You may be asking yourself, “When is NYCFC going to sign a new player?”
Maybe you’ve been watching with envy as other clubs around MLS fortified their rosters.
Western Conference basement-dwellers Colorado Rapids added Djordje Mihailovic as a Designated Player while also signing Manchester City goalkeeper Zack Steffen; the hated Red Bulls tapped into their multi-club network to add Swedish star Emil Forsberg as a Designated Player; FC Cincinnati replaced Yerson Mosquera at center back by signing free agent Miles Robinson away from Atlanta United; and big names like Luis Suarez and Hugo Lloris joined Inter Miami CF and LAFC, respectively.
Meanwhile in New York City, there have been a slew of player rumors—you can catch up on nearly all of them here in our handy NYCFC Transfer Tracker—but the club has yet to make a significant new winter signing.
No new non-Homegrown players (no offense intended, Zidane Yañez) have been added to the roster despite NYCFC missing the MLS Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2015.
This has led to some noticeable angst among the online contingent of NYCFC supporters, with pleas to “sign some players” growing in number by the day. Don’t believe me? Look at the replies to literally any post NYCFC decides to share on social media right now.
A common response to this emerging lack-of-signings fan outrage is to point out that NYCFC and its sporting director David Lee have historically made their moves late in the winter transfer window.
Rather than just accepting this as the conventional wisdom and moving on, patiently waiting for a substantial NYCFC transfer rumor to surface, I decided to comb through NYCFC’s history in the winter window to attempt to quantify when they’ve historically made their moves.
I wanted to see if it really was abnormal to be here in early January with no new players added to the squad, as well as how NYCFC’s winter transfer activity has changed over time, and when we might expect a new player or two to show up.
To figure all this out, I looked back through the signing or acquisition announcements for 63 new players NYCFC added during winter transfer windows.
This tally of winter signings doesn’t include Homegrown players or those acquired via any MLS drafts—SuperDraft, Expansion, Dispersal, Re-Entry, or otherwise.
What stands out: NYCFC was consistently busy in the winter transfer window during its earliest expansion seasons from 2015-2018, and also consistently added at least one or two players in December in the earlier days of the MLS offseason.
That has all changed since David Lee replaced Claudio Reyna as NYCFC’s sporting director in November 2019, though it’s unclear if this reflects a difference in philosophy between Lee and Reyna, or a shift in how the City Football Group higher-ups want to handle transfers in and out of New York City.
NYCFC had its two least-active winter transfer windows under Lee’s leadership heading into the 2020 and 2022 seasons, with the club’s winter signings starting to come later, closer to the start of subsequent MLS seasons.
From 2015-2019, NYCFC made its first winter player addition an average of 86 days before the start of their next competitive season. Since 2020, the club’s first new winter addition has come an average of 44 days before their next meaningful match.
The NYCFC winter additions to arrive latest on the calendar have also largely occurred during the David Lee reign—when looking at the players who joined NYCFC the closest to the start of their seasons (or in some cases, after their seasons began), five of the team’s 10 latest acquisitions have occurred on Lee’s watch.
As of this writing, we are 48 days away from the next NYCFC match, when they open their 2024 MLS season on the road against Charlotte FC.
That puts us right in the sweet spot of when David Lee likes to start adding to his squad, and so too does the fact that we’re soon to reach mid-January.
Across all of NYCFC’s existence, January has been the club’s busiest month for winter transfers. Of the 63 player additions I looked at for this post, 19 joined in January—and most of those signings have come in the second half of the first month of the year.
Of the 19 new NYCFC player additions ever made in the month of January, 11 have been announced on or after January 15. When sorting the list of 63 players ever added during the winter months, the median winter signing has joined NYCFC 35 days before their first competitive match, which this year falls on Saturday, January 20.
So plenty of past data points indicate that a new player or players should arrive sometime around when NYCFC opens its preseason training camp, which the club just announced will take place on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Monday January 15.
While the timing is still right for NYCFC to add to its roster before the MLS season, it seems hard to expect a large wave of new players arriving this winter.
After all, NYCFC just signed six players in the most recent summer transfer window, with four certain to play roles for the 2024 team, and with two players left with uncertain futures due to major injury and the expiration of a successful short-term loan.
The NYCFC of David Lee has also seemed to alternate busy winter windows with quiet winter windows. Amid the mass exodus of NYCFC players that ensued after the 2022 season, Lee ended up bringing in eight new players. A busy winter pre-2023 season followed a pre-2022 winter window in which Lee added only two players—Thiago Martins and Gabriel Pereira—so if we’re following that alternating pattern, this pre-2024 window might only feature two or three new arrivals.
Ultimately, NYCFC’s winter transfer activity has shifted later since 2020, and it varies from year-to-year just how busy David Lee tends to be.
What the sporting director has in store for the rest of this window remains shrouded in mystery, like all things he does, since he rarely speaks publicly to the press or reveals much of anything about his transfer strategy. This winter’s strategy, though, might start to reveal itself more as training camp approaches. Lee and his NYCFC bosses talked a big game about improving the roster and setting the team on a better path toward the playoffs and toward winning trophies in 2024 after the disappointment of the 2023 season, but that’s yet to translate to an injection of new talent.
History seems to indicate we’re on the verge of some “Welcome” posts for new NYCFC players, and if you want to look any further into that history, you can click here to go through my spreadsheet full of all this (useless? maybe) winter transfer information for yourself.
