2025 MLS Season Preview Part 3: Designated Players

They're paid the most, so they must be the best players, right?

This is the third part of my MLS season preview series. The first part focused on takeaways from how teams played in 2024 and the second looked at roster changes. Today, I’m going to look at Designated Players.

The season is about to start, so this will be the last season preview post. Coming very soon will be my first round of matchweek coverage. There’ll be a preview of week 1 matchups that leverages the information gathered together and explained in these previews, then a wrap-up post that briefly covers what happened in each game. My goal continues to be giving you at least a little more insight into the games you choose to watch.

I’m not sure yet what the exact schedule for upcoming posts will be, so subscribe to get them in your inbox.

Let’s talk Designated Players. These are—usually—the highest paid players on an MLS team’s roster and essential components of a trophy-winning team. If you want to understand something helpful about a team you’re about to watch, you can do a lot worse than just knowing who their DPs are.

For anyone new to the league, here’s an extremely brief tl;dr: MLS teams can get up to three Designated Players (DPs). The salary cap impact from these players’ salary and transfer fees is capped at a relatively low amount. A team’s owners have to pay this out of their own pockets, though there are various ways to leverage pooled funds to help.

Positions

Over the years, there have been Designated Players at pretty much every position on a soccer pitch. Most, however, are attacking players: forwards, wingers, and attacking midfielders.

Here’s my best attempt at classifying the positions of the 2025 Designated Players:

I didn’t try to distinguish between attackers because that can often be fluid. I know that makes for a more boring chart, but these are the roles I feel are clear no matter who the coach is and what the team’s tactics are that day.

Lots of attackers here. No surprise. In the previous articles of this series, I explained that offense seemed to be a better predictor of success than defense or goalkeeping and that MLS teams invest a lot more in offense.

If anything’s a surprise, it’s that there are DPs who aren’t attackers! FC Cincinnati’s Obinna Nwobodo, Sporting KC’’s Nemanja Radoja, and Vancouver’s Andreas Cubas are defensive midfielders. Or at least I think so: these guys don’t get talked about nearly as much as attacking DPs so honestly I don’t know much about them. I classified Sergio Busquets and Darlington Nagbe as central midfielders. Arguably they could just be called defensive midfielders, but…how much defense does Busquets play these days? Anyway, the math is easy enough if you’d rather combine them.

I didn’t consider Atlanta United’s Mateusz Klich a DP in 2025 since he’s not one of Atlanta’s DPs even though technically he’s still holding DC United’s second DP slot (sigh), but if you disagree and want to count him, he’d be a central midfielder as well.

The two centerbacks are Nashville’s Walker Zimmerman and NYCFC’s Thiago Martins. I went back and forth on whether to consider Toronto FC’s Richie Laryea an attacker or a “wingback” but I eventually grouped him in with the attackers.

Retirement League?

MLS has often been accused of being a “retirement league” for European stars. David Beckham, the original Designated Player, was 32 when he joined the galaxy. Many of the initial DPs—at least the ones fans today are likely to recognize—were players of a similar age profile: Cuauhtémoc Blanco, Robbie Keane, David Villa, Kaká, Steven Gerard, Thierry Henry, and Frank Lampard.

Even then, that doesn’t mean every DP was an thirty-something player coming from Europe. There were also a fair number of MLS All-Stars who were rewarded with a low-end DP contract.

As far as I can remember (I didn’t try to check), Atlanta was the first to fully invert the aging DP archetype by signing 18-year-old highly-rated prospect Esequiel Barco to a DP contract in 2018. As far as I could tell, to this day he has never lived up to his contract, although Atlanta miraculously got a lot of money back by selling him to River Plate, who then even more miraculously made money by selling him to Spartak Moscow last summer.

In 2021, the strategy of paying big transfer fees for very young players ended up getting codified into a different roster mechanism, the “U22 Initiative”. U22 Initiative players can command big transfer fees but can’t make huge salaries, so theoretically you could still have a Barco-style DP in today’s MLS.

But does anyone? Let’s see:

Charlotte FC’s Luis Abada is the youngest DP at age 23. Most DPs are in their prime years of 24-30. The old DPs contain a mix of successful DPs on extended contracts (the Crew’s Darlington Nagbe and DC United’s Christian Benteke are both 34) as well as Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi. Not bad for retirees! Olivier Giroud is the elder statesman at 38, though, and he’s had a rocky start to his MLS career.

Edit 2/18 3:20pm: As I was finishing this article, the Philadelphia Union signed a new 22-year-old DP, Bruno Damiani who will now be the youngest. I’ve now updated the charts in this article to account for him.

Which of These Guys Are Actually Good?

This is a crucial question. Because DPs are paid directly by ownership, ambitious owners can raise the level of the league for everyone, but it also encourages a ton of paranoia from most teams’ fans. For all but a handful of consistent big spenders, fans are constantly vigilant for signs their owners are cheaping out. Failing to fill an open DP slot is one of the biggest red flags.

