team] technical staffs and our [league] technical staff go through this exercise and had some international experts go through it as well. We measured and literally gave a player rating to every single player in the league. We have to measure ourselves against the international standards so we benchmarked ourselves against the rest of the world."

So MLS took stock of its talent pool and laid it side-by-side with other strong leagues – Durbin mentioned those of Mexico, the Netherlands, Argentina, the Premier League and the Championship. "What became clear when we did that analysis is that many of our teams had high-quality players," said Durbin, arguing that each team has a least a small handful of players who could be effective in Europe's strongest leagues. "But what also became clear is that we needed to add more depth. And that while we were making significant inroads in the top three, four, five, six roster slots, if we really wanted to take the next step in terms of our development and growth, we had to find a way to drive resources into the center of our roster."

This, then, isn't a play to bring more Beckhams or David Villas or Steven Gerrards into the league, or even younger stars like Sebastian Giovinco or Giovani Dos Santos, who are changing perceptions of MLS. The point is to funnel more money to lesser-known players who, combined with the stars, will conspire to actually improve the play on the field.

The maximum salary for two or three of those non-DP players has now essentially gone from $457,500 to a million apiece, which the league hopes will make a significant difference in the international market.

"We're spending a significant amount on our Designated Players and we're spending a significant amount on a couple of roster spots below that," Durbin said. "But what we're really trying to do is drive up the average spend as it relates to the quality of players in that next layer of roster slots that we believe is going to have the greatest short-term impact on product quality."

That seems a sensible conclusion to reach, because in soccer's global and almost entirely unrestricted labor market, the tug between supply and demand is so loose that players are paid something very close to their exact worth. In other words, you get what you pay for. And by paying more, MLS justifiably assumes that it will be getting more.

In addition to improving MLS, and making it more watchable both domestically and in the 140 countries that now broadcast at least some of its games, stronger rosters will allow it to give a better account of itself internationally in the CONCACAF Champions League. While two teams have reached the final, no MLS clubs have won the regional competition – which sends its winner to the Club World Cup – while Mexico's teams have conspired to win the last 10 editions consecutively.

It was always plain that MLS would need to spend more money to make good on its ambitions. Now, almost a decade after the Designated Player rule propelled it forward, MLS is making more moves to accelerate its growth and assert itself in the soccer world.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.