Trade Approval Workflow

What you'll see

The trade workflow is a status machine: a trade starts in pending, becomes accepted (or declined / counter) when the receiving team responds, moves to approved when the commissioner signs off (if approval is required), and only at that final step does it become executed — the moment when players actually swap teams and the cap dollars rebalance.

Whether the approval step is mandatory in your league is controlled by your commissioner through the league's trade settings. Some leagues skip approval entirely and trades execute the instant the receiving team accepts; others gate every trade through a manual approval queue; others use a threshold (number of assets or cap delta) to flag only the larger trades for review. This walkthrough assumes approval is required so you see every state.

The trade workflow

Open the trade builder. From the league trades page or your team page, click Propose trade and select the receiving team. The trade builder opens with two columns — your assets on the left, theirs on the right.

Add assets to each side. Players, draft picks, and/or free-agent picks. The builder shows the live salary-cap impact for both teams under each column. If the receiving team's incoming dollars would exceed their cap (and your league enforces the cap), you'll see a warning on their column — you can still submit; the warning just means the receiving GM will have to make space before they accept.

Submit the proposal. The trade is written to the database in pending status, the receiving team is notified, and the offer shows up in their incoming-trades list. You can see your sent proposal in your outgoing-trades list with a pending badge.

The receiving team responds. They open the proposal and choose one of three responses: accept, decline, or counter. If they decline, the trade closes immediately with no movement. If they counter, you receive a notification and the modified offer appears in your incoming list — you now play the receiving-team role on the revised offer.

If they accept and your league requires approval, the trade moves to accepted status and lands in the commissioner's pending-approval queue. Both teams see the trade as "awaiting approval" in their trade lists. If your league does NOT require approval, this step is skipped and the trade jumps straight to execution.

The commissioner reviews the trade in their approval queue, sees both teams' rosters with the proposed swap pre-applied, and chooses approve or reject. Approving moves the trade to approved status, which triggers the execution step automatically.

Execution is atomic. All players swap teams in a single database transaction, draft picks transfer to their new owners, and any other pending trades that referenced the same assets are auto-cancelled with a comment explaining which asset was moved. Both teams receive notifications, and the trade shows up in the league's activity feed.

What happens if something goes wrong

If any asset in the trade has moved between proposal and execution — e.g., a player was dropped, or a draft pick was traded in a separate deal that resolved first — the execution step catches it and refuses to run, surfacing an error like "Trade contains stale assets". The trade stays in approved status; the commissioner can either re-fetch the assets and re-approve or cancel the trade. Stale-asset checks are why concurrent trades for the same player don't double-book.

If the receiving team never responds, the trade sits in pending indefinitely. The proposer can cancel it at any time from their outgoing-trades list. Trades are also auto-cancelled the moment any of their assets get executed in another trade (the conflicting-trades cleanup runs immediately after every execution).

Approving is reversible only before execution kicks in — once the trade is executed, undoing it would require a manual reverse trade between the same two teams. Plan your league's approval policy with that in mind.