ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. – Pat Onstad’s smile was fleeting, yet revealing, as he explained the backstory on the deal Houston Dynamo FC reached with the Philadelphia Union to acquire Jack McGlynn over the weekend.
“All the CSOs [chief soccer officers] kind of talk: ‘Hey, these are the positions we're looking for,’” Houston’s president of soccer told MLSsoccer.com at the Dynamo’s beachside preseason camp in Florida this week. “We knew Jack fits our model, but we didn't really think that that was a player they would move.
“We'd kick the tires, said this is the player profile we're looking for – hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge; it's the guy, he's on your roster. [They’d respond], ‘OK, that's nice to know.’”
McGlynn heads to H-Town
A rising US international with a wand of a left foot, an innate feel for midfield tempo-setting and a European Union passport via his Irish heritage, McGlynn has blossomed into one of MLS’s most intriguing young prospects – not exactly the typical profile for an intra-league move, with widespread expectations he’d cross the Atlantic in a transfer sooner or later. Houston could only admire from afar, it seemed.
Everything changed when MLS headquarters implemented the new ‘cash for players’ trade mechanism last month, enabling clubs to swap players for hard cash rather than General Allocation Money (GAM) or other assets.
Soon it was Philly sporting director Ernst Tanner’s turn to pick up the phone, initiating negotiations that culminated in McGlynn moving south for a guaranteed $2.1 million, a “significant” sell-on clause media reports place at 50 percent and performance-based bonuses that could garner an additional $1.3 million.
Houston’s reserves of allocation money are currently among the lightest in MLS, thanks to their aggressive efforts to maximize their competitiveness while engine-room linchpin Héctor Herrera, the Mexican international who departed the club at the end of 2024, was in town. Another foundational midfield piece has since moved on, too: versatile Panamanian Coco Carrasquilla was transferred to Pumas UNAM for a reported club-record $3.5 million fee.
The Dynamo craved adding McGlynn. Straight cash and a share of any future proceeds represented the only realistic avenue.
“Without the new internal transfer [rule], I think this probably doesn't happen,” Onstad said, pointing to the newcomer’s additional value as a domestic player eligible for the U22 Initiative, which greatly reduces his impact on Houston’s salary budget.
“Bringing a Jack McGlynn in obviously gives us a little more cap flexibility as a U22 and a starter, that now we're in a position where we can kind of pick and choose how we want to build this roster. And I think we have a really good roster here, but we want to keep trying to improve it.”
Sporting land Joveljić
The same can be said of Sporting Kansas City’s swoop for LA Galaxy striker Dejan Joveljić, officially the first-ever use of cash-for-player.
“Without the new mechanism,” SKC sporting director Mike Burns told MLSsoccer.com on Tuesday, “it's very, very, very unlikely that Dejan would have been with us. I didn't foresee a different mechanism by which we would have been able to make a trade with the Galaxy that would have made sense for us or them.”
A vital cog in LA’s capture of MLS Cup 2024 presented by Audi with 21 goals across all competitions, Joveljic just aged out of his U22 classification. He justifiably felt he’d earned a Designated Player-level contract, something LA could not easily offer thanks to Riqui Puig, Joseph Paintsil and Gabriel Pec already occupying those three prestige roster spots.
Mexican giants Tigres UANL made inquiries. Yet it was SKC who ponied up what was required – $4 million to the Galaxy and a new three-year DP deal to Joveljic, whose enthusiasm to make the Midwestern move sealed matters for Burns and manager Peter Vermes.
“There's probably a pretty good percentage chance that without this mechanism, that MLS loses Dejan,” said Burns. “Certainly we feel like it benefited us, and that's why we did the deal. But there's also, I believe, a benefit to MLS in terms of being able to retain and keep players in the league that have had success.”
Revolving doors
This winter Sporting sought to freshen up an aging roster that fell well short of expectations last season. When Mexican DP Alan Pulido returned to Chivas Guadalajara last month, it set into motion their pursuit of Joveljić, who arrives alongside Spanish midfielder Manu García and Russian winger Shapi Suleymanov, attacking reinforcements from Greek top-flight side Aris Thessaloniki.
“With Dejan, Manu, Mason (Toye), Shapi, we feel like we've brought in four players of a great age, right there between 25 and 27; they're either just entering their prime or in their prime,” explained Burns, adding that SKC want incumbent striker William Agada, and their entire lineup, for that matter, to compete for every minute of playing time. “The fact that Dejan has had success in this league was another contributing factor.”
Beyond a workaround for squad-strengthening priorities or salary-budget constraints like the Galaxy’s, cash-for-player trades also provide a route for players to arrive in better environments for their particular attributes.
McGlynn was always an imperfect fit for Philly’s high-pressing game model, which new head coach Bradley Carnell is now ratcheting into an even higher gear of rugged directness.
Meanwhile, the Dynamo are thrilled to add his cultured distribution to their possession-centric style. In doing so they help the Union reap a return on their investment in a homegrown player ready for the next step.
“Let's see if we can find a solution where everybody can win here,” said Onstad of the clubs’ talks around McGlynn. “I think we've been able to do that.
“There's a handful of guys in our league that we feel can play the role that Héctor plays in advancing the ball and being able to play in tight areas, and maybe provide a goal or two and a final pass from deep, and he's definitely one of them.”
While he confesses to being blindsided by the trade, McGlynn agrees that Houston can elevate his skill set.
“Obviously Europe was the goal. But now I'm here, and I think this will suit me and help me show my talents even better than I could have in Philly,” McGlynn, whose pinpoint set-piece deliveries wowed his new teammates in his first Dynamo training session, told MLSsoccer.com.
“So I think it's a good step for me. Definitely, the style of play is going to help show what I can do.”
New frontier
All this is music to the ears of Christina LaBrie, MLS’s Senior Vice President of Player Relations. She’s a key architect of the new mechanism, an idea she calls “a team-driven initiative” that CSOs have lobbied for over several years, albeit one which required careful calibration to mesh with the collective bargaining agreement with the MLS Players Association.
“The two transactions that we saw this weekend were exactly what we were hoping for,” LaBrie told MLSsoccer.com this week. “These are transactions that could have happened outside the league, but instead happened inside the league. We retained two different, but excellent young players, different profiles, different pathways. But what this new cash-for-player trades was able to do was to give the clubs another opportunity, a different opportunity than sending the players abroad.”
Previously, teams often felt compelled to shop their players to clubs overseas to reap the biggest possible transfer compensation. Now they have an avenue for dealmaking with MLS counterparts who value proven commodities, mindful of the inherent risks around imports to the North American scene.
“The structure of the cash for player trades was really designed to put the trade on the same footing as a transfer out, so you could compare and contrast and decide which one would be better,” said LaBrie.
“Our collective bargaining agreement has a lot of rules around our use of general allocation money, how money comes in and out of the system, and so we had to make sure we put guardrails around this to make sure that we weren't doing anything to disrupt that structure, because we're still operating within the same CBA. So it was a lot of back and forth with the Players Association in order to make sure that everybody was comfortable with how this was going to be implemented. And that simply takes time.”
Since technical staffs tend to plot out their roster-building processes far in advance, over multiple transfer windows, the speed with which Houston and Kansas City pivoted to swing these deals hints at the usefulness of the cash-for-player option in the long run.
“I would think this just becomes a very commonplace transaction in our league,” LaBrie said.
