What Are MLS Discovery Rights (And How Do They Work)?
American sports fans are well accustomed to a range of different administrative functions that may cause confusion to football supporters across Europe and other parts of the world.
Professional sport in the United States of America and Canada is structured in a unique way, and while soccer in North America has only recently started developing and gaining a level of popularity that's comparable to more established sports like baseball, basketball and the NFL, most of the core pillars that underpin these US sports are still present in Stateside soccer.
In this article, we'll be explaining one of the major structural differences between American soccer and football in other countries, as we dive into the history of discovery rights in Major League Soccer and offer a brief guide to the role of the MLS discovery rights list.
To flesh out this analysis, we'll also explain the broader structure of the league and spend some time discussing the rapid growth that has taken place across the US soccer landscape in recent years.
How Major League Soccer Works
Major League Soccer is a unique entity in world football. While the vast majority of domestic soccer leagues around the world function using a system of promotion and relegation — where a pre-determined number of top-placed teams are promoted to the tier above at the end of a campaign, while low-performing sides head in the opposite direction via a relegation zone — the MLS uses a different approach.
Here, new teams enter the league by applying to create a new franchise to represent a particular geographical area (and paying a one-off franchise fee). This creates stability in terms of league structure but it also removes a key competitive element and reduces the potential for smaller sides to gradually win their way to the promised land.
Several waves of recent expansion mean that in total, Major League Soccer now consists of 30 franchises, ranging from well-established MLS outfits like LA Galaxy and DC United, to more recent creations like Inter Miami and San Diego FC.
The 30 teams competing in the MLS today are divided between two regional divisions, the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference.
Teams are grouped into one or the other depending on what side of the vast North American continent they're located in, but the prestigious MLS Supporters' Shield is up for grabs for teams from both conferences, with the club that accumulates the most points in the season across the two conferences winning this award.
Also on offer each year is the MLS Cup, the trophy handed to the team that wins the end-of-season MLS Playoffs mini-tournament contested by the top nine teams in each conference.
The purpose of these playoffs is essentially to create an end-of-season push for a high league finish that has an urgency comparable to the race for Champions League qualification in European leagues, or the Copa Libertadores for South American sides.
What Are Discovery Rights In MLS?
Major League Soccer's more quirky and unusual features — like the postseason MLS Cup play-offs — don't just relate to league organisation. Player recruitment is also a key area in which North American soccer differs from other leagues around the world.
MLS clubs operate under a series of strict guidelines designed to encourage competition and equity in the league system, which starts with the MLS Roster.
Each club is allowed a roster of up to 30 players for the regular season and postseason, with 18-20 of these being senior players. Each club is limited by a salary budget of $5,950,000 to spend on this senior roster, while slots 21-31 in the squad are reserved for homegrown players.
This section of the squad is called the Supplemental Roster and salaries of players in this group don't count toward a club's Salary Budget.
Included within the senior roster, each MLS club is allowed to have up to three designated players (aka players who aren't considered under the team's salary cap either through wages or the transfer fee).
The designated player rule was introduced to allow highly paid, high-profile players like David Beckham to join Major League Soccer franchises outside the restrictions of the salary budget.
Discovery rights are a separate lever used to bring high-profile global talent to the MLS. Ever since the MLS was founded in 1996, discovery lists have played a key role in recruitment. Essentially, a Discovery List allows an MLS club to obtain the rights to sign any player around the world should he wish to move to the league.
Each franchise can place up to seven players on their list, which is ratified by league officials to make sure that no two clubs have the same individual on their list (if this does happen, priority goes to the club that placed the player on their list earliest).
Discovery list players cannot be under contract with Major League Soccer, and they can't have played in the league previously or come through the draft system.
Players can be added or removed from a team's list at any point, and all sorts of players are included within discovery lists, from younger, less established gems with high potential, to huge, globally recognised stars like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
What Are The Benefits Of MLS Discovery Rights?
Major League Soccer has a number of rules and regulations designed to encourage parity and fairness between different clubs in the league, with the intention of avoiding the development of a small group of super-rich elite clubs at the top of the league.
