What we learned from the Carlos Salcedo saga

This may be the final article in the Carlos Salcedo saga that's been ongoing since he first declared his desire to leave the club in November. Quite frankly, I'm happy about it. It's been a distraction from more interesting discussions about the nature of roster-building, the goals of MLS, and the sorts of players that could be coming to Real Salt Lake.

Instead, we were stuck wondering when a player who wanted to leave would actually leave, and whether the club that was more than happy to transfer him would get a chance to actually do that without the player getting in the way. It was a long, arduous mess.

But let's not sit here and gripe too much: There's still plenty we can learn from the Salcedo saga.

Nobody really wanted this to go arbitration

As evidenced by the brinksmanship yesterday from Salcedo's camp and the quickness of the deal that happened afterward, it would seem there was a desire from both Chivas and Major League Soccer to conclude the deal without Salcedo making an appeal to FIFA regarding the state of his contract.

Don't believe it until it's official

The number of times a tweet or report from Mexico surfaced that claimed Salcedo was a done dea? Innumerable, almost. There was a lot of back and forth regarding details, although most agreed that the player was gone to Chivas. Of course, given the result, there was probably nothing too wrong with believing the initial reports, but, uh, well, you get it, right?

There are lots of questions about MLS contracts

The biggest problem is that we simply don't have answers to many of the questions we asked. Like basically every league in the world, transparency behind future contracts is low. That makes it hard for us to evaluate contracts for validity (even though it is, quite frankly, not our job) and harder still to know whether unilateral options are likely to be upheld in regard to MLS and FIFA statutes.

We learned plenty about FIFA regulations, though, and that was certainly something I didn't know too much about a month ago. The more you know and all that, right?

Real Salt Lake need to sign some players

And this is, of course, exceedingly obvious and something we'll have more coverage of later. But Real Salt Lake have, what, 20 players rostered? With incoming moves on the cards, the squad is going to look a bit different in a few weeks when preseason starts — we've got the draft and other moves on the cards.

Craig Waibel got a baptism by fire

Garth Lagerwey left (and was subsequently announced yesterday at Seattle) and Craig Waibel moved into the technical director role, and with it came this whole Salcedo situation. While we don't know exactly how he dealt with it, his public statements have been as respectable as you'd hope.