2026 Roster and Transfer Discussion Thread
- Thread starter LionNYC
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De Paul wasn't a DP when he was on loan when they won the MLS Cup but everyone and their mother knew he was coming to be a full DP the next season. Inter Miami has been breaking the MLS budget rules since they came into the league.
The Messi discount that everyone is taking to play on Miami is beyond bullshit.
These bother me less than most people.
1. If players are coming to Miami on 6 month or 1 year cheap contracts with unofficial and unenforceable deals to be paid DP money when the initial deal ends, I'm not sure the league can or should do anything about it. It's the same as the assumptions some have made about the Galaxy deal with Haak. If a player is willing to forego the security and guarantees of a long term deal, they're entitled to do that. And then if player and club agree to a longer term and higher comp that's also allowed. Someday one of these will blow up when a player busts a knee, destroys clubhouse culture, or just performs below expectations, and it won't be pretty. But trying to make and enforce rules against unenforceable verbal promises is not likely to accomplish anything.
2. If players really are taking less money to play with Messi then I don't see how you can stop that, or if you should. Somehow the baseball players union has managed to create a very strong norm with major peer pressure against taking less money to play for a winner, or your favorite team, or to stay put. But all those things happen regularly in the NBA and NFL. Tom Brady is somewhat famous for choosing to be paid very well but below his actual worth over several years to allow the Patriots to have more cap flexibility. Good for him, he won more super Bowls. And if some player sitting on $25-100M in net worth decides to sign for $700k to play with Messi, good for him. And smart business by Miami.
On this point, I think the big difference is not that Miami plays loose with cap rules but that Miami plays loose with its own discretionary budget. CFG wants to buy low and sell high. It picks targets and if the other teams won't meet our price we hold out until they bend or we pick another target. We do the same when selling. And our targets are chosen as much for their potential resale value as they are for on field performance.
In contrast, Miami seems to pick players it wants for sporting purposes and then does what it takes to buy and sign them, and seems to figure the profit and revenue will take care of itself.
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I can’t stand the way Miami behaves on the field or the preferential treatment they seem to get from referees. But I have no issue with their roster construction. Let them sign as many top players as possible. It raises the league’s profile, forces ambitious clubs to respond by chasing stars of their own, and exposes the clubs that choose to cut corners, like NYCFC.
NYCFC could have put itself in a similar position if CFG had chosen to truly go for it. I’m far more frustrated with CFG for running the club like a Billy Beane–style Moneyball experiment, where every acquisition has to be a clever value or hidden gem, than I am with Miami for being aggressive and successfully building the most impressive roster in league history.
I'm hoping and praying the new stadium is going to change this picture. I've said before, I totally understand the develop-and-sell strategy. But that's because of the lack of revenue.
Once we're in Etihad Park, there's no reason for us to not go out and leverage CFG's financial muscle (which, to be honest, they've built through smart selling) and our own clever use of the checkbook to build a Supporters Shield-quality team every single year.
I'm fine with doing it on the cheap a little when we don't have the money. I'm absolutely not cool with it when we do.
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I'm a when people show you who they are beilive them type of person. CFG has been very consistent in showing us their intentions for this club.
Just over a year ago we had 3 strikers, even if 2 of them couldn’t score. Then we loaned one a year ago, sold another 5-6 months ago, and the last guy got hurt 2-3 months ago.
Zero replacements.
Zero replacements.
I understand that view. I don't agree with it — as I've mentioned whenever this comes up, the fact CFG is writing a check for our stadium, among other things, tells me they're serious — but I absolutely can see why someone would believe they don't care about us very much. We haven't made the kind of impact signings other teams have made.
We'll find out the truth soon enough. We're going to want to build this year for the bridge season and then go into our park either lugging some silverware or ready to grab some. We need some serious work to be done, and this is the time to do it.
To my thinking, it boils down to Dunivant. If he starts making David Lee-style moves, then we'll know the strings are being pulled from Manchester. I can't tell you how incredibly disappointed I would be if that turns out to be the case. But at the same time, I must admit, it could turn out that way.
