How MLS Teams are Using Their Rosters

Trying to make all this slightly less confusing

Last week, MLS engaged in some very uncharacteristic transparency and released the “roster profiles” of every MLS team as of February 24th. It’s weird that this isn’t available in real time on the league’s website, but we have to take what we can get. Big thanks to whoever the frazzled staffer at MLS HQ had to pull this information together for us.

This release allows us to take a step back and see how MLS teams are using their rosters. This may seem boring, but at least in the DC United fan circles I frequent, a lot of people are convinced that any open roster slots means that ownership is betraying them by not adequately funding the team. This is always a possibility with an MLS ownership group, but I’ve often wondered what “normal” is for roster slot usage.

So let’s take a look at the big picture.

Roster Size

We’ll start by looking at how many rostered players there are.

You’d think this would be simple. But no, this is MLS. There’s 20 “senior roster” spots and then 10 “supplemental roster” spots. The supplemental roster is actually broken down even further, but let’s pass over that since the roster profiles don’t indicate those subdivisions. Suffice to say, supplemental roster players are in a separate category because they make less money than senior roster players.

Okay, so 20 and then 10. You might think this means each team would have 30 players to pick from for their gameday rosters, but in fact not a single team does:

A big caveat here is I didn’t include players who are unavailable. Players can be unavailable for a variety of reasons, but the big ones are that they can be sent out on loan and they can be injured for long enough (minimum 6 games) that they are put on a special list.

The reason I didn’t include these is that to some extent players who are injured or on loan don’t really take up spots. What this means for the roster varies based on innumerable details, but teams are often eligible for “roster relief” as the MLS rules call it. FC Dallas and St. Louis City each actually have 31 players on what is supposed to be a 30 man roster because they were able to replace these slots. But this is unusual; the Galaxy is the only other team that even has 30 total players:

My takeaway from these graphs is that every team keeps a roster slot or two open at this stage in the season. Maybe in after the midseason window we’ll see more teams with full rosters.

The most notable thing here might be the teams that are running much leaner than the rest of the league. For Columbus, I assume they are still trying to figure out what to do having not really expected to sell Cucho before the season. Houston might qualify for suspicions about ownership, but the other teams at the bottom spend pretty freely. Maybe high-spending teams tend to have more concentrated rosters where too much of the cap is spent on fewer players to fill it as far as the average team?

Designated Players and U22 Slots

The most important tools an MLS team has for spending over the salary cap are the designated player and U22 slots. There are six of these, split between DP and U22 either 3/3 or 2/4, depending on the team’s choice. As a DC United fan who has always been annoyed that ownership hasn’t used all these slots, I was surprised to find how few teams have used their full allotment of six:

There are just seven teams currently using all six slots. That includes powerhouses like Inter Miami and LA Galaxy, but also less successful teams like FC Dallas and the Houston Dynamo. Meanwhile, Columbus and Seattle have been quite successful lately despite not having any current U22 players.

I didn’t directly do an analysis of U22 players in my preseason previews, but in the article on DPs I showed that only 5 of the top 44 attacking players by G+A in 2024 were U22. It’s been tough for teams to get good output—attacking output, at least, but I suspect the same is true for other roles—from such young players. I wonder if GMs who focus scarce ownership money on more expensive DPs are doing better over time. Something to keep an eye on!

High Salary Players

What if we look at which teams are making use of all the designations for high-salary players? Here’s a chart that includes DPs and U22 but also “TAM players”. These three designations are the only ways for a team to directly pay for a player more than $743,750 in combined salary and amortized transfer fees.

Until doing this I didn’t know there would be such a big discrepancy in TAM player usage. FC Cincinnati has 11 TAM players, Austin FC has just two! I think this is in part reflective of player sales, but it’s hard to see a pattern here. Concentration might again be a factor: maybe Cincinnati has a lot of players making just over the TAM limit whereas Columbus has fewer players making more money? When the salaries are released, maybe we can revisit this.

Once again, though, we see different paths to success. FC Cincinnati, Inter Miami, and LAFC have done well with lots of TAM players, but so have Columbus and Seattle with relatively few. At least in this respect, it’s not just a story of some owners spending and some not.

International Spots

The roster profiles also show exactly how many international spots each team has and how they are being used:

Once again, there’s some huge discrepancies. I think most fans know the default MLS team approach is to use domestic players for goalkeepers and most defenders, then use international players for attackers. Seattle in particular has been bucking this trend by following a heavily American attacker strategy this offseason, as has Colorado.

It’s surely not a coincidence that the teams making the most use of international slots are the teams in the cities most desirable to foreign players, cities like New York, LA, Miami, and…Toronto…and…huh…Salt Lake City. Okay, so maybe they aren’t all desirable cities. Maybe foreign players really like Toronto? And Mormonism?

Compared with the earlier charts, it seems like there’s a slightly better correlation here where good teams are using more international slots, but there’s still plenty of variation here.

Homegrown Spots

Some MLS teams invest heavily in their academies and some don’t. Sometimes this is a rational decision based on how good their region is at producing young talent, sometimes it’s the result of low spending or dysfunction. It’s hard for people not immersed in the arcana of youth soccer to know which academies are doing well, but we can get an imperfect sense by looking at how many homegrown players on a roster:

Atlanta leads the league with 8 homegrown players on its supplemental roster. The Red Bulls are second with six. Colorado only has four, but it’s the only team with two Generation Adidas players (a status earned by the best college soccer players). There’s been a lot of talk about the college draft becoming pointless and there are a lot fewer Generation Adidas players than in previous years, so we’ll see how they do.

On the other side of things, Portland doesn’t have any Homegrown players. San Diego doesn’t either, but that’s probably because they’re new. It seems like at least 5 players is the sweet spot for the teams with academies that are functioning well.

Beyond 30 Players

Finally, there’s some more exotic roster slots designed for teams with a lot of homegrown players. “Spot 31” is a supplemental roster-type player who doesn’t count as one of the 10 supplemental players because they are loaned out all season, while “off-roster” homegrown players are intended to be playing on MLS Next Pro teams but can be called in for short-term contracts.

Only 10 teams are using spot 31 and unsurprisingly, teams like Philadelphia, Dallas, and New York Red Bulls that historically have leaned heavily on academy players are on there. Those same teams are using a lot of off-roster slots, but Real Salt Lake is the champion there with eight, two more than any other team.

Twelve teams aren’t using either of these mechanisms. As usual, there’s enough variation here that there are good and bad teams in each category.

I’ll try to check back in on this when salaries are released and then whenever we get another set of roster profiles. Maybe when the currently-open transfer window closes? Fingers crossed.