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Pick A Budget, Generate Your Own MLS Roster

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Ever wondered what a typical MLS roster might look like if owners were willing to pay $8 million on salaries? $15 million? What if they had to go back to the bad old days of a $1.7 million cap and no DPs? Now you can find out!

By sidereal
Alan Crowhurst

Inspired by our own Aolsh's article on the wage budgets at TempoFreeSoccer, I wrote a script to generate random rosters with current MLS players under a specified budget.

Just enter a target salary and I'll try to put together a reasonable MLS roster using current players under (but near) that budget. Note for purposes of this exercise I'm ignoring DP cap hits, off-budget players, international player limits, etc. Though that may be a good exercise for the future.

To calibrate, the Red Bulls spend around 10 million on salary, the Sounders about 5.4, Chivas about 2.5, and most teams are clustered between 3 and 4. But note that due to the MLS cap the high-spending teams skew their salary heavily towards a handful of DP players, whereas this tool will spread the salary out more evenly.

Some Notes:

  • You have to keep the budget in a reasonable range (between 1.5m and 18m) because of the minimum MLS salary and because there aren't enough multi-millionaire players to meet a high budget number.
  • I use the positions and salaries provided in the most recent MLS salary dump. If they're wrong, blame the Players' Union.

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