In reality, Real Salt Lake lost their two best players last summer.
The team sold exuberant, youthful winger Carlos Andres Gomez in August for a team-record $11 million to French club Rennes. But earlier than that, and perhaps more important, was the suspension of star forward Chicho Arango in July due to a violation of Major League Soccer’s anti-harassment policy.
Arango accumulated a massive 17 goals in the first half of the season. But he went scoreless after the suspension and was even benched in the team’s final game of the playoffs. Relatedly, RSL scored just one goal across 180 minutes, and lost in the first round.
The club traded him to San Jose for $1.5 million in allocation money two months later.
The two departures, plus those of speedy striker Anderson Julio, young goalkeeper Gavin Beavers and fan-favorite midfielder Matt Crooks, have left RSL supporters on edge as the team enters its 21st season of play. While the team has added a variety of pieces over the last seven months, none of them has the MLS pedigree of the players who have left.
What would those who run the club say to those fans?
“I think that’s their job to, as fans, to push us and to try to pressure us into spending more money and doing more fun things, and that’s what we’ll do,” RSL Sporting Director Kurt Schmid said. “But I know that every offseason, we’ll take some sort of risk like this. Nobody remembers, but last year, we sold (Jefferson) Savarino and we didn’t replace him with anything. And everyone was pretty upset about that — until they weren’t.”
It’s true. Savarino was a designated player who departed the club to head to Brazilian side Botafogo in the 2024 offseason. At that time, Gomez was a part-time starter the previous season, but he took the mantle and outperformed Savarino in the first half of the year.
“My guiding light on all that stuff is not to get caught up in the moment, the roller coaster and ebbs and flows of the emotion of it and just know that, like, the team’s just got to be good,” Schmid said. “Nobody cares who those guys' names are at the end of the day, they just have to be good. They have to perform ... as long as the player scores goals, fans are going to love him.”
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of La Barra Real cheer on Real Salt Lake during their game against the LA Galaxy, May 31, 2023. America First Field installed metal bars in part of the south goal section of the stadium and took out the seats to make it so the fans in that section can stand the entire game.
Schmid has particular belief in the strikers that RSL has brought in this offseason. Three players were acquired, all 23 or under: Forster Ajago, Elias Manoel, and Ariath Piol.
Ajago, 23, played in 12 games for Nashville FC last year, earning three starts but scoring no goals in his rookie MLS season. He was selected by RSL in the MLS' Re-Entry Draft, and the team’s contract for him runs through 2025, though the club has team options in 2026 and 2027.
Manoel, also 23, had played two seasons in MLS, both with the New York Red Bulls. In 2024, he played in 33 games and scored eight goals and added four assists, earning more playing time after scoring a hat trick in the 2023 MLS Playoffs against Charlotte. RSL traded for Manoel by sending a total of $700,000 in general allocation money (GAM) to the Red Bulls; RSL also received four draft picks in the deal.
Piol, the youngest of the bunch at 20, was just signed out of Australia’s top soccer league, the A-League. He had scored four goals in 14 appearances there, before signing a three-year contract with RSL through 2027. The team has a club option for Piol in 2028.
“The three guys that we’ve got ... we feel are really good game model guys — in terms of their work rate, their attributes, where they run, where they play, everything. It fits exactly where we want out of that position," Schmid said.
So the team’s brass doesn’t feel the desperation to improve that perhaps its fans do — but that doesn’t mean they are ignoring their open designated player slot.
MLS allows teams to have six players that don’t fully count against the salary cap. Teams can choose whether they have three under-22 signees and three older designated players, or a different split of four under-22 signees, two older designated players, and an extra $2 million in general allocation money. RSL’s chosen the latter, preferring to develop youth and depth across their squad.
But at the moment, the team has just one older designated player: 27-year-old Diogo Goncalves. That leaves room for the team to bring in a more established star — and there’s no more obvious position for the team to do so than at striker.
“I think for us to pull the trigger on a DP or a more expensive player in that role, it’s got to be someone that has all those attributes (that Schmid referenced above), but then has a track record of goals, of finishing ability that these guys don’t have,” Schmid said. “These guys have given us everything that we’ve asked for, everything that we want in a [striker], we just don’t know yet, when the rubber meets the road, what their production will be. So the only way for us to pull the trigger on a DP is to find someone who does all those things and then we feel good about the production.”
While it’s a high bar for a player to clear, Schmid says there are candidates the team is talking to for that role.
“We’re working on a couple things that could happen this window,” Schmid said, leaving open the possibility of making a move before the MLS’s winter transfer window closes on April 23. “But again, if they don’t line up, we’ll wait. It’ll give, just by default, some of these guys a chance to show what they can do, and if they do well, then that also works.”
In other words, Schmid is waiting for the right deal for the club.
“The sugar rush of everyone’s happy because you spend a bunch of money and sign the guy they recognize, that’s fun for a couple days. But signing a player that makes the team successful is what’s going to make everyone happy in the long run,” he said.
