Steven Goff reported today that DC United has purchased Canadian international Dejan Jakovic from Serbian side Red Star Belgrade. As MLS player movement is most often limited to intra-league transactions and the signing of out-of-contract players (free transfers), the purchase of Jakovic is the exception, rather than the rule, for clubs in the American top-flight. I took a quick look at some numbers to see h

This off-season has been filled with moves typical of MLS; player-for-player trades, player-for-allocation-money trades (which I guess is a type of purchase, but I've left it out of the discussion), and the incoming crop of college draftees makes up the vast majority of team acquisitions.

By my count, eleven out of fifty-eight players (nineteen percent) acquired by MLS clubs during the current period came to their new teams through purchases (source*). In all of these cases, the transfer fee was undisclosed, which can make it difficult to determine if the moves even were purchases (but for the sake of argument, I'm sticking to my numbers).

For a comparison, let's look at the English Championship, a league to which MLS is often compared in terms of quality: in the summer transfer period of 2008 (the off-season period, which is most comparable to the pre-season period for MLS), a total of fifty-seven acquired players were purchased by their new clubs (any counting error is mine). Without a percentage**, it's hard to tell how the this compares directly with MLS, as the pure number of transactions in the English league dwarfs the number in the American one. Even if we allow that moves between two teams in the Championship are equivalent to player-for-allocation moves in MLS, the difference in how business is conducted is staggering.

With the salary cap, modest revenues, and the current roster restrictions, buying players is just not a major part of doing business for MLS clubs.

While MLS fans would certainly like to see their clubs become players in the transfer market from the buying end as well as the selling one, the situation is unlikely to change any time soon. Until revenues reach the point when player higher-priced purchases make sense for American teams, those teams will continue to obtain players from outside the league in the cheapest ways possible. Clubs that do purchase players will do so with the utmost caution, making sure their investment, no matter how small, is justified.

Until the day that MLS teams are in the business of buying on a larger scale, they'll need to be as diligent as possible to find players through alternative means. Buying talent is the quickest way to improve quality, and MLS teams simply don't have the resources to follow that path. So MLS fans will have to be patient, waiting as the league and its teams build up the level of play through the current practices.

*I removed Felix Garcia from the count in light of his return to high school.

**Feel free to count every incoming move for the Championship; I just didn't feel it was important enough to deserve the effort.

(Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty Images North America)