Discovery Rights are long-standing mechanism to keep MLS teams from bidding against each other for players and driving the price up. Miami has money/roster flexibility to sign KDB in 2025, much in the same way that the LA Galaxy signed Zlatan w/o having a Designated Player spot. https://t.co/Yzk7MJw09D
— Alexi Lalas (@AlexiLalas) April 8, 2025
There's the MLS Superdraft, a mechanism which sees the best college graduates and homegrown players enter a pool each year, with the weakest teams in the Eastern and Western Conference getting the first pick to sign new MLS players from this pool, and the highest-performing outfits selecting their new graduates once the most in-demand talents have already been picked.
Discovery rights should be viewed similarly. One of the key purposes of the discovery rights feature is to encourage ambitious and intelligent recruitment practices from all MLS teams, regardless of their budget.
In theory, every franchise has an equal opportunity to lay their claim to top players all over the world, regardless of where they finished in the Conference or how big their salary budget is. The existence of the discovery list also helps to bring fresh new talent to Major League Soccer, benefiting the broader league and the franchises within it. But that's not to say there's never any conflict between different bidders.
Can Discovery Rights Pass Between Different Clubs?
It's possible for discovery rights to be sold from one club to another using GAM (General Allocation Money), a tradable resource that is used by MLS teams to manage salary budgets and sign new players.
If a club wants to bring someone to play in MLS but another franchise has their rights, the buyer club can offer the potential seller $50,000 in GAM for the right to sign a player. In this situation, the seller club has to either accept that money and pass the player's rights on or make the player a genuine offer of their own.
A recent example of this happening was with LA Galaxy's signing of legendary BVB forward Marco Reus, who had previously been listed by Charlotte FC. It ended up costing the club $400,000 dollars to complete the transfer (the highest sum ever paid for discovery rights).
High-Profile Examples Of Discovery List Players
David Beckham has a claim to being the most high-profile signing in Major League Soccer history; for many people outside the States, his transfer to LA Galaxy in 2007 marked their first interaction with professional soccer in North America, and much of the growth of US soccer infrastructure since then can certainly be traced back to Becks.
But one player who has surpassed him in terms of impact is Lionel Messi, the Argentinian World Cup winner whose 2023 signing for Inter Miami has led to a surge in attendances and increased interest in soccer across the country.
As soon as rumours of a move to the MLS started to arise, Inter Miami quickly became a frontrunner to sign Messi, ultimately placing him on their discovery list ahead of the signing in July 2023.
This gave them exclusive rights to negotiate with the eight-time Ballon d'Or winner, and in the same summer, the club successfully acquired other international stars such as Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets after placing them on their discovery list.
Previously, several other top players have joined Major League Soccer after being named a discovery player by a franchise within the system. But as previously mentioned, when a player joins the league, they don't have to sign for the team that originally listed them.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic was first placed on the discovery list of Philadelphia Union, but the Swede ended up signing for LA Galaxy after the league decided that Union didn't have the funds to meet his market value.
When Didier Drogba moved to the States, he was originally on Chicago Fire's MLS discovery rights list, but after Canadian outfit Montreal Impact (situated in a French-speaking area that appealed to the Ivorian) moved in, they were able to take Drogba instead after paying for his rights.
More recently, Kevin De Bruyne was placed on Inter Miami's list, but he eventually opted to move to Serie A side Napoli instead.
The discovery rights system can also be used to bring in extra revenue for MLS sides. For example, as player/manager of D.C. United, Wayne Rooney reportedly placed his ex-teammate Jesse Lingard on the club's discovery list, meaning that if the former England international ever ended up joining Major League Soccer, D.C. would profit financially from the move even if they weren't the club that ended up signing him.
Speaking to the Mail, Rooney described this system as "crazy". But for many MLS fans, it's a key part of the league's appeal. To find out more about the differences between US domestic soccer and other worldwide competitions, check out our guide to the postseason MLS Cup Playoffs.
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