FC Cincinnati will face many difficult decisions over the next three months, as they build their expansion team to be ready for the 2019 season. Their next set of choices takes place today, in the Expansion Draft. What the team decides there may not make or break their season, but they do have the opportunity to add important pieces for their inaugural year.

One strategy, the path I’ll discuss here, is for Cincinnati to grab cheap, young players. The hope is that, while they weren’t key contributors for their former teams, those players will continue to develop. A team with enough of these works in progress, and with a sufficient capacity to develop them, might reasonably hope for a few to pan out into full-time starters.