The thing is, not all DPs are equally good. Right from the beginning of the DP rule—or nearly the beginning, since David Beckham was a success for the Galaxy—there have been DPs who haven’t carried their weight. With contracts often guaranteed for several years, missing badly on a single DP signing can all but lock a team out of trophy contention.

This offseason, there’s been a ton of drama about Lorenzo Insigne and how he won’t accept anything less than a complete buyout from Toronto FC’s ownership while the owners remain unwilling to do that. Most MLS owners wouldn’t want to pay so much money, but Toronto does spend a lot of money. I think they don’t want to set a precedent by rewarding what they see as Insigne’s bad behavior.

But how bad has Insigne been, exactly? And more generally, which DPs are earning their keep and which are disappointments?

The good news here is that because so many DPs are attackers, it’s pretty easy to evaluate them. Without watching all their games, I don’t know of a reliable way to assess, say, whether Walker Zimmerman or Darlington Nagbe have lost a step. But attacking players? They ought to be producing goals and assists.

I know, I know, there’s more to playing attacking soccer than goals and assists, but as I mentioned in the first part of this preview series, I don’t think we need to overcomplicate this by looking at shot-creation or progressive passes or other more baroque statistics.

Filtering out the centerbacks, defensive midfielders, and central midfielders, let’s look at the goals (minus PKs) and assists from the DPs who were in MLS last season and haven’t left the league:

First we have to pay homage to the GOAT. Wow. For those of us who never watched a ton of European soccer, it’s good to confirm that, yes, the rumors are true. Messi really is extremely good at soccer. In 2024 he not only had a higher G+A-PK/90 than anyone in MLS history, he had more that half a goal involvement per game more than the all-time second place season.

After Messi, the names won’t be surprising if you follow the league, at least not until you get to Marcus Hartel, who only played 9 games for St. Louis City after arriving in a mid-season transfer and still managed to put up 3 goals and 5 assists. Fans talk a lot about adjustment periods, but apparently Hartel didn’t need one. Or maybe he did, and therefore he’s going to be amazing this year? Meanwhile you have guys like Aleksei Miranchuk and Olivier Giroud completely failing to make an impact after similar midseason transfers.

Given his reputation, I was surprised to find Lorenzo Insigne in the middle of the chart. Of course, even DPs aren’t paid the same, and Insigne is paid more than anyone except Messi, so middle-of-the-chart is still disappointing, but I think his reputation has more to do with his defensive effort—or considerable lack thereof—and locker room presence.

Finally, I want to note that the average G+A-PK/90 of these returning DPs was 0.57. That’s a goal or assist just a bit more than every other game. That’s…pretty good, I gues? It’s a lot better than I could do! But…it’s not amazing. In part because Messi makes the list top-heavy, only 20 DPs are above this average. The other 41 attacking DPs produced fewer than 0.57 G+A-PK/90.

You might also be wondering: aren’t there good MLS attackers who aren’t on this list?

Are All Good Attackers DPs?

For example, conspicuously missing from that list is one Luis Suárez. When he arrived last season, I was told on good authority that Suárez’s knees are completely shot and he could barely walk. Maybe so, but he still had an utterly dominant season in 2024 with 1.36 G+A-PK/90. This is the second all-time best season in this stat, behind his teammate Leo Messi. Yes, the two greatest MLS attacking player-seasons in history happened last year and both players were on the same team. Having assists included means there’s a little double-dipping here with Messi assisting Suárez and vice versa, but still…man. That’s certainly one way to set the points record.

Suárez was beneath Messi in this stat and in MVP voting, but he has a very plausible claim to being the most underpaid player in MLS history, because he’s not a Designated Player. He makes just $1.5 million a year, making him a “TAM player” in MLS lingo.

For Suárez’s sake, I hope he’s getting paid under the table somehow by Messi, Inter Miami, or better yet, both. He’s worth way more than he’s officially paid and was essential to Inter Miami’s success last season.

Suárez is a huge outlier, but he’s far from the only non-DP to produce more G+A-PK/90 than most DPs:

I said earlier that only 20 DPs were above the average, but that was returning 2024 players. Here, we’re looking at all attackers from 2024 compared with that average 0.57, so Cucho and Dante Vanzeir are on the list, but Marcel Hartel and Kelvin Yeboah come off because they didn’t play enough minutes. I was lazy and used the returning player average of 0.562 even though really it should have been the 2024 attacking DP average—probably a bit higher with Cucho in there—but I don’t think it meaningfully changes the results.

What surprised me about this list is that there are 44 players on it and only 20 of them are DPs. More than half of the top attackers weren’t DPs! Even if you dismiss Suárez as a special case, two more of the top 5 players aren’t even TAM players! Tani Oluwaseyi played four years of college soccer at St. Johns and was drafted 17th overall by Minnesota. Alonso Martínez seems to have been let go by a team in Belgium’s second division before having a breakout season with NYCFC.

