After eight hugely successful weeks on trial with Australia’s Central Coast Mariners, the secret was out: Usain Bolt is a raw talent, but the greatest sprinter of all time can also do work on the football pitch.
Apparently FC Barcelona saw enough to take a chance on the Jamaican, and the 32-year-old has now touched down at the Camp Nou on a three-year contract as the ideal longterm replacement for Luis Suárez.
This story is only going to dominate the entire summer transfer window from start to finish, so we might as well keep abreast of it now. We know that Real Madrid has its eyes on both Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, but which PSG star will ultimately makes his way to the Santiago Bernabéu?
The latest reports say that it won’t be Neymar.
Presently, it looks like Real will turn to Chelsea’s Eden Hazard — who only has one-year remaining on his current contract at Stamford Bridge, so the club might have to sell this summer — to remedy the left-hand side of the attack.
Trend meets trend: Another U.S. national team or youth prospect makes the jump to Major League Soccer as Sporting Kansas City signs a talented, young player off the radar of most clubs. That's what we got today when Sporting officially announced that Gedion Zelalem had signed from Arsenal. The 22-year-old joins Kansas City for the 2019 season, with club options for two additional years.
The Galaxy had a Designated Player problem. With four LA Galaxy DPs — and only three allowed by MLS rules — the league’s flagship club had to do something before the start of the 2019 season.
Last year when Zlatan Ibrahimovic signed with the Galaxy, he signed a smaller contract to keep him under DP status because the club already had three DPs: Giovani dos Santos, Jonathan dos Santos and Romain Alessandrini. But Zlatan re-upped his contract in the offseason, putting him in DP money despite the fact the three others remained under contract.
Orlando City has announced the signing of former Manchester United winger Nani to a three-year contract on a Designated Player deal. The 32-year-old joins Orlando from Sporting Lisbon in Portugal, where he’d scored nine goals and provided seven assists in 26 appearances across all competitions this season.
Having been in the rumor mill for a few days and teased on social media, the Marco Fabian transfer to MLS was officially announced Friday afternoon: The Mexico international is heading to Philadelphia.
Tottenham Hotspur, currently third in the English Premier League, has not bought any players in more than a year. Maybe the Spurs could learn a thing or two from Turkish club Elazigspor, which just set the record for most players bought in the closing hours of a transfer window.
For the casual fan watching Europe, the 2019 January transfer window was by no means the most exciting in recent memory. In terms of what it meant for U.S. soccer, it was massive.
More and more young Americans are heeding the words of one-time USMNT coach Jurgen Klinsmann and heading to Europe. More and more European clubs are welcoming young Americans into the fold.
Bayern Munich has signed 17-year-old Real Salt Lake academy product Taylor Booth on a three-and-a-half-year deal, according to Sports Illustrated. Booth is a member of the USMNT U-18 team, and he was a part of the U.S. squad that advanced to the quarterfinals of the 2017 U-17 World Cup.
Over the last four MLS seasons, few players terrified defenses like Sebastian Giovinco. His speed on the ball, clinical finishing and deadly free kicks made him one of the best strikers from the day he joined the league in 2015.