What Gastón Giménez’s departure means for the Fire
Gastón Giménez’s return to South America via mutual contract termination has numerous impacts for the Fire and the team’s roster as the club looks to retool under new Director of Football Gregg Berhalter. The move comes as somewhat of a surprise following repeated rumors over several years that a return to his native South America was imminent, none of which panned out until Christmas Eve just shy of the start of the now-former Fire midfielder’s sixth year with the team.
Following the departure of Fabian Herbers at the start of the offseason, Giménez was the most-tenured Fire player on the roster, with 124 matches played and 112 starts for the club across all competitions. Now that mantle falls on Fire homegrown Mauricio Pineda, the first time in club history that a Fire homegrown is also the most seasoned player on the roster, an unexpected – though likely not unwelcome – consequence of Giménez’s departure for the team that has placed significant emphasis on the academy and bringing in Chicago-area locals to the club over recent seasons.
Giménez was also the Fire’s longest-serving player in history who was a Designated Player (DP), both in terms of seasons, matches played and starts. However, although because not classified as a Designated Player in 2023 for roster reasons, in terms of games played in MLS (not including other competitions) while occupying a DP slot, Nemanja Nikolić remains the Fire’s most-tenured designated player in MLS play, with 96 matches compared to Giménez’s 94.
As a result of the move, the Fire now have 14 players on their senior roster, out of 20 available.
The move also clears an additional DP slot for the team, though because Giménez received permanent resident status in the United States, he did not use an international slot, meaning the team still has four international spots occupied and four available.
Because of changes announced last summer, MLS teams are able to choose between having three DPs and three U22 Initiative slots, or two DPs, four U22s, and an additional $2 million in General Allocation Money (GAM), which can be used to reduce the budget impact of players throughout the roster.
With Giménez’s departure, regardless of which model the Fire choose for 2025, the team has the cap and roster space to add at least one new DP without dipping into the team’s limited pool of Targeted Allocation Money (TAM), which can be used to buy down the salary cap costs of higher-earning players up to a specific limit.
Significantly, because the move is classified as a mutual termination (generally meaning that the player receives no portion of guaranteed wages they have not already been paid), the Fire preserve their single buyout for the 2025 season, enabling them to unilaterally terminate a contract or move a player or send them on a permanent basis to sister club FC Lugano in Switzerland, even if there are no competing offers from outside clubs, further increasing the team's roster flexibility in the upcoming season.
With MLS’s recent public release of available GAM for the first time in league history, we now have more insight into the Fire’s (and every other MLS team’s) cap space than before, although there remain significant unknowns and a large possibility for inaccuracy, as MenInRed97 discussed when the information was first released.
Despite the significant margin of error, to the point of making it hard to draw conclusions about how many players a team might be able to add or what budget constraints a team may have in making new signings, the move clearly opens up significant cap space for the Fire.
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With Giménez no longer on the roster, the Fire clear up $743,750 in salary cap room, open a valuable DP slot and thereby greatly increases Berhalter’s flexibility as he works to rebuild a roster that, despite one of the highest roster spends in the league since owner Joe Mansueto took control of the team, has failed to make the postseason since 2017.
