As with many professional sports leagues in North America and rugby leagues around the world, Major league Rugby has a limit on the number of international players that each team can field in any given matchday 23. The purpose of this is to promote homegrown/domestically eligible talent and help to grow the game in teh United States and North America.

In previous seasons of Major League Rugby, each team started each season with 10 international player slots. These international slots determine how many non-US/Canada eligible players a team can have in any given matchday 23 (not a limit on how many foreign players a team can have on their entire roster). This is to guarantee playing time for US/Canada eligible players in order to let them develop as much as possible, and strengthen the domestic game.

With the exception of Anthem RC, teams could trade away a maximum of 3 international slots for a minimum of 7 per matchday 23, and each team could have no more than 12 international slots. Anthem RC, as a USA national team development side, was initially permitted to trade away an additional slot for a minimum of 6, but traded away two more 2025 slots and sat on 4 international slots per matchday 23 for the 2025 season. MLR have not provided any clarity on this.

This system changed during the 2025/26 MLR offseason from a flexible limit that could be traded for players, draft picks, and other assets, to a fixed limit of 7 international players per matchday 23 for the 2026 MLR season and beyond.

Additionally, the domestic status for Canadian players was removed so that they now counted against the strict 7 international player limit, much to the disappointment of Canadian fans. This coupled with other factors saw the number of Canadian players in MLR drop from 47 in 2025 to only 10 in 2026. With at least 16 domestic players on all rosters for the 2026 campaign, this meant that at least 96 of the 138 professional players on a typical MLR match week would be eligible to represent the USA, or roughly 70%. This lead to some creative scouting by MLR franchises to try and find top quality players who happened to have a link to the USA either through birth/ancestry, or residency.

MLR Transactions

The dropdown menu on the banner under this page would contains a list of all trade transactions between clubs for the 2026 Major League Rugby Season. However, during the off-season the publicly available MLR Trade Wire was removed from the league website without explanation, so fans had any transparency on and trades between teams ahead of the 2026 season. Given the restructuring of Major League Rugby following the disastrous 2025/26 Offseason, it is likely that trading between teams was at least paused for the year, and it remains to be seen if the Trade Wire will return in the future.

It is also possible that trades were happening but fans did not know about them. Before the season kicked off, the Chicago Hounds announced that they had loaned two players (Alex Hernandez and Elias Garza) to Anthem RC in the hope of getting them some game time, but if the Hounds received anything in return for loaning these players out, it has not been publicly disclosed. Additionally, the Bew England Free Jacks announced that they had signed Cyrille Cama for the 2026 season, but he didn’t play a game for New England before popping up on the California Legion roster for the tail end of the season. It is unknown if this was a trade.

This section now only serves to explain to NARDB visitors why there are no longer Transaction Summaries for the later seasons of Major League Rugby. If this changes again in the future, NARDB plans to resume updates on MLR Transactions.