It’s January.
Winter transfer windows are open around the globe. MLS players start reporting for preseason in a matter of hours. There are a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous, and a lot of strands to keep in our heads as we count down to the opening day of the 2025 season, when it comes to trades, transfers and other roster updates.
What have your favorite team and/or their adversaries been up to? Here’s a rundown of this week’s major marketplace moves.
A complex set of moving parts clicked into place for the Seattle Sounders as their acquisition of versatile attacker Jesús Ferreira, MLS’s Young Player of the Year in 2022, from FC Dallas in exchange for winger Léo Chú, up to $2.3 million in General Allocation Money (GAM), an international roster spot and other considerations finally went official on Wednesday.
A day later, the Rave Green secured another foundational piece by re-signing Designated Player Albert Rusnák. Based on general manager Craig Waibel’s hints in a midweek media availability, they’ll probably announce the acquisition of another FCD veteran, winger Paul Arriola, any day now. Waibel also revealed that striker Jordan Morris’ productivity levels have triggered clauses that make him a full DP for the remaining three years of his current contract.
We’d sum it up thusly: The league’s most consistently competitive club of the past decade have chosen roster continuity and MLS experience over the exciting but risky alternative of splashing out on pricey imports. Go read the full breakdown over at Sounder At Heart, the gold standard in independent local coverage, for more on the “Waibel method.”
Down in central Texas, the prospects for 2025 took a marked upswing as Austin FC unveiled their new club-record signing, US international Brandon Vazquez. The big No. 9 arrives from LIGA MX giants CF Monterrey for a reported $10 million fee, with a hunger to shoulder face-of-the-franchise responsibilities in the river city as the Verde, who missed out on the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs last season, seek a swift turnaround under new head coach Nico Estévez.
"I know my qualities, and I know what I can bring to the team," Vazquez, a Supporters’ Shield winner and Best XI honoree with FC Cincinnati, told MLSsoccer.com. "I’ve got to dream. And to me, in my head, with the group and the kind of players that we have, we can have some great success."
His recruitment will be even more crucial if widespread reports of Sebastián Driussi – Austin’s showpiece in their first four years of existence – being on the verge of a similarly sizable move from ATX to River Plate prove accurate.
It’s not too often you see a Designated Player traded within the league, let alone for the extremely modest sum of $50,000 in GAM, plus a sell-on percentage. That’s the deal CF Montréal swung with New England for Giacomo Vrioni on Tuesday, a transaction that underlines both how eager the Revolution were to shed the underperforming Albanian international forward to open up a DP slot and how differently CFM do business from most of the rest of MLS.
In recent years Montréal have tapered down their discretionary spending, preferring to seek out undervalued assets they can burnish in-house, the likes of Romell Quioto, Djordje Mihailovic and Caden Clark. Now they reckon Vrioni is worth a flyer. As excellent local beat writer Jean-François Téotonio writes (in French) for La Presse: "CFM has shown that it is capable of bringing out the best in players whose path, until their arrival in Quebec, has not been perfectly mapped out."
That mindset also drove a bigger bet on Jalen Neal, the LA Galaxy’s highly talented, but work-in-progress, homegrown center back. At age 21, with European and US men’s national team ambitions on his mind, Neal needs to be starting regularly in MLS, and MTL offers that in a way the freshly-crowned MLS Cup champs cannot. Hence his Monday arrival via a hefty trade package headlined by $650,000 in GAM.
Seven goals, five assists and 26 key passes in 1,959 regular-season minutes amid an overall down year for Sporting Kansas City might seem like a decent enough ‘24 for Alan Pulido, if viewed in a context-free vacuum. Something similar could be said of his 35g/16a across five campaigns in the Midwest, one of them spent entirely on the IR due to surgery to repair a cartilage defect in his knee.
Taken in full, however, most observers were bearish on the Mexico international’s prospects of inspiring an SKC rebound from last year’s 27th-place finish in the Supporters' Shield table, especially with his 34th birthday looming in just a few weeks. There have just been more bummers than breakthroughs since the striker’s reported club-record $9.5 million arrival from Chivas Guadalajara in 2020, and MLS Players Association documents indicate he was on one of MLS’s biggest salaries following a 2023 contract renewal, with guaranteed compensation more than double that of Sporting’s second-highest earner.
So the late Tuesday night news that Chivas swooped in with a fee in the low seven figures to bring him back to Estadio Akron was welcomed by many of the KC faithful. Can they mobilize that newfound flexibility in the days to come?
With from-scratch expansion projects like San Diego FC’s, roster construction can serve as a de facto countdown clock from the inaugural signing, which the Chrome-and-Azul made just over a year ago, to opening day, a massive landmark which is now a mere six weeks away.
This week, SDFC swung a trade with the Revs for winger Ema Boateng and signed Franco Negri, an Argentine left back whose rights they picked up in the Re-Entry Draft. These veterans won’t spark headlines like tentpole attraction Hirving “Chucky” Lozano or Manchester City star Kevin De Bruyne, whom they’ve reportedly courted at length. They’re experienced hands who can help steady the ship on what history tells us is likely a stormy voyage ahead.
Negri could turn out to be an inspired acquisition, having gotten eclipsed by Jordi Alba’s considerable shadow at Inter Miami. And there’s beautiful symbolism in Boateng joining San Diego, given he’s an alumnus of Right to Dream, the aspirational academy program founded in his native Ghana a quarter-century ago, which has since blossomed into a global development network of which SDFC is the latest and perhaps most intriguing outpost.
