Is there a downside for allowing more flexibility for contract buyouts (more than one per season and not tied to a short period of time)?
One way the roster rules inhibit the quality of MLS is how difficult it is to move on from underperforming players.
Last night, there were 4 or 5 players Atlanta fielded who have not been very good for a long time (or ever)..
If you’re an MLS club (or ANY soccer club) with underperforming players, you can try to..
1. Sell the underperforming player. Happens everywhere else in the world, but in MLS clubs are capped on roster sizes, so the odds of finding another club within the league to take your underperforming player on a bad contract is slim to none.. selling a player at a loss internationally means you potentially lose GAM
2. Loan the player out to make room for someone else. Sounds good, until you realize you’re still going to be responsible for a cap charge when the loan is finished, and then you end up with too many players and no leverage. Atlanta did this and ended up having to loan out the only u22 player they had that was a regular starter to a team in their own conference
3. The most obvious - SIGN BETTER PLAYERS.. Except in MLS, it’s so difficult to get out of bad deals and roster sizes are so small that you’re locked into a player unless you can get creative to move him. If you have bad players, it can take a while to overturn the roster unless you’re super savvy.
All in all, it allows mediocre players to stay in starting line ups and hurts competition and quality within teams