Notes from a press conference on a day when Austin FC welcomed $175,000 in GAM to the club

Before we get to Thursday's press conference, ahead of Austin FC hosting Houston Dynamo FC on Saturday to re-restart this hiccupy part of the season, let's get into one of the nerdier and funnier things that the club has done in its history — and, yes, I'd like to think that sporting director Rodolfo Borrell did this just to prove that he's mastered MLS roster rules.

On Wednesday, a simple press release came out: Austin FC bought a 2025 international roster spot from the Philadelphia Union for $50,000 in 2025 GAM. Without getting too much into it, GAM (General Allocation Money) is MLS-specific currency that teams can use in different creative ways to meet the league's salary cap requirements. (This Moontower Soccer episode hits it pretty comprehensively starting at the seven-minute mark.)

Typically, a team doesn't buy an international roster spot — especially in the middle of a transfer window like we're in right now — without planning to use it on a player. With Brandon Vázquez going to the season-ending injury list, his senior roster spot opens up for the remainder of the season, but he can only be replaced by a domestic player (an American player or a player who has a green card) right now, because Austin FC used its last international spot – one over the allotment of eight each team gets at the start of the season — on Mateja Đorđević.

Widespread speculation about that purchased extra international slot led to Austin fans and media looking for the Anthony Precourt green smoke tweet that precedes most signing announcements. But then, just two hours after Thursday's press conference concludes, we get this:

Austin FC announced today that the Club agreed to a trade with New England Revolution. Austin received $100,000 in 2025 General Allocation Money (GAM) and $125,000 in 2026 GAM in exchange for a 2025 international roster slot.

That's right: In about 24 hours, Verde paid $50,000 in GAM for an asset Philly had and then sold it to one of Philly's mild rivals for a profit of $175,000 in GAM. With the Revs in 11th in the East, and 10 points below the playoff line with 10 matches to go, they're going to need an epic final push just to make the playoffs ... where they'd be likely to meet Philly in the first round.

I've got a call out to The Blazing Musket about any players on their radar who would be worth paying three to four times the "normal" amount of GAM to secure a needed international spot. Is Neymar suddenly available? Does Antoine Griezmann want to play where Tom Brady (and Maxi Urruti) played and watch the Celtics in his downtime?

And would a player of even that caliber be able to drag a Revs team, led by a coach who has become so unpopular among supporters that they wrote an open letter requesting his dismissal, over the line?

In short, Verde's the beneficiary of a very unusual move, even if it didn't meet our expectations of a new player. But at least we do have one new player to talk about who's apparently getting closer to getting into a match.

Beloko watch

According to Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez, Swiss/Cameroonian midfielder Nicky Beloko finally got some game action in Sunday's successful closed-door scrimmage against Charleston Battery.

Estévez commented that Beloko hadn't played since May, and still needs more time to adapt. But Diego Rubio, also part of Thursday's conversation, likes what he's seen so far.

"He's a very strong guy, very strong, very physical," Rubio observed. "He's very fast in small spaces ... yeah, we like him. I know it's not easy to come in the middle of the season. It's difficult to come in the start of the season and get adapted to a new league, different schedules, sometimes you play eight games in one month, and then you play two games in two months ... It's not easy. You have long flights. You play away three, four times in a month. So I will say that he needs to adapt. He needs to adapt. He has this time to do it."

He also observed, "He came from Switzerland, where the weather is not like this," understating that there's "a couple degrees difference," before reiterating, "He needs to adapt. I see him; he's doing very good."

As for Đorđević, Estévez indicated visa issues are still being worked on, making it increasingly look like getting him was a "stash for 2026" move rather than a "will play some minutes in 2025" move.

Just hoping for another good month

Estévez didn't put much stake in the significance of the next two matches being Copa Tejas contests, even invoking the "one game at a time" cliche, but he provided some month-by-month perspective on where he sees the season.

"We went to May ... we had a lot of games, and we weren't as successful as we wanted on results. But June was a very positive month. July was a very positive month. And now we have August, and we have to try to make another positive month to put us in a good position to to start September on the right foot."

Indeed, Verde went winless in league play in May, but went 4-1-1 in a combined match-light June and July to get to 7th in the West with one and two games in hand on the Rocky Mountain rivals just below them. Finishing in 7th, as the table currently stands, would mean a best-of-three playoff series with a Thomas Müller-enhanced Vancouver (which sounds pretty daunting), but at least it would be a second trip to the playoffs in the club's history.

'It's not easy because you want to play'

My partner in podcasting, Moisés Chiullán, got an interesting response from Rubio about the realities of playing when you're not an inked-in every-match starter.

"When you are a competitor is not easy," he reflected. "To be honest, it's not easy because you want to play. You want to be in there, [even] five or ten minutes. When you have competition at the end of the day, you have five changes, and there are 25 players, you know that it's going to be only 16 players, maybe sometimes less.

"When you are younger, I think it's more difficult," he added. "Maybe you don't think about the consequences of getting mad, getting angry, but it's totally normal. I don't see that as bad. I see that as that they want to compete. They want to play. I mean, you want to have players that get mad after the game when they don't play. I mean, of course, you need to be happy if we win. If we lose, it's fine if everybody gets mad. You want to help. You want to have players that help. But after, come to the training, 100%, because that's when you try to win your spot. You can get mad one day, but after, you need to change the reality and say, 'I want to be good,' because that way I can help the team too. It's not only the 11 players [on the field], because if the other 11, the other 15, push the guys that are playing, it's going to make the team way better."

Perhaps you might see this as Rubio using time before the media to address a certain seemingly unhappy teammate who has just 538 league minutes and no goal contributions after leading the team in goals last year. Perhaps it's a more innocous general observation on the importance of everyone on a team that is currently somewhere between the "keep doubting us" xG-defying chippiness of the 2022 squad and the despondence of the 2024 team that wilted down the stretch and was cruelly in the "mathematically still alive but come on now" zone in Josh Wolff's final weeks as head coach.

But, certainly, Rubio's insistence that he and his teammates push to get on the field and make everyone better is an encouraging indicator of fight. Heading into the next two games with a chance to make a statement about Texas supremacy, and that not being something to salvage a bad season, it's a good place to be.

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