2026 Roster and Transfer Discussion Thread

For the record, we should give the Club a lot of credit here. They easily could have missed whatever was wrong on the medical, or they could have chosen to risk the DP spot on him anyway because of our need. This is a good job by the team not to settle for a player who may not make it through his contract. I'm confident we'll still be able to find someone else, just have to hope we do it before the end of the winter window.

Sporting KC, by the way, has 14 outfield players under contract. The season starts in under 3 weeks.
 
Striker Depth Chart:
S. Reid, T. Magno, S. Scraper
Scraper highlight reel:

Football Soccer GIF by ElevenSportsBE
 
Im interested to hear more about this Sylla deal falling through. Schalke is a German footballing institution and NYCFC is amateur hour with the press and generally any issue. Schalke seems very annoyed.
Maybe another opportunity opened up so we just used any excuse possible in admittedly poor faith.
 
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Im interested to hear more about this Sylla deal falling through. Schalke is a German footballing institution and NYCFC is amateur hour with the press and generally any issue. Schalke seems very annoyed.
The club already has one striker out injured. I wouldn’t want to spend DP money on a striker who shows signs of a weak knee and being injury prone. Two strikers out on medical is a lot worse than one. Especially if one is a DP. I think Sylla wasn’t worth the risk to them at the price. Hopefully we start hearing loan deal options for Sylla (doubtful based on his Instagram story) or rumors of another potential goal scorer.
 
Im interested to hear more about this Sylla deal falling through. Schalke is a German footballing institution and NYCFC is amateur hour with the press and generally any issue. Schalke seems very annoyed.

Transactions fall through all the time after the medical, I think the more legitimate gripe I've seen from Schalke is around the timing of everything. Reportedly Schalke had downstream transactions planned that hinged on the sale of Sylla. Failing a medical is one thing but failing a medical for a player and then trying to squeeze the other team while they are right up against their transfer window closing is pretty scummy and I could see Schalke being infuriated about that.

Hind sight is 20/20 but maybe we shouldn't have negotiated a deal with our new SD that caused us to start making offseason moves 5 weeks after all the other MLS clubs and we would have had more time to maneuver on this one before the winter window closed in Europe.
 
Failing a medical is one thing but failing a medical for a player and then trying to squeeze the other team while they are right up against their transfer window closing is pretty scummy and I could see Schalke being infuriated about that.
The flip side is Schalke trying to foist damaged goods on us and getting caught out. After all, they're in pretty desperate financial straits. Coming back up will help them, but in the meantime, they need as much revenue as they can get.

Rather than jamming them, maybe we were offering them a way to still get it done which limits our risk a little more.

But honestly, the simplest explanation is the most likely one: our medicos saw something they didn't like which Schalke's training department either missed or didn't think was a big deal.
 

Admittedly I don't know my ass from my elbow when it comes to these things, but is that SOP to sign a contract and then take a physical? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
I doubt players are flying around the globe taking physicals for potential clubs while being shopped around. My guess is that deals are reached, then the physical is part of the due diligence process. Similar to real estate, you don't typically do a home inspection prior to negotiating a sales price, but if things come up during the inspection the original deal can be called off or modified.
 
I doubt players are flying around the globe taking physicals for potential clubs while being shopped around. My guess is that deals are reached, then the physical is part of the due diligence process. Similar to real estate, you don't typically do a home inspection prior to negotiating a sales price, but if things come up during the inspection the original deal can be called off or modified.
Every single transfer press release i've ever seen has had "subject to the medical exam" in there which makes me assume that this is a clause written into transfer contracts. The question I have is more-so what constitutes a reasonable "medical exam failure" such that it can trigger a transfer reneg.
 
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