SuperLiga suffered another hit Monday as the Major League Soccer Players Union announced that players from the New England Revolution and Houston Dynamo, who face one another in tonight’s final in Foxborough, Mass., have agreed to pool and split evenly the bonus money at stake.

The move comes as a protest of the players’ inability to negotiate with individual team owners for their share of the tournament winner’s $1 million prize. A grievance filed by Dynamo players last year is set for arbitration in the near future.

Under the current Major League Soccer collective bargaining agreement, a winning MLS team’s players split $150,000, or just over $5,000 per player on a 28-man roster. The runner-up team’s players split $100,000.

With the CBA set to expire at the end of the 2009 season, the MLSPU called the bonus structure into question last month just prior to the tournament’s first matches.

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SuperLiga, created last year and run by Soccer United Marketing, an arm of MLS, touts awarding “the heftiest winner’s purse in North American soccer history, but “We never implied that the players were going to receive a million dollars,” said MLS commissioner Don Garber. “The winner’s the team. The club gets the prize. And then we have an agreement as to what the share would be for the players.”

Garber said the pooling of the bonus money is not permitted by the CBA.

“That’s not something that we’re going to allow,” he said.