Atlanta United made a few roster moves on Friday with an eye toward what will be a busy winter transfer window.
The club announced that Bartosz Slisz will gain a DP designation through the end of the season. That’s because the majority of his transfer fee was moved to 2024 instead of 2025, per a club spokesperson. As for Gregersen, he has been bought down to TAM status using GAM.
MLS rules that kicked in this summer require teams to declare their roster building mechanisms: three DPs and three U22 or two DPs, four U22s, and $2 million of GAM (prorated to $1 million since the rule became effective during the secondary transfer window). Atlanta opted for the second option, with most of the GAM used to buy Gregersen down — his projected cap number for 2024 was $1.120 million, $436,250 above the TAM threshold of $683,750.
While some people lambasted the club on social media after the announcment, they really don’t have a reason to. It’s essentially accounting moves made by the front office to ensure two fully-opened DP slots in the winter. Don’t forget the resulting funds from the Caleb Wiley sale, either.
Along with a pair of DPs (presumably one being a striker), a new head coach, and new general manager, the eyes of the league will be on Atlanta’s front office in what will be a transformative time period for the club.
Of course, further relaxation around roster construction would make things much easier for MLS club executives, but that’s another topic for another day.
Help support independent Atlanta soccer coverage
Every week, Scarves and Spikes brings you original interviews, on-site coverage, live shows/podcasts, and the analysis you won’t find at the bigger national outlets. With 2026 being a World Cup year, Atlanta United facing yet another important transfer window, the U.S. Soccer National Training Center setting up shop in the Atlanta area, and NWSL Atlanta kicking off in 2028, your support helps us do even more.
What you get on Patreon:
- Atlanta United training ground updates
- Exclusive interviews, like our recent sit-down with ATL UTD 2 head coach Jose Silva
- Discord access, talk Atlanta soccer with the SnS team and other supporters
- Patreon-only mailbags
- Grey Gowder’s analytical deep-dives on roster construction, the academy, ATL UTD 2, and more
Membership starts at $5/month. New subscribers get a 7-day free trial.
If we go into 2025 with
New TD
New Coach
U22 winger DP striker Saba
Slisz Miranchuk
New CDM
Amador Gregersen Williams Lennon
Cohen
And another DP spot to boot, we should on paper be ridiculously good.
But we were supposed to be ridiculously good this year too, soo….
Still mostly joking, but we can do some one stop shopping if we get Mark van Bommel and his two sons. That gives us coach, a DP-level U22 player we can do roster shenanigans to keep under cap, and a more destroyer type DM.
Great little article here, Sydney! Thanks for the quick analysis. It helps for people like me that have an incredibly elementary understanding of the salary rules.
Anyone freaking out hasn’t been paying enough attention to the highly transparent breakdown of the cap management strategy Garth and Dimitrios have told us. This is just formalizing what Garth has been saying for a while.
Slisz has the highest added amortized transfer fee hit to his annual salary of $830,000 with an extra $703,216 added per season from the approximately $3.5 million transfer fee. After paying a season off of that, we have approximately $2.8 million to $3 million left on the cap hit of that fee. Making Slisz the DP of the trio of Gregersen, Slisz, and Saba opens up the DP slot when we use the $3 million in GAM we got from Wiley’s sale to pay for the rest Slisz’s transfer fee cap hit. Now, Slisz’s salary is all that counts against the cap, with that maximum salary figure rising to over $700,000 for the first time next season. Using that $3 million on Slisz and the natural reductions in GAM needed for salaries based on the maximum rising, we have approximately $700,000 GAM per season freed up through 2028 to use on other roster spots. If (based on the club’s statement), we moved even more of the transfer fee hit to this season, that means we might have some of Wiley’s $3 million left to play with next year after Slisz’s buydown.
For comparison, Gregersen’s salary is $1.12 million plus the added amortized cap hit of $440,000 for his transfer fee. Buying out his transfer fee through 2027 or 2028 doesn’t make as big of a difference because his salary requires a higher GAM commitment per season.
The same is true for Saba. Saba earns just short of $1 million plus $471,000 through 2026.
For anyone wanting to go further down the financial rabbit hole, the Maximum Salary Budget Charge will increase next season to $734,750 from $683,750 this season with the maximum ceiling of what can be bought down ($1 million above the Maximum Salary Threshold) also rising to about $1.7 million. This is all great for us because some of our contracts are starting to shift out of TAM territory.
