According to a report from The Athletic this week, Major League Soccer club owners are considering one of the more consequential roster rule changes in the league’s history: scrapping outdated mechanisms like General Allocation Money (GAM) and Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) entirely, and replacing them with an open, capped budget for every roster spot outside of Designated Player and U-22 Initiative slots.

If it goes through, this won’t just be another tweak to a system that already gets tweaked almost every offseason. It’s closer to a change in philosophy, and the reason it’s worth celebrating comes down to two things: it gives clubs real optionality in how they build their squads, and it finally starts to make the league’s rulebook something a new fan could actually follow.

MLS’s roster rules were never designed as a coherent whole, they were built piece by piece over nearly two decades. The Designated Player rule came along to land stars like David Beckham, and homegrown subsidies followed to protect academy investment. Eventually GAM and TAM arrived as ways to let teams spend above the salary budget without blowing up the cap. Each mechanism made sense as a solution to a specific problem at the time. But add them all up and you get a system where money isn’t just money anymore, it’s several different currencies, each with its own eligibility rules, expiration dates, and restrictions on how it can be used.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. A general manager sitting on a pile of GAM has to think not just about how much he has, but what he’s allowed to spend it on, when it expires, and whether trading it away changes the rules for the team on the other end. TAM came with its own separate limits on which tier of player it could even be applied to. Two teams can have identical “spending power” on paper and still operate completely differently, depending on which bucket their money happens to sit in.

A hard, but open salary cap for every roster spot outside of the DP and U-22 spots gets rid of that problem in one move. Instead of juggling several currencies with different rules attached, a front office would just have one number to work with, spendable however its sporting director decides. A team in a rebuild could put that money toward depth and squad balance. A team chasing a playoff spot could stack it behind a couple of difference-makers just below DP level.

Right now, both of those approaches get bent out of shape not by how much a team is actually willing to spend, but by which allocation mechanism that spending happens to fall under. Getting rid of restrictions such as GAM and TAM as separate categories means clubs get to build around an actual unique strategy instead of around a spreadsheet of exceptions.

Lets do a dumbed down hypothetical exercise for a moment. Inter Miami could see a salary budget capped at $50 million and decide to spend $40 million of it on three players, bringing more superstar names to South Beach. A team like the Seattle Sounders could take that same $40 million and spread it over 10 players, giving them solid depth in every position in the squad. Some clubs may funnel their money into youth, some into depth, some into stars, and some a variety of all three. Either way, the open cap will breathe brand new life into a league where the majority of the teams build similar looking squads to one another as a result of the restrictive spending rules.

The other reason this change matters has less to do with the people running teams and more to do with the people watching them. MLS has spent the last several years trying to grow a genuinely casual, national audience, a push drastically increased after Lionel Messi’s arrival at Inter Miami. But it’s hard to convert casual sports fans into MLS fans when the rulebook reads like tax code.

Try walking a new viewer through why a player only counts for a fraction of his real salary against the cap, why that fraction shifts depending on his age, why a team might be sitting on money it technically can’t spend on the player it wants, and why two clubs with the same “budget” can look nothing alike on the field. Do that a few times and you’ll understand why even MLS commissioner Don Garber has said publicly that the rules need to get easier to follow as the league’s audience grows.

That’s not a slight against longtime fans who’ve put in the years to decode the system. It’s just an acknowledgment that every extra layer of jargon is a small tax on whether a new fan sticks around. Nobody watching the Premier League or the Bundesliga needs a glossary of allocation mechanisms before they can follow a transfer story. MLS, on the other hand, has turned “explaining the roster rules” into its own recurring genre of soccer writing, which is usually a sign that something got too complicated by design.

While the proposed changes to those rules in favor of an open cap wouldn’t erase MLS’s rules altogether. DP slots, U22 designations, and the salary budget itself would still be there. But it would remove the mechanisms that truly confuse people more than anything else in the current setup. A new fan trying to understand why a club can or can’t sign a certain player would have a lot fewer exceptions standing in the way.

MLS’s rules were never built as one coherent system. They’re the accumulated residue of two decades of individual fixes, and that patchwork approach bought the league real flexibility back when it needed guardrails against a handful of big-market owners spending everyone else off the field. But that same patchwork is now working against the two things MLS says it cares most about on the back of the North American World Cup: how competitively its teams can be built, and how many new fans actually stick around long enough to care.