This whole thing is an asset game for them. They bought a club for $200M that's now pushing a $1B valueation. Having their own stadium will only push the value up more, not to mention the value of the stadium itself as NYC real estate. Writing the stadium check isn't some sort of sign of commitment to the projects its a calculated investment.
No one at CFG or CFG's owners cares about this team beyond what it means for their bottom line. They might bring in some stars to generate buzz for the stadium, but it won't last any longer than the Villa years. If it's just an assest why shell out any more money than is needed to be moderately competitive? Let the LAFCs and Miami's of the leage shell out the money that grows the profile of the league, and just ride along on the increase in club value as the profile of the league rises.
ZYanksRule
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I really disagree with this. They are spending on the wrong players, but they are spending a ton of money on this team in transfer fees. I'm not happy with the transfer strategy lately either, but to say they're not spending money or that this is just an asset game doesn't fit in with what the club has accomplished the last 5 years. MLS Cup, two other conference finals, missing the playoffs once in the last 10 years, they're better than you're giving them credit for.
I suppose you could argue the club is achieving these things despite the ownership, but I don't really think that. Sure they're not spending on the roster like Miami or LAFC, but I think on some level the team is trying not to lose oodles of money during the YS/CF era. Very interested to see how this all changes when the stadium opens.
CFG as a corporation is a group that wants to win. We've seen what they've done for Man City. Girona has had some good years too. They don't want to be associated with a loser.
I agree with ... some of that. We're certainly an asset in their portfolio. And they certainly want to make money. Ferran Soriano isn't tasked with lighting Sheikh Mansour's pile of cash on fire, and I know for a fact, the Emiratis are in business to do business. They don't mess around.
Which are some of the reasons I think the opposite from your point of view. We're essentially a decade of sunk costs: paying rent for a place to play for all our home games, paying rent for our offices, paying our share of league revenue and our DP money, and on and on, all out of very narrow, even minimal revenue streams.
And now we're plowing another $785 million-plus into the franchise.
It just doesn't profile to me like a "just good enough" strategy. More like, "let's keep it rolling until we get through the red tape and have our own park" strategy.
My big question is how much independence Dunivant and Sims are going to have. I know if I'm Soriano, all I care about is a healthy positive cash flow and a perpetually rising valuation, which means they get to do what they want as long as it works. We get there by winning, and we win with smart signings. It won't happen if we're being micromanaged by Manchester, and I'm sure Ferran is perfectly aware of that.
What was going on with David Lee, I don't know.
They say a lot of things about winning and their goal to be the model club in MLS, but their actions are different than their words. MCFC is their trophy, and where they care about winning, the rest of the teams are cogs in the system. I agree to a point that they care about their brand enough that they will not tolerate NYCFC being a bottom table team for multiple seasons, but they have shown they are perfectly content to let the team coast along around the slightly above average line for the league. They have shown no intention of trying to build a league-dominating club with NYCFC the way they have with MCFC.
In terms of NYCFC is typically middle of the pack in salary spend in MLS. On the transfer front, they spent $10M on Nico, which is less than they sold Santi for. They spent the money they made on Taty and Gabby on 3 teenagers who were nowhere near ready to help the team wi,n and the moment any of them came good, they would have been sold. How is this investing in the team?
This is sour grapes. We also took a DP caliber player in Santi Rodriguez on loan for years before permanently purchasing. The loan before purchasing move is just a smart MLS roster move that everyone on MLS does.
Arman Kafai did a good job breaking down Miami's offseason so far:
A 2026 Off-Season Update on Inter Miami
Yes, I will guide you through how Inter Miami is doing all of these deals
open.substack.com
ZYanksRule
Registered
I've said this before but I believe they misjudged the rapidly-improving state of MLS. They thought those kids would help the team immediately. Instead, the quality of MLS continues to improve every season, and CFG misjudged the quality of the leauge in comparison to those players.
