WVHooligan - Soccer Blog

Just as promised, once I got more information, I would pass it along to you. This morning was more like a flood of information from sources, reports, and other blogs. What we do know is Captain America has retired.

But what it appears to be now is he was some what forced into retirement by his own club, the New York Red Bulls. According to Ives Galarcep, the Red Bulls came to Reyna with the idea first in what sounds like a buy-out of his contract.

According to team sources, the Red Bulls first approached Claudio Reyna about the possibility of retiring last month. It remains unclear when Reyna finally made the decision to retire, but the announcement had been delayed while Major League Soccer sorted out how exactly to handle the retirement (yes, you can rest assured that some new DP rules were recently added to the MLS rule book the public has never seen.)

The Washington Post’s Steve Goff reported late last night that league officials told him the Red Bulls will be allowed to use the roster spot and designated player slot, but not the salary cap space. It sounds weird but Galarcep explains it a little more.

Having the DP slot available is more important than the cap space (Either $175,000 or $200,000) because the Red Bulls can the remaining portion of the Jozy Altidore allocation (the original allocation was approximately $500,000, but some has been used on Jorge Rojas and possibly Gabriel Cichero) toward the salary cap. Now, if the Red Bulls actually want to use the DP slot this year they can certainly fit it into the cap. The question is whether they want to. A team source told me on Tuesday that the team didn’t plan to.

To me it sounds like New York is just going to wait it out for the rest of the year and use that DP slot next year in a big way before they open their new stadium, Red Bull Park. We’ve heard talks about them signing a big star for the opening of their new stadium and this seems like that plan is in full motion.

But back to Reyna, his retirement means it is one less player for New York to cut as they continue to bring on a slew of new players (I think I last counted they are up to five or six).

Reyna will still be paid in full for the remaining portion of his contract, which explains why New York isn’t going after a big time player to fill the DP spot. If you read the fine print it pretty much screams that the Red Bulls bought out his deal, had they not and Reyna just up and retired he would have forfeited the pro rated portion of his salary. Thus “retirement” seemed fitting I suppose, millions of Americans know what it is like to “retire” when a company guys out a contract like this.

We should still get more information on what will and won’t happen to the roster spot and more importantly the open DP spot.

A press conference about Reyna’s retirement is scheduled for later today.