Ahora que estas poniendo muy en alto nuestro futbol catracho en la MLS, te admiran mucho mas.

Gerardo y Carlos te mandan un cordial saludo desde Miami, ahora que estamos pasando unos dias de vacaciones y quieren ver la posibilidad de poder vestir la Camisola (la 21) que tu usas en tan prestigiado equipo. Te agradecere si es posible complacer a estos grandes admiradores tuyos. Un saludo a la distancia de este catracho. Julio Villalta

Players at the college draft do not have a choice which MLS club they go to if they are drafted. Undrafted players can go to whatever team is willing to take a flyer on them but are unlikely to get picked up.

A player who has no history with the league or US national teams can negotiate with any team but are limited to one negotiating partner once a discovery is filed.

In a rule that the league is reconsidering a player whose contract expires can only renegotiate with his old team for a period of two years after the expiration. Developmental players may or may not be subject to this.

Returning national team players are limited by the allocation system. Youth national team players signed out of draft season are assigned by the league by lottery.(the most notorious case of this being Danny Szetela, a New Jersey native, who wanted to go to NY. A lot of NY fans thought Garber would fix the lottery nice and good after all he did fix the first pick of the Freddy draft (ie Dallas had to accept an allocation from DC for the #1 pick because the league said so) but everyone was surprised when he went to Columbus (including maybe Garber who it is sometimes insinuated was shocked when the fix didn’t work). This led NY fans to assume that they could lowball Columbus on a deal with backroom pressure. They were surprised at how obstinant Columbus, a small market team that frequently feels slighted by big market favouritism, was in not trading with him. Columbus & New York catfight over trades frequently.)

Anyway, a lot of players once they are signed by the league are limited by the decisions of their teams front office. Some teams will accomodate players who want to leave and accept say a fourth round supplemental draft pick for a trade. Some won’t.

This question may sound strange, but what kind of input do the players have re where they go, and at what point, or do they have any?

Don’t worry about not understanding allocations completely, no outsiders do and the rules change frequently. They need to be abolished and replaced by a better system.

Frank would be wise to pick up Carlos then… Ms. Jack did the math for me during her “free” period (the one teachers are assigned but always manage to work through rather than rest) on the player stats (another thing I usually eschew, preferring to watch actual play). Among the Forwards we have/had(?) Carlos is less effective than Lando and Alan-my-boy, and of course CoJones but he’s a M and now the XO so I’m leaving him out of this… until one factors in amount of playing time, then Pavon is more effective but not as much as Lando…. and none of that matters in context of this expansion drafty thingy, S-I’s and all that, but it was fun to bug Ms. Jack at work, since WGA’s still on strike (gdmmit, studios just pay us the way you pay yerseffs for a change).

bluemeanies, Laurie, I owe you a beer apiece. This was not only fun but truly eddicashunal.

So, when Laurie’s talking protection, she means LA makes a list of players that are not going into the pool for the expansion draft from which SanHo gets to pick, right?

Discovery signings- This is a way for teams to sign USL players or foreignors with either very low transfer fees or on free transfers. I don’t think DP’s fall under this rule.

All player contracts are technically held by the league. Back in the day players would sign directly with the league and then be assigned to teams (leading to accusations of the league office having favourites). When they abolished this rule they introduced the discovery rules. Because the league can’t bid against itself for one player on behalf of multiple teams if a team wants to sign an outside player they file a discovery on that player that means no other team may negotiate with them (at least without giving something up for that right, I believe there was a cat fight going on this year between NY and Columbus where Columbus filed first then the player would play nowhere but NY). I believe each team has a limited number of discoveries per year (6??).

Allocations: This system will hopefully soon be abolished, please. Here goes:

Teams acquire allocations in a number of ways including: Trades with other teams, sucking so bad that they miss the playoffs, sucking so bad that they almost missed the playoffs, being an expansion team or having a player on their team sold off overseas for a significant transfer. The monetary value of these allocations never matches the monetary value of the transfer. There are also allocations still out there that come from the era MLS gave them for player retirement. Allocations can then be used two ways that I know of:

1) To pay transfer fees and signing bonuses to significant overseas additions.
2) To pay part of some players salaries so they fit under the cap (this part is really done in darkness).

Of course they can also be used for trades if you are inept at using them yourself (RSL). Or you can sit on them like the Revs. They can also be split to partial allocations and end up in multiple places so the Marco Etchverry retirement allocation is still out there at a couple of teams that are not DC United.

Returning National team players: So lets say that instead of a foreignor from overseas you want to sign a player who has some caps with the US team. This should work the same way as with foreignors right? Wrong.

The allocations are ranked by a formula that is incomprehensible. If a US nats player be it only Connor Casey wants to return to MLS and not be a DP like Reyna the teams will look at this list. The first team on the list gets first rights of refusal and we progress down the list (Toronto grabbed Casey with the top allocation this year to extort his hometown team Colorado, I think it failed in the end). Or at least thats how they say its done.

Lotteries: Gen Addidas players signed outside of the draft (they happen and are frequently US youth national team players running home from Europe with their tail between their legs) are usually assigned by lottery with teams volunteering to enter and the lottery weighted by how badly the team has sucked over a year or so. That’s how you got Sesay.

There are probably other things going on but this is basically my understanding.