CFG needs these players to succeed so they can profit on their sales -- there is no situation in which CFG would send us players they know aren't able to compete in this league. That does nothing for their bottom line. Look at Jovan. When we signed him, his market value was $6 million. Now it's $2.2 million. That's not helping them in any way. Obviously they misjudged and mis-scouted that player, but they're not sending Jovan here because they think he'll fail. They sent him here thinking he was the next Taty, he'd blow up, and we'd sell him for $20 million.
Probably the worst-case scenario for NYCFC was a Jhon Duran sale, where he barely made an impact in Chicago before getting moved to the Premier Leauge. Had that been us, we'd be screaming bloody murder.
There are also signs that CFG/NYCFC has changed their transfer strategy. After years of exclusively signing young developing players, we signed Aidan O'Neill (27 years old) Raul Gustavo (26 years old) and Nico Fernandez-Mercau (turned 26 today) during the season last year. Those are three players in their prime, and three players who obviously helped us a lot last year and should help even more this year.
Could it be possible CFG has had the scales fall from their eyes? Or is it possible they've been biding their time until our park was locked in?
It can't be a coincidence we suddenly recruited a top-notch head coach from a respectable European league and then added three decent veteran players in their primes, could it?
Sometimes you make do with what you have until you can get to something better.
ZYanksRule
Registered
I think this window will give us an indication which way we are going. If we sign a U-22, will they be 18 or 21? If we sign a DP will he be 22 or 26?
Is it also possible that CFG has gotten a firmer handle on MLS's quality in the last 12 months after the failures of Jovan, Ojeda, and Fernandez? It wasn't that long ago that we were getting Taty and Pereira.
We can disagree about the intent behind the Jovan-type signings, but I still don’t see real spending on the team. Over the past three years, our total transfer fees for incoming players roughly equal what the club made from selling Taty, Gabby, and Santi combined. Even if you view Nico-for-Santi as a direct replacement, they didn’t reinvest what they earned on Santi into Nico. From a pure market-value standpoint, that’s a downgrade, even if Nico looks great on the field, which isn’t the point.
Meanwhile, the ownership group paid a $200M expansion fee to enter MLS, and Forbes recently valued the club at nearly $900M. With valuations skyrocketing, they could clearly afford to invest more than they are. Plenty of other MLS clubs already do.
True. But we should note, both Taty and Pereira were development projects of their own. They just turned out a lot better than the most recent trio.
I think we should be fair about Jovan, too. It seemed like everyone wanted him. That was a very, very broad-based scouting fail, probably just one of those cases of a million-dollar talent with an undiagnosed 10-cent brain. We just happened to be the ones who won the bidding and got stuck with him.
One could argue we overpaid, but that's both 20/20 hindsight and circular.
Julian was clearly a gamble. Lots of physical attributes, but he had so little experience when we brought him on. He was going to be a project no matter what, no matter where he played, and that should have been obvious on paper.
Agu was less of a gamble. And he showed very positive signs of coming around late last year. Personally, I think he's about to pay off.
The big question is how much of this was David Lee calling the shots, and how much was CFG. I don't think we've ever gotten any kind of definitive answer on that. We might be about to get a definitive answer going forward.
And if it was CFG behind Jovan, Juli and Ojeda, were they also behind O'Neill, Raul and Nico?
We paid $400k for Taty, we paid $8M for Jovan. These approaches are not the same. Also, the other interest in Jovan was reportedly Juve, which could have been a complete Agent spin; it wasn't some Europe-wide bidding war, CFG got hoodwinked by Red Star into overpaying for an 18-year-old brat.
On the Julian front, there was a Reddit thread when we signed him, where NYCFC fans were asking fans of his previous team about him. Multiple responses said essentially super talented physically, but dumb as a box of rocks. How does the "world-class" CFG scouting network miss what a bunch of fans saw? Real I can fix him, hubiss from CFG on that one.
I agree with you on Ojeda; we paid more than double for Ojeda than we did for Julian, and all reports on Ojeda were very positive. I don't know if it was adjusting to life in another country or something Cushing did, but the kid's confidence got crushed. Pascal seemed to unlock him a bit last season; things look better, but his counting stats are still abysmal. I'm hopeful for this season, but he needs to find a measurable way to impact games or all the looks better is pointless.
