MLS Roster Profiles: Every Club’s Remaining 2026 GAM, Ranked

On Thursday morning Major League Soccer published something it does a couple of times a year and almost nobody outside a front office reads closely: a roster profile for every one of its 30 clubs, frozen as of September 15, along with the amount of 2026 General Allocation Money each club still has to spend.

The timing is the point. The secondary transfer window closed on September 2. The next hard date is Roster Freeze, on Friday, October 9. Between the two, clubs can still sign out-of-contract free agents and still trade allocation money, so this is a picture of where everyone stands with three weeks of dealing left, not a final accounting. The league says as much in the release: the totals are static as of September 15, and any GAM transactions between now and Roster Freeze will not be reflected in them.

The profiles come as one 33-page document, linked from the release. What follows is the allocation-money table in full, ranked, and then a guide to what the rest of the document tells you.

The spread is wide. Philadelphia, Minnesota, St. Louis and San Jose each have more than $3 million left. Six clubs have less than $500,000: Atlanta, LAFC, the Galaxy, Inter Miami, Nashville and Red Bull New York, which is the only club at zero. Add all 30 together and the league’s clubs are sitting on a little under $48 million of unspent 2026 GAM, a median of about $1.2 million per club.

The numbers are not quite comparable straight across. Every club received $3,280,000 of GAM for 2026. Clubs on the U22 Initiative Player Model received up to $2 million more, in exchange for carrying two Designated Players instead of three. Thirteen clubs are on that model as of September 15 and 17 are on the Designated Player Model, and the U22 clubs, unsurprisingly, have more left on average: about $1.79 million to $1.45 million. GAM no longer expires, either, apart from that extra U22 money, so a balance can include funds carried over from earlier seasons.

So a big balance can mean discipline, or money a club has not found a use for. A small one can mean a club spent well, or that it is boxed in for the winter. The table tells you the number. The profile behind it tells you which.

Each club gets a page. It lists the senior roster, slots one through 20, which are the players who count against the $6,425,000 salary budget; the supplemental roster, slots 21 through 31, whose salaries do not; and off-roster homegrown players, who can only appear in a match through a short-term agreement. For every player you get the roster designation, the year the guaranteed contract runs through, and the option years after that.

Each page also lists the club’s international slots (241 are divided among the 30 clubs this season), its Designated Players, its U22 Initiative Players, its TAM players, and everyone currently unavailable, whether on loan or on the season-ending injury list. A TAM player, in the league’s definition, is anyone whose salary-budget charge sits above the maximum charge of $803,125 and at or below $1,803,125. A caret next to a Designated Player means the club cannot buy him down to a non-DP with allocation money.

A few things stand out on a first pass. Three clubs list four Designated Players, one more than either model allows: Atlanta, the Galaxy and San Diego. In each case one of the four is marked unavailable, which is the answer to the obvious question: the league’s rules give a club roster relief for a player who is loaned out or on the season-ending injury list, so the fourth name is a contract the club still holds, not a slot it is using. Each of the three has three active Designated Players. Hirving Lozano appears on two of those lists, San Diego’s as unavailable and the Galaxy’s as active, which is what a loan looks like in this document. Inter Miami lists five U22 Initiative players, two of them out on loan. Sporting Kansas City and CF Montréal each list a single Designated Player. And the league’s note on unavailable players is worth reading twice: a club may get roster or international-slot relief for a player on loan, but not salary-budget relief unless the loan agreement says so.

One more note from the document. Clubs were allowed to change their roster construction model at midseason, between July 1 and the close of the window on September 2, provided they met the conditions: a club moving from the U22 model to the DP model had to have used $1 million or less of the extra GAM and have no more than three U22 players, and a club moving the other way had to have no more than two Designated Players. The profiles show each club’s model as of September 15. They do not say who switched.

None of this changes what happens on the field this month. It matters for what happens after. Allocation money is the currency of the MLS trade market, and this is the last public look at the balances before the season ends and the winter begins. When a club is described this offseason as having room to move, or as having none, this document is usually what the person saying it is looking at.

The release is here, the profiles are here, and the 2026 roster rules, which define every term above, are here. If you want the rules explained rather than quoted, our CBA Lab lets you build a roster and see which rule you broke.