How the new MLS roster rules affect the Sounders

Nearly two months after the season started, Major League Soccer finally got around to releasing their new roster rules. There quite a few changes, some of which were strongly rumored and a lot of which are quite confusing (despite the stated goal to make the whole situation less so).

Some quick highlights:

• The salary budget is $3.49 million with only the top 20 players on the roster counting against it
• The rosters include 28 spots, with the top 24 earning no less than $60,000 and the final four spots earning at least $50,000
• Teams are still limited to three Designated Players, who will now count $436,250 unless a team uses allocation money to buy them down. Having three Designated Players at a full cap hit would take up about 37.5 percent of your budget, which is consistent with previous years.

It would be fool-hardy to attempt to explain everything right now, as we're still trying to understand everything ourselves, but we do know a bit more about how players enter the league and what happens after they leave. More specifically, we now know the status of former Seattle Sounders Fredy Montero and DeAndre Yedlin.

As players who were both transferred outside the league for more than $500,000 (the new threshold for these things), both players' MLS rights are no longer controlled by the Sounders and are subject to the "Allocation Ranking List." Here's the full list of players:

Allocation Ranking List

As of May 1, 2015

The Sounders are currently 13th on the list:

Allocation Ranking Order

As of May 1, 2015

What this means, as of right now, is that the Sounders would likely have to work out some sort of trade if Montero or Yedlin wanted to return to MLS, but were only interested in playing for the Sounders. It's hardly the perfect solution from a Sounders perspective, but at least there's now clarity on how it would work.

The flip side to having this list -- which will presumably be updated and communicated to the public on a regular basis -- is that anyone who's not on it is now subject to a "discovery claim." While the list of players a team has a claim on won't be public, that list is limited to seven players (down from twelve in the past). The good thing is that there are a ton of really good players who are now available to the Sounders -- and every other team -- who otherwise would have been subjected to the Allocation Ranking in previous years. The Sounders can update their list of seven "Discovery" players throughout the year, meaning there's a great deal of flexibility as well.

One thing that was not clarified was how this all translates to players on S2. As the dust continues to settle, we will hopefully get more answers on how the first team interacts with S2, as well as on other topics such as how HGPs may or may not affect the salary cap.