Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Sporting Loan Salloi to Vasas in Hungary

Sporting Kansas City announced today that they had loaned homegrown forward, Daniel Salloi back to his native Hungary to play for Vasas FC in the Hungarian first division for the remainder of the 2016 season. Salloi, who dressed for the first team in the first couple games of the 2016 season, has spent most of the season on loan to Sporting's USL affiliate, the Swope Park Rangers. With the Rangers Salloi has appeared in 10 games, scoring four goals and adding three assists. Recently though his playing time has decreased in the center forward position with the emergence of Mark Anthony Gonzalez, who is tied with Salloi for the team lead in goals with four. Add that in with the return of Dane Kelly from injury and Salloi seemed like he may find most of his time on the wing for the Rangers.

Signed in January as a homegrown player after spending the second half of 2015 playing with Ujpest FC on an amateur contract he'd scored seven goals and four assists over 16 games for the Hungarian club. He'll now return to the league for the 2016-2017 season in Hungary which starts in July. Vasas is a six time Hungarian league champion, but finished 10th last season in their first season back in the top level since the 2011-2012 season.

Salloi becomes the second homegrown player to currently be out on loan in Europe, joining Erik Palmer-Brown who is also on loan through the end of 2016 with Porto in Portugal.

There are certainly some questions that can be asked about this move for Kansas City. Was it made because Gonzalez and Kelly are seen as the primary options in the middle for Marc Dos Santos? Was Salloi just homesick and wanting to be closer to home at this point? Is he just not developing in the way that Peter Vermes would like him to? It seems awfully early to be the last of those questions considering he's been with the team for less than six months.

It also brings up questions about Sporting KC as a whole now, they now have an "off budget" roster spot opened up to sign a player, but at the same time have just two forwards on the roster, Dom Dwyer and Diego Rubio (no I'm not counting Jacob Peterson). With Rubio's lack of time combined with this move you have to assume and hope that Rubio is gone and that KC is close to, or has finalized something for another forward to come in and back up/challenge Dwyer. If not it would seem that Vermes hasn't learned anything from his experiences last year with a lack of impact substitutes on the bench.

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