Major League Soccer is on a mission to foster an environment where teams take more of a chance on signing young, foreign stars-in-the-making, and it is giving teams the financial flexibility to be more open to bringing in those types of players.
Starting next season, Designated Players ages 21-to-23 will count $200,000 against the salary cap, while players 20 and younger will count as just a $150,000 cap hit, MLS executive vice president of competition and player relations Todd Durbin said on a conference call with reporters. Both numbers are reduced from the current $335,000 figure that encompasses all Designated Player signings.
"If we want to continue our growth … we need to be identifying top young players that can come in and grow in the league and be long-term stars in Major League Soccer for years to come," Durbin said.
The rule change gives teams a larger margin for error while going after younger, non-U.S.-based talent, much like FC Dallas did by signing Colombian Under-20 international Fabian Castillo to a DP deal (which reached that level mostly because of the transfer fee involved) earlier this year.
Under the new rule, the 19-year-old Castillo, and players like him, would take up a smaller portion of the team's salary cap while the team's ownership (and potentially allocation money) would compensate for the rest of the contract.
"Fairly regularly particularly over the course of the last 12-to-18 months, we've consistently heard from teams that they've identified players like this," Durbin said.
Now the hope is that teams will put a larger emphasis on pursuing and scouting young, foreign talent that they wouldn't necessarily consider signing because of the large cap hit and the risk involved with signing a young player whose career path is more unpredictable than that of an established star overseas.
"Teams have been reluctant to enter into that market given the speculative nature of signing young players," Durbin said. "We now truly have the ability to get into that market for young players and grow stars for the future of Major League Soccer."
Durbin stressed that the new rule does not apply to U.S.-based players who can be signed through either the Homegrown Player or Generation adidas mechanisms or who are already signed in MLS. It would apply to a young American plying his trade overseas, though, as it is not exclusive to foreign players.
For example, 21-year-old Freddy Adu could wind up with a young DP deal next season depending on how the Philadelphia Union and MLS break down the payment of his contract.
The change is the latest in the evolution of the Designated Player rule, which went into effect in 2007. After the 2009 season the amount of DPs that teams could sign increased from one to three, allowing for teams to take more of a gamble with their DP slots as opposed to being reluctant to use them while guarding against a player not panning pan out.
Since then, 24 DPs have been brought into the league, a vast increase over the 12 that were signed in the first three years since the rule's inception.
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What do you think of the rule change? How do you see it changing the way teams go about scouting and signing younger personnel?
Share your thoughts below.
Read the example. The rule only applies to new young players signed from overseas, be they American or foreign. So if you have a great young player you developed in the US, he wouldn’t fit under this rule. But if you have an American who went over seas while young, he would fit. Hence, Adu would fit, Shea would not.
It’s almost like MLS is saying, we want you to have youth teams to develop talent, but we don’t want you to sign the best of them, we’d prefer you let them go, and sign young foreigners. Oh yeah, that totally makes sense…
I will still make this argument: MLS will need to turn the contracts over to the teams at some point in the near future. A Salary cap of 60% of gross income…so it floats. Some will argue it’s not competitive, but a lot less people would watch the EPL if Wigan were winning the league one year, West Brom the next, and Man Citeh the year after that. And it’s feasible with, for example, LA’s income, to have a team salary that approaches $10 mil, which is very fair. An additional 10-15% would be the max Transfer Fee allotment, but can be “saved” or up to two years. Anyways, I digress until I can find more reliable financial info on most MLS teams.
Don’t think so. I think they fall under the generation adidas bit at the endcghere.
Smart move. There has been a much larger influx of young foreign talent in MLS over the past 5 years or so. The younger this league is the better off it will be.
This news totally gave me pudding face
cool beans,it would be a huge step if teams can sign players like joshua Gatt, diskeurd, Chandler, Agbossoumonde and perhaps bring back jozy alitodre while maybe offering players like brek shea a dp contract to stay in the league. But i think mls should extend that to any player capped by the nats for the US or canada for toronto, vancouver, montreal. Could help keep or bring back some talent.
Which is also the point I”m making. Kraft can afford that. DC’s owner, Chang, says he cannot. That’s why DC signed Boscovic for the DP slot — because he wasn’t asking for much beyond the cap #. If DC’s GM Kasper says there’s some young player we want, but now he’s gonna cost you an extra $135,000 or extra $180,000, Chang will now be even more inclined to say no.
SO, it makes even easier for rich clubs ot outbid the poor ones.
i think it can go either way, sign some young dp’s, they struggle in MLS, or they become MLS stars, and also, what happens when they pass the “young-dp” limit and they start hitting 24+, would they still cost the same or would the DP price go to normal?