Meanwhile MLS’s other big money roster designation, the U22 initiative, isn’t very impressive here either with just five entries out of 43. Now sure, the U22 slots are supposed to develop prospects into stars more than it’s supposed to enable teams to import ready-to-go stars. Teams are also much more willing to use these slots on players who aren’t attackers. I still think this is an underwhelming showing.

I know I shouldn’t throw rocks at pundits trying to make predictions when I’m too cowardly to do it myself, but this should give us pause when preseason predictions seem to assume every new-to-the-league DP with even mildly impressive pedigree is going to produce like the high end of the DP spectrum. A few will, but many won’t.

Designated Player Consistency

If most DPs fail to blow the roof off in production, if a general manager picks correctly, will they at least be rewarded with consistently good seasons? In the NFL, quarterbacks are the equivalent of the “DP” position and are notoriously hard to predict before entering the league. But when a quarterback plays extremely well, there’s a very good chance—baring injury—that will continue for much of their career.

You might think this would be true of Designated Players, so let’s take a look at the MLS seasons for some top-performing 2024 DPs as well as some notable DPs of years past who were still playing in MLS in 2024:

I might not have thought to chart this were I not a DC United fan. When Christian Benteke arrived in a midseason window, his games in the remainder of 2022 were very disappointing (0.16 G+A-PK/90). There was a lot of talk about how he was washed up, how he’d always been a bad finisher, and so on. His 2023 season was much better, but still not great: 0.57. Then he exploded with a great year in 2024 (0.87) despite being 33, an age where he ought to be declining.

Part of this has to be the players and the “system” around him. Wayne Rooney was an amazing soccer player but now has been thoroughly proven a terrible manager. Under Troy Lesesne’s leadership, the team used Benteke better and, uh, checks notes…finished with the exact same points as in 2023.

Benteke’s variation seems more the rule than the exception. Thiago Almada looked unbeatable in 2023, then toothless in 2024. Cucho’s sudden upswing might be him developing as he grew into his prime, but what about Albert Rusnák’s unexpected resurrection at age 29? No doubt fans of these teams could offer some explanations, but my main point is that even established DPs with no “adjustment period” excuse are a lot more volatile in their performance than anyone wants to admit.

This has to be a cause for concern now that a rule change has made it practical for the first time for one team to sell a DP to another. FC Cincinnati was willing to spend big to bring in Evander and this move has been almost universally praised, so I was surprised to see here that Evander really had just one great season in Portland. Lucho Acosta has a better track record, but he varies as well.

Even the GOAT himself had “only” 0.72 G+A-PK/90 in his first half-season. That’s lower than his new teammate Fafà Picault had in 2024! Messi only played four games’ worth of minutes in 2023, so maybe that’s not the best example.

The Big Picture

As in the previous articles in this series, let’s now take a step back and see every team’s designated players in one big table.

I’m going to apologize in advance to fans of teams with new DPs because I’m not going to characterize their 2024 seasons. Wait, no, I’m not going to apologize. I don’t care that Latte Lath scored lots of goals in the Championship or Eric Choupo-Moting is coming off four seasons at Bayern Munich. You never know what happens when someone transfers to MLS. After being told that Lorenzo Insigne was going to be league MVP and Olivier Giroud would lead LAFC to a title, I’m just labeling all new DPs “Not in MLS” for 2024 performance no matter what their résumé looks like.

Edit: The original version of this article called them “unproven”, but this wording is better.

The first thing that surprised me when I made this is that only 12 teams have three DPs. It’s possible we’ll see a few more third DPs added before the window closes in April (the Crew seem like they’re looking), but it looks like less than half of MLS teams will end up with three.

When you add in the number of underperforming DPs, there’s very few teams with multiple above average players. The only team with three is the LA Galaxy, who—perhaps not a coincidence—won MLS Cup. The other major trophy, the Supporters’ Shield, was won by Miami with two good DPs and should-be-a-DP Luis Suárez. In 2024, Columbus also played with three good DPs, assuming Darlington Nagbe was still very strong at his position (seemed like it to me). But Cucho is gone, LA is going to have to play most of the season without the injured Riqui Puig, so only Miami comes close to following the three-great-DP formula.

For some reason, the East is the land of the old DPs. It’s also where a lot more teams have underperforming DPs. Underperforming by my simplistic definition, but your mileage may vary. I know Red Bull fans are convinced Emil Forsberg is amazing, for example. The West has more teams with at least an above average DP. But DPs are inconsistent, so we can expect a lot of this stuff to get scrambled as the games start being played in 2025.

Thanks to “cash trades” this season is also going to be a grand experiment in DPs changing teams. Three of the bottom four teams in the West last year now have players who were “Great” offensive players last season…playing on much better teams. Is this really going to be plug and play?

I’m really looking forward to seeing how all this plays out as the season begins. I’ll be trying to follow it week by week here at this newsletter, so subscribe if you’re interested.

Coming in a few days, I’ll be back with an article with concise previews of opening day matchups.