By using Wiley’s $3 million to buy down the remaining transfer fee cap hit for Slisz, his annual cap hit will just be his salary ($830,000 in 2024) with that requiring just $95,250 in TAM/GAM in 2025 to make him compliant under the new maximum (set to rise annually).
This increase in the maximum salary budget charge impacts a few other players on the roster. Lennon got a slight pay raise from $700,000 in 2023 to $740,000 in 2024. If his wages remain the same in 2025, he will only require $5,250 GAM/TAM.
Based on my best estimates, here is the breakdown of GAM/TAM required for over-maximum players to bring their 2024 wages + amortized cap hit down to $734,750:
Every club will receive $2.4 million in TAM which is discretionary and has to be used within the 2025 season. Clubs will also receive about $2.93 million in nondiscretionary GAM that they can use or roll over into future years. This is what every club gets as a baseline that other rolled-over funds from previous seasons, trades, other boosts for competitive balance, and other league initiatives can add to. Our $3 million nondiscretionary GAM from Wiley will be on top of that.
The wrinkle in all of this is our $1 million in 2024 discretionary GAM that we got for electing the U-22 Pathway option that we have to spend in 2024. We appear to be using that for Gregersen. The question is how much of that are we using for costs associated with this season versus for proactively paying for future transfer fee cap hits? The purely speculative side of this is whether we can use the full $1 million dGAM to pay for what we were already using $1 million in nondiscretionary GAM for on the roster this season. If that is the case and we can offset the non-dGAM with dGAM we may be able to use the nondiscretionary GAM to pay down part of the total $2.2 million transfer fee hit that would have been spread over his contract from 2024-2028. Amortized, that would be about $440,000 per season in added cap hit. The maximum we can spend this season on Gregersen without him being a DP is $1,683,750 with his salary accounting for $1,120,000 of that. If we were to use our newly freed up $1 million in GAM to proactively reduce Gregersen’s remaining transfer fee cap hit, we could potentially bring it down an additional $1 million past the $440,000 already allocated to his cap hit. That would bring his remaining transfer fee penalty to $760,000 over the remaining 4 years of his contract, so about $190,000 per year if split evenly. That could decrease the portion of GAM/TAM he uses in 2025 to $575,250. That would bring the total amount of GAM/TAM needed to bring TAM Players to the Maximum Salary Budget Charge to $1,773,296, entirely within what we would already be getting from the league for the 2025 season without any other funny business.
Another wrinkle is the question of how much of Derrick Etienne Jr’s remaining salary for the last season of his current contract remains the responsibility of Atlanta United. We know we are at least paying some of his salary this year. His total salary for 2024 as reported by the MLS Players Association back in April is $710,062 which is just above the TAM line in 2024 but below the TAM line for 2025. I honestly don’t know how much of that we are responsible for going forward. What I do know is that we are due between $200,000 and $350,000 GAM in 2025 from Toronto depending on how many performance thresholds he reached with Toronto this year. Let’s say we pay half of his salary and are awarded $300,000 in GAM so it is pretty close to even. Is that enough for us to carry his cap hit for the rest of the season or do we wipe the entire amount from our books with our buyout while using the $200,000+ in GAM from the trade for other purposes? That $200,000 in GAM can buy an international slot, or at least most of one.
All of this is to say that this offseason will be fascinating. We will need to make tough decisions with Abram, Hernandez, Guzan, and Thiare to determine whether their cap hits add the relative value we need versus a less expensive player that allows resources to be used elsewhere. We will have at least 5 Senior Roster spots to work with, though I don’t know if we will use all of them. We will have two DP spots to work with and will likely sign one in the summer to reduce the cap hit from $734,750 to $367,350. We will have up to 2 U-22 spots to work with and may use at least one since they count $150,000 – $200,000 against the cap. Though it may feel like we have a lot of money and room, that will run out very very quickly as we try to fill a lot of holes in the roster.
So, Slisz would be a DP in 2025 with the transfer charge? Why not just buy down Gregersen and have 3 DP slots open for next year…Maybe I’m not understanding the move.
the article just said he is a DP for the rest of 2024, not 2025. They are just shifting money around so the transfer money is added to his 2024 balance so he won’t be a DP in 2025. So by accounting, Miranchuk will be the only DP on books to start 2025
This just flips Gregersen for Slisz in the same spot. We still have 1 DP spot open through the end of 2024 until the Wiley GAM buydown for Slisz’s transfer fee. happens in a few months.
Correct, this is clearing space to sign 2 new DPs. No need to get excited (or angry) until we find out who they are, along with the new coach.