Real Salt Lake spent more money in transfer fees in the last 20 months than in its first 20 years. What changed?

Real Salt Lake just said goodbye to one of its best players, Carlos Andrés Gómez.

I know that sounds sad. To be honest, it is.

But it’s also one of the most impressive things RSL has done in the last decade.

Gómez’s sale, for $11 million plus add-on bonuses to French club Rennes, is a sign that RSL is actually doing things right for the first time in recent memory. RSL is actually trying to be a real club with ambition, not just an also-ran competent enough to maybe luck into a trophy.

A new model has worked wonders. Besides just being able to sell players for a profit, RSL is on pace for its highest points total since 2010, and may even set a new club record with a favorable schedule for the rest of the year. Games are selling out and the home crowd is significantly more enthusiastic. And Salt Lake is better poised to actually win something — an MLS Cup, a Supporters’ Shield trophy — than at any point in the last 10 years.

For hardcore RSL fans like myself, it’s been fascinating to watch the sea change in the club’s approach over the last year and a half. For a wider audience, it’s worth re-introducing the club and explaining what’s going on.

Ownership spending money, for real

Let’s be honest and call a spade a spade: Former owner Dell Loy Hansen was famously cheap in running RSL in his tenure from 2013-22. To be sure, there were very significant investments in real estate, Hansen’s main expertise. The club’s facilities out in Herriman are a clear example of this. But in nearly every deal related to the actual soccer team, cost was a barrier. Former club scout Andy Williams decried the situation in an interview with KSL in 2020:

“He’s never invested in the team. He doesn’t spend. Scouting doesn’t exist. I don’t go anywhere, my staff doesn’t go anywhere. We watch soccer like everybody else on the TV. He doesn’t invest in scouting, he’s not trying to improve the team currently. He’s trying to spend the least money as it takes to survive, which is sad. The fans here deserve a lot better. ... Mr. Hansen, Dell Loy, I don’t think he wants to win anything. I think it’s maybe a tax write-off for him, to be honest.”

Now, though? The team’s new ownership is spending money on the field. To be sure, it took majority team owner David Blitzer and minority owner Ryan Smith over a year to show a new approach, as they finalized the sale and put new managers in charge. The team’s new conductor is Kurt Schmid, with previous experience at the Seattle Sounders, L.A. Galaxy, and Inter Miami. And there’s no denying that things have changed drastically.

What RSL has done differently in the last 20 months is pretty breathtaking.

The short of it: The club is spending money.

The long of it:

• In the previous 20 years of RSL history, the team signed three players with transfer fees over $1 million (Jefferson Savarino, Jonathan Menendez, and Yura Movsisyan). In the most recent 20 months, RSL has signed eight players with transfer fees over $1 million — Diogo Gonçalves, Dominic Marczuk, Chicho Arango, Braian Ojeda, Nelson Palacio, Matt Crooks, Brayan Vera, and Gómez.

• In all, RSL has spent about $22 million RSL in that recent period to improve its roster.

• The Gómez sale — $11 million or so, plus $2 million in potential bonuses — is RSL’s biggest sale ever, by a multiplier of three or four. Simply put, most MLS clubs have never had a purchase this successful.

• The club’s second-biggest sale ever is 18-year-old Fidel Barajas, sold for $4 million in June. Before that, the team’s biggest sales were in the $1 million to $2 million range.

At the beginning of this run, I wrote an article bemoaning RSL’s lack of valuable talent, begging them to spend more in transfers. One site that keeps track of player values, Transfermarkt, ranked RSL dead last in MLS, 29th, in talent value then. Now, in the snap of a finger, RSL is 10th — and that doesn’t even count the cash they received from Gómez and Barajas.

Put it in the Tribune’s Impact Report. Journalism really does make our community better. I’m claiming responsibility.

(OK, just kidding.)

Inspiring, developing young talent

What all of this investment in young talent has meant is that RSL has become a successful developmental club overnight. Sure, they argued they were that before, but the track record of actually developing talent and getting it to higher levels was pretty poor. Freddy Adu famously flopped. Luis Gil? He plays in Spokane now. Frankly, a concerning amount of RSL young talent even begged out of the club, trying to restart their career elsewhere.

I get it: calling yourself a developmental club seems damning with faint praise. When people call the Utah Jazz a developmental club for the NBA, it is a pejorative.

But in soccer, it’s been a pretty successful model for teams in leagues outside of the big five. Ajax has bossed Dutch play for decades, just as Porto and Benfica have in Portugal. If you can successfully convince soccer’s young talent that they’ll advance their future, their skill plus club stalwarts can win you trophies.

In recent months, RSL has successfully pushed forward the careers of almost too many players to count. There’s the ones they’ve sold recently. But players like Diego Luna, Brayan Vera, Braian Ojeda, Emeka Eneli, Nelson Palacio, and Bode Hidalgo have grown into starring roles as well before their 25th birthdays.

New signing Lachlan Brook, a 23-year-old Australian winger who’s played in both Australia’s league down under and in English Premier League side Brentford’s setup, is one example of a player convinced enough by RSL’s newfound developmental success to tie his future to Utah.

“Andrés was, I think, a great example of what they’ve done with players,” he said. “They bring them in from different countries, and they do really well and obviously accelerate their careers.”

It also means the club can build around that identity. The developmental infrastructure — the youth academy, training fields, and so on out in Herriman — is considered to be top-quality. (Brook, for example, called the facilities and staff at RSL “the best I’ve ever seen in my life.”)

They can also make salary cap decisions to that end. MLS allows each team to have up to six players that don’t count against the salary cap; teams can choose between having a 3/3 split of older designated players to under-22 players, or a 2/4 split of the same. If a team chooses the 2/4 split, they also receive $2 million in money they can use to reduce the salary cap impact of other players on the roster.

Schmid and staff chose the latter, emphasizing youth, and says that he expects to choose the 2/4 option for years to come.

To be sure, the hard part is deciding if and when to sell the talent that’s been developed.

Schmid says he waffled on whether selling Gómez now — with nine games left in a contending season — was the right move. “I go back and forth on it as well,” he admitted. But in the end, Schmid says that Gómez sale was simply too important to the club in “validating its process,” a phrase he used over and over again in our interview.

“These chances to play at this level and to compete potentially for trophies don’t come around often,” he noted. “At the same time, I’d like to think that we’re building something sustainable, that we can compete in multiple years and not just have one magical year and then drop down after that.”

And Schmid’s players agree — they like to see players given the ability to move on if they so choose. Take RSL midfielder Emeka Eneli, in the wake of signing a new contract with the team this week.

“You see Andrés had a really good six, seven months here, and then, boom, he’s in France. So, like, why can’t that happen to anybody else at the club, you know? Why couldn’t it happen to me?”

It could. It could for about 10 different players on RSL’s roster.

More than ever before in club history, RSL management and ownership are making significant, consistent investments in the players on the pitch, buying players from Europe, South America, and all over the world, and making them better.

The result is a different RSL than the one I thought we knew.

Success isn’t guaranteed, and the approach hasn’t won any trophy yet. But for the first time in a long time, it’s easy to feel good about RSL in the short and long term — even a sale of one of the club’s best players proves to fans that RSL is on its way up overall.