What Are Waviers?

Looking at a uniquely American phenomenon

What Are Waviers?

If you start playing an MLS save in Football Manager, you’re going to run into a really strange thing early on.

It’s called “waivers.”

I’ll try to make this explanation as simple as I can.

In the MLS, you’ve got 30 roster slots. A bunch of those slots are designated for certain types of players. This Football Manager screenshot does a somewhat decent job of explaining the registration parameters:

Now, the tricky part here is that you’ve basically got to keep your players registered. When you have senior players who are unregistered, they automatically go through the waiver process — meaning that another team could pick them up for a really low amount of money.

This can be a problem from time to time. I wound up promoting a goalkeeper from my B squad partway through the season due to injuries. I wanted to push him back down after I was done with him to free up that roster spot, but, instead, he wound up going through waivers and getting picked up by another team.

So what in the world are these waivers in the first place?

Well, waivers are a direct result of the monopolistic structure of American (and Canadian) sports. They are the direct result of the fact that player contracts in these sports tend to be with the league and not the team.

If a team decides that it no longer has use for a specific player, the player will automatically go through the “waiver wire,” which gives every other team in the league a chance to purchase the player’s services for a negligible amount of money.

This isn’t a Football Manager trick, by the way. It’s a real thing in the MLS. And, according to the MLS roster and registration rules, there is not a specific “waiver period” like there is in other North American sports:

There is also a pecking order among teams trying to pluck up waived players:

This waiver order is set up this way to theoretically give an advantage to teams that have underperformed.

Waivers are also one of only two ways that a club can remove players from its roster:

The other way is through a transfer — usually a trade in the MLS. But we’ll get to that later.

This is the reason why unregistering a player in Football Manager will cause that player to automatically go through the waiver process. The only way a team can suddenly decide not to use a player is to put him through waivers. The team can’t just buy out the player’s contract the way teams can in the rest of the world.

Why is this important to understand?

This is important to understand because you can actually get great deals on waived players in Football Manager.

In all versions of Football Manager that allow you to manage in the MLS, the computer manager struggles mightily with roster management.

In fact, the best strategy to put together a good roster with limited funds is to get rid of expensive players that are no good, keep roster spots free, and just wait for good players to come through the waiver process.

In particular, you want to make sure that you’re in a position to catch as many undervalued waived players as you can around when registrations are due. Always make sure you have an open roster spot, if not a couple of them, and make sure to focus your scouting on domestic players.

Now, in real life, the waiver system is frustrating to follow. It’s common for practically no players to be selected in the formal waiver draft, and the kinds of players that tend to be waived are usually marginal.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if a strategy of sitting back and waiting for gold nuggets to appear in waivers might also be feasible for real life MLS roster management.