Photo: Marjorie Elzey

Philadelphia Union II announced the signing of 18-year-old Venezuelan striker Jose Riasco from first-division Venezuelan side Deportivo La Guaira on Wednesday afternoon. Although the club did not announce a transfer fee, Transfermarkt reports the fee as $997,000.

“We have watched Jose develop for some time and had been impressed by his performance in the Venezuelan Primera Division last season,” Union sporting director Ernst Tanner said in a press release. “He’s a young striker with great potential and look forward to seeing him grow and progress within our system.”

Riasco appeared 24 times in all competitions as a 17-year-old in 2021, totaling five goals and three assists. The majority of his appearances came in the first division’s regular season, where he made 16 appearances for 746 minutes.

Riasco, who turned 18 last month, stands 6’2” and weighs 170 pounds, so he is of a piece with Nelson Pierre and Mikael Uhre. @FUTVEEnglish would have included him as the lone Venezuelan in The Guardian’s top 60 players born in 2004, had they been given a voice.

The Inquirer’s Jonathan Tannenwald expects that Riasco will be good enough to be the Union’s fifth striker, should there be need. Were the need extensive he would have to be promoted, since he can dress four times on four-day contracts but appear only twice.

The competition for minutes for already announced Union II strikers Chris Donovan, Stefan Stojanovic, and Nelson Pierre has just become that much more intense. It is unclear whether Riasco joined Union II while they were in Florida, or whether he is even yet stateside. He will be eligible to play when he receives his P1 visa.

The transfer fee makes the acquisition without precedent in the Union’s previous youth player development history.

Reliable Venezuelan journalists first tweeted the transaction on or about January 25, but only a week ago Tuesday did Tannenwald and Tom Bogert both tweet that they understood the deal was in fact done. And Tuesday itself is when Transfermarkt added him to its Union II roster.

The extensive delay may well have involved MLS’s Discovery List and how that list interacts with an MLS NEXT Pro signing by an MLS parent club such as Keystone Sports and Entertainment. Unlike MLS, MLS NEXT Pro contracts are signed directly with the club itself, not the league.

If the Riasco signing were the precedent-setting interaction between the rules and procedures of the two leagues, considerable time may have been expended working out the details because they will govern similar future transactions even though the one league owns the other.

A close reading of the 2022 MLS Roster Rules and Regulations concerning the Discovery List details the process of resolving multiple league clubs listing the same player. A second team also listing the player has an opportunity to make an objectively equitable offer. The opportunity to compete may explain the magnitude of Riasco’s transfer fee. But unless multiple offers and counteroffers are allowed, and the rule does not specify that they are, Discovery List mechanics do not explain the time delay.

The delay’s length sounds more like lawyers for two contending clubs each presenting and counter-presenting arguments to league arbiters who are fully aware of the precedent-setting nature of their decisions, and are being slow and careful in consequence.

@UnionRumors points out that by signing Riasco to Union II, Keystone Sports sidestepped all of MLS’s  salary cap and other Byzantine cost regulations. The end run may have caused resistance elsewhere within the league community. Ever since the city-states of Sumer and Akkad in ancient Mesopotamia, traders have not favored the new, the different, and especially the unanticipated. Ernst Tanner is said to be good at loopholes.