While Atlanta United has had a successful first offseason by most measures, they’ve reportedly suffered a setback in their preparations for their inaugural season.
The team’s rumored deal for Paraguayan forward Oscar Romero is reportedly dead, according to Goal.com. The team has been linked to the 24-year-old from Racing Club de Avellaneda for some time as a potential third DP acquisition.
Atlanta has reportedly been outbid by Chinese Super League club Shanghai SIPG with a transfer bid of almost double Atlanta’s $8.5 million, and salary considerations more than tripling what the expansion MLS team was offering.
Romero would’ve joined Argentinian winger Hector Villalba as well as fellow Paraguayan Miguel Almiron in Atlanta, but it appears that a deal will not happen. This leaves Atlanta with an open third DP slot, which the team seems determined to fill after failing to secure both Romero and Mexican midfielder Andres Guardado.
Atlanta is set to open the season at home against the New York Red Bulls on March 5th, 2017 at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium.
Can’t compete with crazies. For example, let’s assume that they truly needed to triple his salary to persuade him to go to China as opposed to Atlanta (although even as big as fan of MLS as I am this appears to be too much of a premium), once he had a personal preference to go to China, why did they need to offer double the transfer fee? Wouldn’t 10%-20% do the trick for his team????
If they need a LB they should try to get Royson Drenthe. Crazy how he has fallen off a little, but I feel like he still has the jets for MLS.
Wasn’t even aware he was still playing. Last I saw him was with Everton.
lol unreal
Man, how many people are China drawing to their games?
They get money and interest….it is over. China is just short of the population of the US, South American and Europe combined.
People always say MLS is like the old NASL, but aren’t there some parallels between the CSL and the NASL? I’m pretty sure I remember reading the league is being subsidized by the Chinese government and to be honest who outside of China would watch 2-4 aging superstars and 20 average Chinese guys on a given team? What are they gonna do, go full NASL and have entire teams of aging stars with $100M rosters? It’s definitely a situation to monitor for MLS, but surely there’s enough quality around the globe for MLS to find players, right?
yeah, and once President Xi Jinping is gone, will his successor still want the Government to back these soccer clubs hemorrhaging money?
The spending might be the same, but the difference is, is that soccer is incredibly popular in China, in comparison to the popularity of soccer in the US during the NASL days. Also they’re not just getting older players, and in fact, they seem to be moving away from that rather quickly. Recently getting Oscar was huge, and if they end up getting Alexis Sanchez, it’s going to be a massive game changer.
Last transfer window’s spending spree for them got people’s attention. Bigger moves this transfer windows is going to legitmize the league rather quickly. And it’s not just players they’re getting, but coaches too. Villas-Boas and Gus Poyet are great additions to the league in terms of coaching.
This isn’t the Qatar or UAE we’re talking about where a lot of the expensive players are merely vanity buys for rich owners. China is plenty serious in being a soccer power and will spend their way to get there.
MLS is going to get a lot of competition for players in the next few years via CSL, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to compete cash-wise. The only teams that might win out will be the teams in LA and NY because of the lifestyle. But teams anywhere else are going to find it difficult to compete against Chinese money.
CREAM, dolla’ dolla’ bill, y’all.
My larger concern is that they’re spending so much money on soccer because the Chinese government is eyeballing the 2026 World Cup bid and would like the illusion of a legit soccer league prior to this. Technically they’re not eligible because of Qatar 2022, which is also Asian Federation…but if China applies, FIFA is likely to grant an exemption faster than you can say “renminbi under table”. Which I suspect the USA is leery of since we have yet to offically lodge a bid for 2026 ourselves.
I figured as much as soon as the Chinese team show interest. If they want to shell out close to $20M more power to them. It would have been great to have him but I am sure Darren, Carlos, and Tata will find another capable DP to bring to the team.