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Jeff Carlisle
Reigning MLS Cup champion the LA Galaxy has exhausted its supply of 2025 General Allocation Money (GAM), MLS announced on Friday.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the team doesn’t have room to maneuver when it comes to its salary budget, but it does highlight the difficulties the Galaxy has had in becoming salary budget compliant.
MLS’s announcement included numbers for every team as of Feb. 28, and follows an initial release of data in December.
GAM is essentially additional salary budget space that each team is given by the league each year — $2.93 million to be exact — to help them sign or retain players.
However, the Galaxy’s lack of GAM still leaves the team with some room to maneuver when it comes to its salary budget.
In addition to the league outlay, there are myriad ways a team can acquire more GAM, including trades. The newly established internal transfer market that uses cash to acquire players can see teams convert up to $3 million of the funds received into GAM.
MLS’s announcement provides an incomplete picture of a team’s salary budget information, with GAM by no means the only bucket that teams can dip into when managing their roster.
As well as GAM, the salary budget for MLS teams in 2025 is $5.95 million. There is also Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) that teams can use to sign players who earn around the Designated Player threshold of $743,750. The amount of TAM each team received for 2025 is $2.225 million.
For that reason, the amount of GAM a team has doesn’t paint a complete picture of a team’s ability to make changes to its roster. But it does provide a glimpse of how active teams have been in the transfer market, and what limitations in part they might be working under.
In the Galaxy’s case, it had $2.4 million in GAM as of Dec. 10, but that number shrank to zero by Feb. 28, as GM Will Kuntz has been forced to jettison several players from its MLS Cup-winning side. That list includes MLS Cup MVP Gastón Brugman, midfielder Mark Delgado and forward Dejan Joveljic, who scored in the final.
In terms of incoming players, Lucas Sanabria was brought in for a reported $5 million transfer fee, but because he is a U-22 player, his salary budget hit is only $200,000.
Atlanta United spent the most GAM since Dec. 10, shelling out $5.4 million in GAM. Atlanta president Garth Lagerwey said through a team spokesperson that given the arrival of new DPs Miguel Almirón and Emmanuel Latte Lath — the latter for a record $22 million transfer fee — the GAM was spent buying down the salaries of players like Stian Gregersen, Saba Lobjanidze and Bartosz Slisz so they wouldn’t count as Designated Players.
The Five Stripes now has $1.1 million in GAM left, which ranks 14th in the league.
Only two teams, the Houston Dynamo and New York City FC, saw their amounts of GAM increase since Dec. 10.