MLS Trades Explained: What Clubs Can Trade

Trades in MLS: Everything That Actually Counts as Trade Currency

Across this series, we’ve mentioned trades constantly, GAM being traded, draft picks being traded, even Waiver position and Discovery Priority changing hands. This piece finally pulls all of that together in one place: the complete, official list of what MLS actually allows clubs to trade, called Bona Fide Consideration, plus the real restrictions that govern how these deals actually get built.

The Official List: Everything That Counts as Trade Currency

Every MLS trade has to include at least one of these, and every single one of them is a real, named category under the rules:

• Players signed to an SPA (Standard Player Agreement), which can include a future share of any transfer fee revenue if the player is later sold abroad.
• Future MLS SuperDraft picks, though a club can’t trade a pick more than three years in advance, and clubs can use “best” or “worst” pick language rather than a specific round, determined 24 hours before the relevant draft, covered in our companion piece on the SuperDraft.
• Waiver position for a specific claiming period, covered in our companion piece on Waivers.
• Re-Entry Draft position.
• General Allocation Money, with a $50,000 minimum, covered in our companion piece on GAM and TAM.
• A specific player’s Right of First Refusal, Discovery Priority, Homegrown Priority, Affiliate Priority, or SuperDraft Priority, covered in our companion pieces on the Discovery List and Homegrown Players.
• International Roster Slots, though these must be traded for the remainder of the current season, or through the Secondary Transfer Window if the trade happens before the Primary Window closes.
• Financial Consideration (cash), with its own $50,000 minimum, its own 2-players-per-season cap in either direction, and the rule that it must be the sole form of consideration in that specific trade line, all covered in our companion pieces on GAM and TAM and the 10% Player Percentage rule.
• Anything else the league decides to allow, a catch-all that keeps the system flexible for situations the rulebook hasn’t specifically anticipated.

Technical staff can also be traded between clubs, and that’s actually the one exception where cash is allowed alongside other consideration in the same deal, since the strict cash-must-be-sole-consideration rule is specifically about player trades.

What Actually Can’t Be Traded, or Can’t Be Traded Freely

A few real restrictions matter here, and they trip people up constantly:

• Generation adidas Players can’t be traded without prior written league approval. Once a player graduates out of that program, though, he can be traded freely like anyone else.
• Players under 18 can’t be traded without prior written approval, though trading priority over an underage player, his Discovery rights, for instance, doesn’t require that same approval.
• TAM itself is not tradable. This one surprises people given how tradable GAM is. A club can trade a TAM Player, the person, but it cannot trade the TAM allocation as a standalone asset the way it can with GAM.
• A club cannot trade purely for Salary Budget space. The trade has to involve real, substantive consideration, not simply an arrangement to shuffle budget room around.
• Trades can’t be structured as temporary arrangements. Outside of Intraleague Loans, MLS doesn’t allow clubs to effectively “loan” a player to each other by trading him for a finite period and swapping him back later.
• A player can’t be blocked from playing against his former club. Clubs aren’t allowed to write that kind of restriction into a trade agreement.
• Players signed through Discovery Conflict Resolution have a cooling-off period. They can’t be traded until the next Transfer Window opens if signed during the Primary Window, or until after MLS Cup if signed during the Secondary Window, specifically so the process can’t be used as a backdoor way to quickly flip a player.

TAM itself is not tradable. This one surprises people given how tradable GAM is.

Trading Designated Players and U22 Initiative Players

DPs and U22 Initiative Players can be traded just like anyone else, but the paperwork has to specify which club is actually responsible for costs beyond the player’s Salary Budget Charge, and one club has to formally retain the DP or U22 tag itself.

There’s also a more flexible option available, but only in limited quantities. Each season, a club can trade one DP and one U22 Initiative Player under an arrangement where both clubs actually share responsibility for costs beyond the Salary Budget Charge, rather than one club taking it all on. This only applies to players in their second MLS season or later, and no club can have more than two DPs or two U22 Players under this shared-cost structure running at the same time.

Homegrown Status Travels With the Trade

If a Homegrown Player gets traded, or if his Homegrown Priority gets traded before he’s even signed, the new club inherits the full benefit of that designation exactly as if it had developed him itself, a detail we covered in more depth in our companion piece on Homegrown Players.

What Happens When a Trade Agreement Doesn’t Specify Something

MLS has real default rules that kick in automatically if two clubs don’t spell out every detail themselves:

• The acquiring club takes on all payment obligations, guaranteed and conditional, unless the agreement says otherwise.
• For a discretionary-spend player like a DP or U22 signing, the acquiring club recoups its full out-of-pocket costs if it later transfers or loans him elsewhere.
• End-of-season bonuses that carry into the following year’s budget become the responsibility of whichever club actually receives the player, with one specific carve-out: bonuses for players earning close to the Senior Minimum Salary stay with whichever club he was on when he actually earned them.
• Trades that happen in the offseason, after MLS Cup but before the following year’s Roster Compliance Date, are treated as effective January 1st for Salary Budget purposes, rather than whatever calendar date the trade actually closed.

Sell-On Clauses Don’t Automatically Follow a Player Forever

Clubs can absolutely include sell-on provisions and conditional payments in a trade, but by default, those provisions only apply between the two clubs that made the original deal. If Club A trades a player to Club B with a sell-on clause, and Club B later trades that same player to Club C, that original sell-on right doesn’t automatically carry through to Club C unless the clubs specifically agreed it would. Even when it is written to carry forward, it typically extinguishes the moment the player leaves that club through any mechanism other than a trade, a transfer out, for instance, or being claimed off Waivers.

Timing, Registration, and When a Trade Actually Becomes Final

A trade is binding once one club submits it and the other confirms it through the league’s system, but it isn’t actually final until the league formally approves it. A player traded outside of a Transfer Window can’t be registered or play for his new club until the next window actually opens. And once the Secondary Transfer Window closes for the year, no trade involving a currently signed player can happen at all until the calendar turns over, with a further freeze on most other trades between the Roster Freeze Date and MLS Cup.

A trade is binding once one club submits it and the other confirms it through the league’s system, but it isn’t actually final until the league formally approves it.

Sign-and-trades follow their own careful sequence too: the league has to give provisional approval to the trade terms before it will even issue contract paperwork for the player, and the acquiring club isn’t allowed to recruit or communicate with him at all until the trade has actually been submitted and approved.

The Bottom Line

MLS’s trade system looks, on the surface, like any other league’s, players and picks moving between clubs. In practice, it’s a genuinely unique marketplace where GAM, roster priorities, Waiver positions, and even the right to negotiate with a specific player all function as real, tradable currency alongside players themselves. That flexibility is only possible because of MLS’s single-entity structure, the same theme running through nearly everything covered in this series, since it’s the league itself, not each club independently, that ultimately sets and enforces the rules every one of these trades has to follow.

In practice, it’s a genuinely unique marketplace where GAM, roster priorities, Waiver positions, and even the right to negotiate with a specific player all function as real, tradable currency alongside players themselves.