Waibel: RSL in hot pursuit of one or two players

Real Salt Lake is still in "hot pursuit" of one or two out-of-contract players, club technical director Craig Waibel told ESPN 700's Bill and OC Show on Tuesday.

Listen: Waibel's interview on ESPN 700

While there's no indication of who could be targeted by Real Salt Lake, it's the first truly positive sign in RSL's transfer dealings since deals were said to have fallen through last week.

On signing a player

The roster is not set, I'll tell you that. We talked about it — transfer windows are tricky, they can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. The transfer window that was spoken about last week was for players under contract. Any player out of contract right now is available to sign across the league, so we're still working diligently on getting one or two players here that are out of contract, and obviously those don't involve transfers or loans.

On who's available to sign

There are quite a few players in the summer months that do run out of contract. MLS works on an interesting, interesting calendar compared to the rest of the world. Where are our contracts are kind of Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, the rest of the world works on July-to-July. There are quite a few interesting players out there still.

On why there's been a delay

It's a number of things, but finances are always the number one thing that elongate any negotiation, because there's always two parties that have to agree on all the details involved. That's played a role, and just the structure of some of the situations — the timing of some of the situations, some of the players under their current contracts up until last week, there were still discussions with clubs.

So it wasn't only the players that I was in discussions with; you have to work out with the clubs. Everybody has a different price. A lot of the time, it boils back to the dollars and cents of the deal, but there are a lot of steps that take place in those conversations. In the end, it's really pretty simple — it's usually money.

On long-term implications of making a move

Once it gets to a point that later in this season, that if we're not agreed on the right player to bring in for now and for the future, we won't make a move, we'll wait for January to make the right move. I think we're still in a good place with a very educated move now, and we're still in hot pursuit of a player, and I think the guy we're dealing with can make us better for quite a while.