The Union’s three Designated Players all got raises this year

Update: On October 14, the MLS Players Association issued a correction to the April data. The salary of Toronto FC’s Lorenzo Insigne was underreported due to the union not having full information.

Originally, Insigne’s base salary and guaranteed compensation were both listed as $7.5 million. It turns out that while Insigne’s base salary is $7.5 million, his guaranteed compensation $15.4 million. In April the Union did not have posession of a supplemental agreement for Insigne to get additional compensation.

The new information changed the top salary standings, the payroll standings, and the leaguewide statistics. This article has thus been updated to include the correct data.

The MLS Players Association published its latest round of salary data last week, giving us the year’s first view of how much money the Union’s players are earning.

Headline items include new pay figures for the Union’s three Designated Players. Dániel Gazdag’s elevation to DP status with a new contract more than doubled his salary, taking it to $1.35 million. Gazdag signed his new deal over the winter after smashing the Union’s single-season goal record with 24 — and his previous deal paid him just $586,250 last year.

Mikael Uhre got a big raise, too: $273,750 more, to bring him up to $1.94 million for the year. And when the Union bought Julián Carranza from Inter Miami last summer after initially taking him on loan, they signed on to give the Argentine a $50,000 raise to $950,000.

Around MLS, Toronto FC’s Lorenzo Insigne retains the top spot wtih a raise from $14 million to $15.4 million. The Chicago Fire’s Xherdan Shaqiri, a previous holder of the crown, is in second at $8.153 million.

(Whether Shaqiri wants the crown is a different matter. A player who has featured for Switzerland at the last four World Cups and two European Championships, he has just seven goals and seven assists in 38 games for Chicago. This year’s tally is zero goals and one assist in nine games.)

» READ MORE: Mikael Uhre aims for a 20-goal season in his second year with the Union

D.C. United’s Christian Benteke, one of this season’s star newcomers, is earning just over $4.4 million. Teammate Mateusz Klich, a new arrival from Leeds United (where he played with Union alum Brenden Aaronson) is earning just under $2.1 million.

The winter’s biggest reported transfer fee was the $10 million that Portland paid for forward Evander. His salary is $2.23 million.

Two DPs who came to the league with quite a bit of hype are getting relatively moderate salaries for their statuses. Atlanta United is paying Giorgos Giakoumakis around $1.75 million, and the New York Red Bulls are paying Dante Vanzeir around $1.46 million — or at least were until he was suspended six games for using racist language toward an opposing player on April 8.

Expansion team St. Louis SC’s biggest salary is going to a goalkeeper, a rare sight in the league. Roman Bürki is earning just over $1.63 million. Key striker João Klauss, who scored five goals in nine games before suffering a knee injury, is earning $1.37 million.

» READ MORE: The Union have rarely had must-watch players. Jack McGlynn is one right now.

Across the landscape, MLS teams are paying a total of $467,586,809 to 869 players. The total spending is up from the second half of last year, but the number of players is down slightly.

That decrease seem unusual in yet another expansion season, but it isn’t. It just means a lot of players left the league after last season, whether by sales abroad or other means. The same thing happened in the 2021-22 offseason. History shows that the influx of summer signings usually more than makes up for the decrease. An average of one summer addition for each of MLS’s 29 teams would do so this year.

The good news is that the average and median (middle) salary are new records: $538,074.58 and $294,500, respectively. The lowest salary in the league, which is set by the CBA, is $67,360. Forty-one players earn that sum, and the only one from the Union is rookie goalkeeper Holden Trent.

Charlotte FC is paying four players the minimum, the most of any team. Five teams have three minimum-salary players each: Chicago, the Los Angeles Galaxy, Nashville, San Jose, and Kansas City.

Notably, the minimum salary is not the most common exact number in the league for the first time since 2021 — and for a relatively rare time in MLS history. The most common salary now is $85,444, a healthy distance above the minimum.

All of these numbers are as of April 30, just under a week after the end of the league’s first transfer window of the year.

» READ MORE: Joaquín Torres goes from foe to friend in move from Montreal to Union

Each player’s salary figure officially includes two numbers: the base salary and the guaranteed compensation. The latter number includes signing and guaranteed bonuses, plus marketing bonuses and agents’ fees, annualized over the term of a player’s contract, including option years.

For conversational and reporting purposes, the guaranteed compensation figure is the one commonly used around the league.

The annotations in parentheses mean the following:

1 — Designated Player

2 — Salary-cap hit bought down below Designated Player threshold with Targeted Allocation Money

3 — Young Designated Player

4 — Last salary based on contract with previous team

5 — Academy product

6 — Not on the Union’s official roster, but included for contractual reasons

Salary data does not include transfer fees, which are an ever-greater portion of MLS teams’ budgets. Just because a team is ranked down the list here doesn’t mean that team doesn’t spend on transfer fees. But the payroll comparison is still a snapshot of how teams handle the salary part of the equation.

To learn more about teams’ histories with player sales and purchases, check out the data at Transfermarkt.us.

It’s also important to note that players who are loaned out internationally usually still are counted on the MLS Players Association’s books. That has a significant impact on the payroll rankings.

For uniformity’s sake, all players listed in the MLSPA’s records are included in the calculations here, whether they’re big names or not.

Click here to see the team payroll comparison from the previous set of data, released last October.

The number of millionaires leaguewide continues to grow. This spring, there are 112 millionaires on the books.

The table below includes some players on loan at clubs out of the league, but still technically on MLS teams’ books. Even with them, the total would still be well over 100.

As is tradition in this feature, the last section is devoted to players who are on the MLSPA’s books but aren’t currently on any team’s roster.

Dom Dwyer ($85,444) has played for Kansas City, Orlando, Toronto, Atlanta, and briefly the U.S. national team in his well-known decade-plus career. Atlanta waived Dwyer at the start of this year. He was seen at a Kansas City practice a few weeks ago, auditioning to return to his first club.

Chris Gloster ($260,000) was with New York City FC until his contract was bought out in February. He hasn’t found a new team yet.

Dantouma Toure ($100,062) was last with the Colorado Rapids’ reserve team. He was waived last month, and remains without a new team. He is dealing with rehabbing a torn ACL suffered last year. Rapids president Padraíg Smith told the Denver Post that there were personal reasons on Toure’s end that made waiving him “the best pathway forward” for the player.

Kenneth Vermer ($387,334) was with FC Cincinnati last year. He was waived early this year, but his contract was guaranteed for the season.

Here are the latest versions of other charts that are recurring features with this analysis. Many of them show changes in key MLS salary metrics over time.