Everything we know about the MLS Expansion Draft

How many players can you protect?

A whopping 11 players — so for some teams, it'll be their starting eleven, but Real Salt Lake is fortunate enough to have some very good young players worth protecting.

Are homegrown players automatically protected?

Kind of. Homegrown players who don't occupy a senior roster spot (spots 1-20 on the roster, which doesn't really help describe it) will be automatically protected.

What about Carlos Salcedo?

It doesn't appear he'll be automatically protected. The weirdness of MLS includes the fact that Salcedo did not actually join as a homegrown player, and as a result, he's not automatically protected. If we want to keep

Do you have to protect designated players?

Yes. They're not automatically protected. However, in 2011, teams had to protect any designated player with a no-trade clause in their contract, and they counted against your 11.

But you get something if your players are picked, right?

Apparently so. Each player selected (and only two can be) nets you $50,000 in allocation money, which can be used for a variety of purposes in MLS. So it's entirely likely that we'll be earning $100,000 simply by having our players taken from us, which, um, I guess is alright.

What happens after your first player is selected?

You get to move an additional player to the protected list. Lucky us.

Do you think we'll have a player selected at all?

It's popular knowledge that Jason Kreis knows our players well. (And by popular knowledge, rather, I mean, it's pretty obvious.) The only players he may not know too much about? Sebastian Saucedo, Justen Glad, Jordan Allen, Luke Mulholland, and Sebastian Jaime. And three of those are automatically protected (one isn't even on the first team yet.) So, yes.

Anyone else we'll have to protect?

Because we have four international players (green cards are a nice thing to have, aren't they?), we can only leave one international player unprotected. Our four internationals will almost certainly be protected — Sebastian Jaime, Luke Mulholland, Joao Plata, and Carlos Salcedo.