The next part of getting to grips with San Diego has been trying to understand exactly what sort of room I have to rebuild the squad, because MLS finances are rather different from simply looking at the wage budget and deciding how much money is left. On the normal club finances screen everything looks extremely comfortable: there is around $63m in the bank, no debt, an annual wage budget of roughly $29.87m and only about $16.47m currently committed. That leaves more than $13m a year in ordinary wage-budget space, before several of the club’s biggest contracts disappear at the end of December.

The MLS salary cap is the part that actually restricts what I can do. San Diego’s current cap impact is $6.137m against a league limit of roughly $7.06m, leaving somewhere around $900k of immediate room. The important thing is that this figure bears very little resemblance to the actual salaries being paid. Hirving Lozano earns $2.07m a year, for example, but because he is a Designated Player his current cap impact is only $440k. Philipp Müller earns just over $1m but counts for $537k, while several minimum-salary and reserve players effectively cost nothing against the cap at all.

That means there are really two budgets running alongside one another. The first is the club’s actual wage bill, which San Diego can comfortably afford. The second is the MLS salary budget, where every contract has to fit through a combination of Senior slots, Designated Player places, U22 Initiative contracts, minimum salaries and allocation money. Having $13m available in the wage budget does not mean I can simply go out and add $13m worth of players. The challenge is finding ways of fitting the players I want inside that $7.06m cap.

Fortunately, quite a lot of space is about to open naturally. The aforementioned Anders Dreyer, Hirving Lozano, Mohamed Farsi, Artem Smolyakov, Daniel and Shane van Aarle are all leaving when their contracts expire. Their current combined cap impact is approximately $1.657m, as well as more than $6.3m in actual annual wages. If everything else remained exactly the same, removing those six contracts would take the current cap figure down from $6.137m to roughly $4.48m.

It will not be quite that simple. The cap is recalculated between seasons, Designated Player charges can change, allocation money may be applied differently and there are currently things such as released-player charges and injured or unregistered players sitting in different parts of the calculation. I therefore do not want to treat $4.48m as the exact opening number for 2031. What it does tell me is that the club should have meaningful flexibility once the offseason processing is finished.

The roster mechanisms are arguably even more valuable than the raw cap space. Dreyer and Lozano are both Designated Players, meaning their departures leave two of the club’s three DP slots vacant. Carlos Rotondi will be the only remaining DP. Smolyakov is currently the club’s only U22 Initiative player and is also leaving, so at present it looks as though all three U22 slots could be available going into the new season.

That gives me five potentially important roster decisions before I even start worrying about ordinary Senior contracts:

two players who can be brought in as DPs and three who can potentially arrive through the U22 mechanism at heavily reduced cap charges. Used properly, those are the places where I should be adding the players who genuinely raise the ceiling of the squad rather than simply filling holes.

It also explains why I am being cautious with the trade offers currently arriving from all over MLS. General Allocation Money is potentially extremely useful because it can be used to reduce the cap impact of Senior contracts, whereas a pile of SuperDraft picks does very little to solve an immediate roster problem. If I do move players within MLS, I am going to be looking very closely at what the deal does to the cap rather than simply whether the headline value looks attractive.

So the financial picture is actually a very healthy one. San Diego have plenty of real money, a substantial transfer budget, several expensive contracts about to disappear and a number of premium MLS roster mechanisms opening at exactly the same time. The difficulty is not going to be finding enough money to spend.

It is going to be making sure I understand the rules well enough not to waste it.