D.C. United has traded $225,000 in General Allocation Money (GAM) to Toronto FC in exchange for $337,500 in Targeted Allocation Money (TAM). This is a real trade that happened today, and the reaction has largely been to mock MLS’s general tendency towards the arcane. No players or draft picks were traded. It’s a currency exchange rather than a trade.
Anyone purporting to declare a winner of the trade is making a wild leap. We don’t have any real handle on the market value of TAM in relation to GAM. We know** the latter is more valuable because there’s less of it, and it can be used in more ways, but declarations of precisely how much more valuable GAM is seem to be nothing more than “guesstimates.