On the trade...
"We have four core values and the first one is the team is always first. We have never built the team around one player. Don’t get me wrong, Dom [Dwyer] has had an amazing amount of contributions to this club and to the team in a lot of different games over his time here. At the same time, the team has never been built around one player and I think our objective has never been a team that has been really good one year and really poor the next year. We try to stay competitive year after year and we have proven that in as many consecutive years that we have been in the playoffs and the number of trophies that we have won. That’s our objective and that has not changed in doing this deal.
"The other thing I would say to you guys is regarding the timeline and that back in March - 20 months from the end of his deal - we had already made an offer [to extend his contract]. I know that had come out a little bit, but 20 months prior to his deal ending we made an offer to extend his deal. They rejected our first proposal, they countered and we rejected that. We had a little back and forth, a little bit of a standstill and they we are up to the [Gold Cup]. When the story was released that supposedly we weren’t getting anywhere, we were still 17 or 18 months out, that spurred on an influx of calls. That's not to say that we hadn’t gotten them before, but it really spurred on a larger group of teams to be very interested. Our first brush there was one or two that had no appetite for any compensation that was even worth chatting about further. Then, there were a few that came heavy and hard. Up until the last few days, there were a few teams still banging on our door wanting to get in. So the deal got driven by the competitive nature of the other teams in the league."
On how the team replaces Dom Dwyer...
"Dom has been a tremendous player for us on the field and has been an incredible ambassador off it. This was not an easy decision for us. It was a very difficult decision, but when you have success as an organization one of the problems you have is when you are in a salary cap sports industry, you are limited in the ability to keep your team together. Money plays a big part of the overall decision and the ability to keep the players based on the guidelines and the mechanisms that go with the salary cap. How do we replace Dom? I don’t know if you do. You go find another player that has other strengths that you make work. That’s not going to be easy to replace, but at the same time these are incredible resources to be able to manage the salary cap over the next few years depending on how smart we are with the money."
On balancing short and long-term goals for the club...
"The fact that I am both the Technical Director and Manager, I have to look at the short and long term aspects of the organization. When you are in a salary cap industry like we are in our sport, people are going to want players on your team and sometimes you can’t keep everyone based on financial constraints that are imposed upon you. In this situation, it was going to present itself to be very difficult. I don’t know when anyone would say this is the right time. If we did this at the end of the season, they say, why are you doing it now? I don’t know when you make a move if it is ever the right time for everyone, but this made sense at this point to do what we did and, for us, we’ve maintained competitiveness within this league for a long period of time and that continues to be our objective."
On how this money will be used to bring in additional players...
"From a tampering perspective, it’s hard for me to talk about specific players. I would say that player and many others are all in play. The question is going to be is whether we are able to get a player done in the short term or does it wind up being in the next window. I want to make it clear, it’s not all of a sudden that we are reacting in this situation. Our roster is fluid, it’s never complete and so we constantly have a set of targets in this position. It’s something we have already been looking at for quite a long time and we will make the appropriate acquisitions at the appropriate time that best serves the club."
On the finances involved with the deal...
"The deal truly is for $1.6 million. That’s a little over 2.5 times bigger than the next closest deal in MLS history. $900,000 of that is guaranteed and the other $700,000 is incentives. Those incentives, I feel 100% convinced they will all be achieved and possibly a few of them might be achieved this weekend. You can imagine the resources for us, and we are looking at this as resources that we can start working with for probably over the next two-to-three years.
"I would say it to you this way, if we got all the $1.6 million today, we would be pretty inefficient in the way we were putting our roster together if we used it all up now. Instead, we are allocating that over a certain number of years to a certain number of deals to get the best usage of that money."
On the advantage of selling a player within MLS compared to overseas...
"If you have player A and you sell him for $3 million outside of the league, the league would get $1 million off the back and the other two-thirds comes back to the team so we would get $2 million. Out of that $2 million, you can only take a maximum of $650,000 of GAM and apply it to our cap. If the cap was $4 million, you are now at $4.65 million. With the way that we did this deal in the combination between GAM and TAM, all of those resources can be used to our cap. This deal almost tripled the maximum of amount of allocation money you can take per sale which provides us with quite a bit of resources.
