Major League Soccer’s primary transfer window closed last week, and unlike the breathless buzz around some of its overseas equivalents, there was limited need to deploy lurid vocabulary about “slamming shut” on “deadline day,” or fret about failed physicals or late paperwork snafus.
Much of that is structural. This window runs for nearly three months, and teams had all winter to craft and execute their plans. Plus, as a single-entity league, trades, waiver-wire pickups and other intra-league transactions usually involve documents shifting within the same headquarters offices in Manhattan, minimizing the risks of a ‘clicked save instead of submit’-type scenario like the one that scuppered Duncan McGuire’s January move from Orlando City to Blackburn Rovers.
There were some late coming and goings. The Eastern Conference last-place New England Revolution understandably sought reinforcements in the form of Xavier Arreaga and Aljaz Ivacic, while their opposite numbers in the West, the San Jose Earthquakes, finally completed a club-record transfer for Argentine playmaker Hernán López. And Cincinnati and Vancouver got international deals for talented teenagers across the line with Kevin Kelsy and Giuseppe Bovalina, respectively.
Yet the mostly muted nature of things was distilled by The Athletic’s scoops specialist Tom Bogert: “Overall, sources across the league have described the trade market as slow and not really moving in terms of active negotiations.”
Another seemingly key facet must be noted, too, one that connects what didn’t happen in this winter window to what will (according to multiple, extensive media reports) happen in the secondary window when that opens on July 18.
Earlier in April, the MLS board of governors approved multiple changes to roster regulations, including a doubling in the number of contract buyouts allowed and the removal of a complicated set of restrictions on how clubs could use the Under-22 initiative (a loophole to incentivize investment on elite young players) based on how they utilized their three Designated Player slots. As ESPNFC described it:
“Previously, if a team used all three available senior DP slots, it was allowed only one U22 signing. A team with two senior DPs as well as one young DP or a DP that can be bought down with targeted allocation money (TAM) could utilize up to three U22 signings. Now a team can have three of each, or have two DPs and four U22 signings plus an additional $2 million in GAM.”
Many would argue this doesn’t exactly count as the kind of seismic change some observers have been calling for in service of exploiting Messi’s arrival to the fullest extent. It retains the fundamental heliocentric dialectic in which a select few top talents are categorized apart from the rest of their teammates, usually making more in wages than the rest of the squad combined and relied upon to a similarly outsized proportion. A glance at a team’s DPs tends to be one of the more revealing snapshots on offer. It shows how, and how much, that club is spending, how well that is being mobilized on the field and how the combination projects their identity in their markets. That will remain the case.
Yet these changes are significant, particularly by the cautious standards of MLS.
In sum, this gives clubs more scope for what’s widely dubbed “discretionary spending” – splashing out on transfer fees or high salaries for top-caliber talent, be it win-now acquisitions like Luis Suarez and Leo Messi or rising prospects like Thiago Almada (photo) that reflect a longer-term outlook.
Unusually, these changes don’t go into effect for next year, but will reportedly be activated in midseason, when the aforementioned summer window arrives, assuming the MLS Players Association gives or has already given its blessing.
“Is it unique to do that in the middle of the season? Of course. You have to adapt and adjust; some plans have to shift and change,” said Philadelphia Union head coach Jim Curtin in the days after the BOG’s vote. “Our country has an opportunity to build towards a World Cup in 2026. You have Lionel Messi here, so you have a lot of eyes here. Let’s maximize it. Teams are going to improve drastically, and they are going to improve quickly.”
Any such injection of spending and flexibility stands likely to boost the quality of the product on the field, which is good news for the stakeholders who are supposed to matter most: the fans. The fact that a corporatized, highly process-oriented organization like MLS does not feel compelled to wait until the end of the current season to push this into effect is also encouraging.
Thursday morning brought another positive step in that direction. The league unveiled “club roster profiles,” a new feature containing unprecedented levels of public information about every team’s roster designations, contract lengths and other details, intended to “provide a snapshot of the roster composition for all MLS clubs following the conclusion of the Primary Transfer Window,” in the words of a press release.
The league still isn’t officially providing salary info, though cross-tabbing the contents of these roster profiles with what the MLSPA has released biannually since 2007 sheds a great deal of light on how clubs build squads and allocate resources. Joseph Lowery of Backheeled.com was among the first to process this into something closer to layman’s terms, breaking down how each team is using their precious DP and U-22 spots and what moves might allow them to make come July.
All this data bolsters the sense that quite a few sporting directors, understandably, kept their powder dry in the previous window due to the looming changes afoot. And that’s yet another complicating factor in a large and growing league where objective comparisons can be so elusive.
Has the spotty start to the season by reigning West champion LAFC (4-3-3, albeit unbeaten in its last four) looked underwhelming? It must be borne in mind that the generally ambitious Black & Gold have essentially kept two DP slots unoccupied for months. One is undoubtedly being stashed for impending summer signing Olivier Giroud, but the other is only being filled by Eduard Atuesta (photo) as a salary-budget management measure; Atuesta can be ‘bought down’ when and if the club finds a worthy high-profile reinforcement.
Impressed by the Vancouver Whitecaps’ (5-2-2) push into the league’s upper echelon? That they’ve done so with one DP slot open and effectively only one of their three U-22 spots in use is both a compliment to their performances thus far and a reminder of their owners’ longstanding reluctance to spend big on the roster. The shortage of A-list difference-makers that follows on from the latter has been an inescapable facet of the Caps’ struggles against elite opponents, be it their Concacaf Champions Cup loss to Tigres UANL, last year’s playoffs exit at the hands of LAFC or their ‘24 regular-season home losses to Real Salt Lake and the LA Galaxy.
Unsurprisingly, Inter Miami (6-2-3) is jetting along at the bleeding edge of all this, both driving and reflecting the wider shift. Messi’s free-spending side has managed to stack up FIVE U-22 players, thanks to one being on the season-ending injury list (Facundo Farias) and another (Emerson Rodriguez) being out on loan at Millonarios in his native Colombia. Even at that, the Herons could conceivably still sign yet another high-grade addition by “buying down” Leo Campana to open up a DP spot come July.
Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that all of this further contributes to the devaluing of the regular season’s first half. The playoff format and the emphasis it places on the home stretch in early fall has long been baked into the rhythm of MLS, and that’s amplified by the fact that the summer window remains the main period of movement for many of the world’s most prominent leagues.
The points picked up or dropped in April count the same as those in October. But the context of those phases of the season tend to be markedly different. That’s probably part of why Messi, Tata Martino and their Miami colleagues have repeatedly stated their plans to stack up as many points as possible in the opening months before Messi and many of his teammates check out for international duty at Copa America or the Olympics.
So far, so good: IMCF’s 4-1 rout of the flatlining Revs at a packed Gillette Stadium on Saturday kept the Floridians atop the overall league table, now not only on points but on a points-per-game basis. It’s become difficult to deny that Miami possesses MLS’s largest quantity of sheer talent. And anyone with a mind to come anywhere near matching that won’t do so until August or thereabouts.