81017_arriolapaul_isi_usmntjd072617437 John Dorton/isiphotos.com
8.10.17

ASN Morning Read: That's a Lot of Money

Scream, Paul, scream. You're moving to DC United on a record transfer fee, one that is sure to raise a lot of eyebrows around Major League Soccer; Confusing times, no?
BY Noah Davis Posted
August 10, 2017
7:55 AM
  • Paul: "D.C. United transformed its last-place roster Wednesday, announcing the acquisition of two midfielders and, with time running out before an MLS deadline, finalizing the most expensive deal in club history with the signing of U.S. national team midfielder Paul Arriola.United purchased Arriola, 22, from Mexican club Tijuana for more than $3 million. The previous high was $1.4 million for current playmaker Luciano Acosta from Argentina’s Boca Juniors last fall.United will also ship allocation money to the Los Angeles Galaxy, which owns Arriola’s MLS rights because he was once a member of its youth academy. On top of that, United will furnish him a contract of more than $1 million annually through 2020, according to sources familiar with the pact."

  • Um...
  • No one understands this and it's the best: "That said, it appears that Arriola has broken new ground in the area of Homegrown Players, though the mechanism is very similar to that of say players who enter the league through the allocation ranking. In that case, a team at the top of the ranking gets right of first refusal to a player on the allocation list. If the team isn't interested in signing the player, it can engineer a trade for players and/or assets. That's how, for example, Didier Drogba ended up in Montreal and not Chicago, who initially held his rights. It does seem to be an abuse of the Homegrown mechanism, however. The only way to change it seems to be through collective bargaining, but with the current CBA running through the end of 2019, any alterations are still a ways away."

  • Seriously, no one: "The news here is that if you have a Homegrown claim on a player, it doesn’t seem to expire. And, as SKC proved with Sargent, they don’t even need to have played for your academy, just have lived in your Homegrown catchment area. Whether or not MLS has a secondary deterrent to keep teams from simply squatting on the Homegrown rights of dozens of local and regional players it’s never even developed in hopes of collecting future fees, we’ll have to wait to see.MLS allocation rules are so intricately webbed that they often require real world precedents, much like landmark court cases, to set them in stone. We seem to trip over new scenarios by the year. If this one is the way it appears, MLS clubs who’ve watched academy players fly the coop before signing them, only to have them return years later for another team, will be compensated.That’s not such a bad thing, even if it does appear to contradict MLS’s own rulebook."

  • This is exceptional.

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