If MLS wants to improve its on-field quality, the league needs to overhaul its salary cap – and that means it must reckon with how to end the Designated Player rule.
The DP rule, which allows MLS teams to sign players with no limit on their incoming transfer fees or salaries, has been an engine for growth for the league since David Beckham joined the LA Galaxy in 2007. He became the first player to bring major attention to the league by signing one such DP contract.
The rule, however, has expanded past what made it useful and has become a drag on MLS’s improvement rather than a driver.
When my spouse lived in Ghana, the trotro bus to the shops had a paint brush for a gear shifter. At some point, the shifter had broken and in a piece of clever invention, someone McGyvered a new one with the handle of the brush. But in grand trotro tradition, this was not a temporary solution, this was the permanent fix. The DP rule, like that poor overworked paintbrush, is a tool proficient at what it was made to do but has been thrust into a load bearing role in a totally different system.
The rule was made to raise the profile of the league by signing recognizable stars. But as MLS has matured and many clubs have become more interested in winning titles than winning a news cycle, it was reimagined and redeployed as the main tool for adding in-prime players with less name recognition but more years left on their legs. Signings like Nico Lodeiro and Diego Valeri transformed the league and how the DP rule was used. But the muddying of DP rule’s marketing function and talent acquisition function has made the whole thing a less than ideal vessel to do either.
