A No. 1 goalkeeper has finally arrived for Minnesota United in the form of John Alvbage, whose season-long loan move was officially announced by the club Sunday.
The 34-year-old won Goalkeeper of the Year in Sweden’s top league in 2015 and his arrival underlines the style of roster building you can expect to see from the Loons in their first season, if not indefinitely.
Alvbage’s acquisition comes via a common world soccer mechanism where a player is loaned out by their owning club to a participating club, which then pays the player’s salary during the terms of the deal.
Contextually, this is a player acquisition strategy most commonly used by teams on the lower end of the financial totem pole. Those with bigger purse strings will usually just buy players outright in the form of transfer fees or be willing to pay prized free agents fat salaries. In Major League Soccer, these highly paid players are known as Designated Players and their contracts don’t count against the team’s salary cap. Minnesota United will be placed in the former, less-lavish category, and a prominent member of its front office said as much last week.
The club’s director of player personal, Amos Magee, told MLSsoccer.com that the Loons will not sign a Designated Player prior to the beginning of their inaugural MLS season. This confirms suspicions that Minnesota will, at least to start, enter the top division as a low-budget, or “small-market” team. The latter has a negative connotation about a club’s overall ambition, but when you hear Magee’s logic it appears instead to simply be a more patient and methodical approach to building the franchise.
“I think we as a technical staff got together and said, ‘OK, do we go out and spend $2 million on a Designated Player, $3 million, when we may have in [Abu] Danladi, or we may have in Miguel [Ibarra], or Christian [Ramirez] or somebody else, we may have a player that can be very, very good in that role already?’” Magee told MLSsoccer.com. “And so you’ve then taken a relatively young player, a talented player, a player we believe in and sort of relegated them in that role behind a Designated Player, as opposed to saying let’s get a really good core – and TAM players are big piece of that – and then let’s see where the right Designated Player is now going to elevate our core.”
It’s worth mentioning that I predicted this financial conservatism months ago on the Minnesota Soccer Podcast.
Loan-signee Alvbage and blockbuster trade addition Kevin Molino show the alternative routes the United front office have chosen to bolster the roster in the meantime. Both proven players will seemingly be especially valuable with the lack of Designated Players on the roster. Minnesota is likely the only team in the league who will begin the season without any DPs.
“We signed several TAM players already that a couple years ago that would be DPs,” sporting director Manny Lagos told MLSsoccer.com. “So to us, that’s kind of a sign of how we’re going to build the base of the roster and how we’re going to build the core. And then again, from that, with the timeline of making sure the team gets off and gets competitive, we’re going to see where our needs are going to be, both short- and long-term.”
