Perhaps the most antiquated aspect of MLS is the Expansion Draft. Once an absolute necessity for new teams, its importance has waned significantly over the years.
To the league’s credit, they’ve also lessened its impact. Once 10 rounds, it now consists of just five rounds, with dozens of academy-produced players automatically off-limits and teams permitted to protect another 12. Instead, expansion teams are given extra General Allocation Money they can use however they see fit.
Still, it persists at least for this year as San Diego FC prepares to select players on Wednesday.
As in most years with an expansion draft, we gave Sounder at Heart readers a chance to pick which 12 players they’d exclude from the draft (we call it the Protectionator). We received more than 1,500 ballot submissions which formed a pretty clear consensus. The official list will be released on Tuesday.
With the caveat that Josh Atencio, Cody Baker, Reed Baker-Whiting, Jacob Castro, Stuart Hawkins, Sota Kitahara, Danny Leyva, Obed Vargas and Dylan Teves are all automatically protected, these are the players you elected to protect: Jackson Ragen, Cristian Roldan, Yeimar Gomez Andrade, Paul Rothrock, Jordan Morris, Georgi Minoungou, Nouhou, Pedro de la Vega, Andrew Thomas, Albert Rusnak, Stefan Frei, Alex Roldan. All of these players were on a majority of ballots, with 11 of them on more than 80% and eight on at least 90%.
This exercise gives us a pretty good idea of who fans want to protect and for the most part there’s a lot of agreement. I’m not so sure the Sounders’ list will look exactly like this, but I do think this vote tells us plenty. Here are some of my thoughts:
There are eight players basically everyone wants to protect
As you’d probably expect, there’s nearly universal agreement on some core players. All of Jackson Ragen (99.1%), Cristian Roldan (98.7), Yeimar (98), Paul Rothrock (96.8), Jordan Morris (96.6), Georgi Minoungou (96), Nouhou (93.9), and Pedro de la Vega (90.2) showed up on a whopping 90+% of ballots.
My projection: All eight of these players will be protected and I assume will be part of this team’s core through at least 2026. I will say I was a little surprised that nearly 10% of voters were willing to expose de la Vega, which I suppose illustrates how disappointing his debut season was. But you simply don’t spend $7 million on a transfer and then risk losing that player for nothing a year later.
Broad consensus but room for disagreement
For the most part, you also wanted to protect Andrew Thomas (87.3%), Albert Rusnak (82), Stefan Frei (81.8) and Alex Roldan (58.8). Although there’s obviously some disagreement there, you also seemed to come to a reasonably broad consensus on the final four players you’d like to protect. With the exception of Thomas, who seems to be the heir apparent at goalkeeper, these were all reliable starters and will most likely fill similar roles in 2025 if not beyond.
My projection: I think this is going to be a little harder decision for the Sounders. I think Thomas and Roldan are almost guaranteed to be protected, but I’m less sure about Frei and Rusnák. For Frei, I think it depends on some game-theory, specifically if the Sounders think San Diego would take a 38-year-old goalkeeper or try to trade him. This was a similar topic of discussion during the previous Expansion Draft, and the Sounders ended up protecting Frei. Despite Rusnák’s team MVP performance, I will be a little more surprised if he’s protected. Rusnák is a free agent and while there’s some benefit to be had if San Diego were to pick him, it’s pretty limited. If I’m the Sounders, I’d leave Rusnák exposed and trust that we are on the same page about our intention to re-sign him on the open market.
Others to consider
The only other players to show up on even 9% of ballots were Jon Bell (34.3), João Paulo (18.9), Braudilio Rodrigues (15.4) and Léo Chú (9.1). Most of you seem to be at peace with potentially losing these players or think there’s going to be limited interest in selecting them.
My projection: I’m not going to say you’re definitely wrong, but I think one or two of these players are likely to be protected. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think the player most likely to be protected is Chú, but not because I think the Sounders want to keep him. There’s supposedly a fair amount of interest in Chú in Brazil and letting San Diego take him is perhaps the equivalent of writing them a $1 million check. Given our reporting on the Sounders’ transfer budget, this would be an absolutely maddening thing for them to do. If they protect one more player from this group, I think it’s probably Bell, who is at worst a reliable backup going into 2025. Conversely, if I’m San Diego, Bell is the exact type of player I’d be interested in taking – he’s reasonably young, cheap, positionally flexible and reliable.
