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.
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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