Four Signings, a Trade and Sporting KC likely lose a Designated Player

S2E57 - For the Glory KC is back with the 64th episode of the show! On this week's episode we decide to do a "double episode" with Christmas coming next week and likely a slow news week with it. If you are only interested in certain teams/topics, be sure to check out the run down below. We start the show with Sporting Kansas City as they made some moves this week and a few more rumors rolled in. We get into the signings of left back Zorhan Bassong and forward Alenis Vargas. Sheena and I share our thoughts on the players and how the roster spending flexibility hasn't been impacted much by these moves. Sadly, that brought us to Gadi Kinda, who is "extremely unlikely" to return according to reporting from Paul Tenorio and Tom Bogert. Then we turned our attention to Major League Soccer at large. MLS took the extraordinarily (stupid) move of removing all MLS teams from the 2024 US Open Cup. We have thoughts! And then we get into a mostly positive set of rule changes, that certainly don't go far enough to capture the attention of the audience with Messi only in Miami for two more season. The spending isn't changing much but some of the time wasting may be a thing of the past. The KC Current also made some big moves this week, swinging an unpopular trade for expansion draft protection and signing two other players in other transactions. Izzy Rodriguez re-joins the team, and 17-year-old Claire Hutton will come over from New York. Finally, we get to the Digital Crawl. We breeze through the following topics: The Sporting KC U-19s got eliminated from the UPSL playoffs Several little KC Current news nuggets The KC Comets earn a mention (listen to Thad for way more on the Comets) The upcoming CONCACAF Champions Cup and Bruce Arena is reinstated to MLS Here is a quick rundown of topics (and approximate start times): Sporting KC Make Two Signings - 4:45 Gadi Kinda almost certainly gone - 20:00 MLS Teams out of the US Open Cup - 26:53 MLS Rule Changes - 39:01 The Current trade Kate Del Fava - 50:15 KC Current make two signings - 1:01:12 Our MLS Schedule wishes - 1:07:29 How we got into Sporting KC - 1:13:34 Digital Crawl (including the schedule) - 1:25:17 **Apologies in advance, there is a little crosstalk between us. We record on a website (Riverside) that captures our audio to our computers, so we were apparently cutting out live, but just talking over one another on the hard recording. It's not a ton, but it happens! Spotify took away our ads, so we turned on "Listener Support." Don't feel obligated, but if you have a few spare bucks and a fan of the pod, we'd appreciate your donation. Big thanks to Splitter Conspiracy (listen to them here) for our theme music made with the permission of the KC Cauldron.