A Recent History of Rapids Transfers from Abroad
Friday the Rapids announced the acquisition of Alexis Manyoma from Argentina's Club Estudiantes. Let's review recent Rapids transfer history and how those new players impacted the club.
For a wounded fanbase trying to recover after losing Djordje Mihailovic, nothing eases the pain like a good transfer signing. So Colorado supporters are likely feeling a little better now that they’ve learned about incoming winger Alexis Manyoma. But of course, that only really matters is Manyoma is any good.
A good indication of odds of whether Manyoma, the 22-year-old from Colombia, will a hit or or a miss is the recent history of Rapids signings and purchases from abroad. How well have foreign acquisitions gone in the recent past? And so I took a look. The ground rules for players I looked back at for this article are as follows:
I looked at players acquired (by loan or transfer) from outside the US.
I did not look at US-born players returning from a stint abroad. That excludes a bunch of ‘known quantity’ guys like Cole Bassett, Sam Vines, Reggie Cannon and Djordje Mihailovic.
I also did not include foreign players the Rapids scooped up in moves made within MLS. So no Aboubacar Keita or Kevin Cabrál or Gustavo Vallecilla. I also did not review foreign players acquired through MLS draft. No Moïse Bombito or Mohamed Omar here.
You could read this article as a scorecard of how the Rapids Front Office of Pádraig Smith, Fran Taylor, and new scouting director Alex Aldridge have been doing as of late. Or you could just read this as ‘you win some, you lose some’ – and by that I mean that some transfers are going to be amazing and others… less amazing. For the guys no longer with the Rapids, I’ll also do a short ‘where are they now?’ riff. Which, by the way, I love doing that. I can dive down dorky internet rabbit holes all day long – and since I’m on vacation right now, I will gladly do so. We’ll start with recent pickups and work backwards. Here’s 10 guys the Rapids signed from abroad, and how they did.
Ali Fadal
Date Acquired: 2/8/2025
Date of Departure: NA
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Free Transfer from Valencia CF (Spain)
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: Zero minutes
Grade: NG
Fadal was announced as a senior team acquisition, but coming on a free transfer and making the league minimum of $80,622 this year, he’s really more of young ‘stash him and see what happens’ pickup. For Rapids 2 this year in MLS Next Pro, he hasn’t seen much action - just 2 starts and 163 minutes. As evidenced by the lineup in the Rapids final match against Cruz Azul in Leagues Cup, he’s been passed in the depth chart by Sam Bassett and Wayne Fredrick and Sydney Wathuta and Alex Harris. But the kid is only 21 years old, so there’s still time for him to develop.
Lamine Diack
Date Acquired: 2/1/2024
Date of Departure: 6/30/2024
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Six-month loan with an option to buy
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 19 minutes.
Grade: D-
Diack, a native of Senegal, played 1384 for Turkish Superlig team Ankaragükü in 2022-23, and that apparently impressed French first-division team FC Nantes to sign him to a three-year deal. I guess they didn’t think he’d break into the first team so they pawned him off on Colorado, who … couldn’t make use of him either. Diack didn’t even play for R2; I assume there was a contractual problem that precluded him being ‘sent down to the minors.’ So he played a few minutes in garbage time and ran around at training and was shipped back to France in the summer of 2024.
All that could be chalked as an ‘oh well’ situation, except that Diack earned $864,500 in 2024 in guaranteed compensation. Was that a pro-rated-for-six-months amount ($432,250)? I dunno. Does it matter if the Rapids paid $45,500-a-minute or $22,750 a minute? Not really. Diack was a bust. The only reason he’s not an ‘F’ is that he was a loan and there was no transfer fee, so in comparison to other players (cough, cough, Kevin Cabrál) even though he was expensive, the cost was off the books quickly. So a fiasco, but not a clusterfuck or an albatross.1
Post-Rapids, Nantes loaned him again as soon as the Rapids sent him back. And so Diack spent 2024-25 as a defensive midfielder with another Turkish club called Hatayspor. Diack played 1634 minutes, and Hatayspor conceded 74 goals, second-worst in the league, en route to being relegated.2 To start the 2025-2026 Euro season, Diack is with Sion in the Swiss first division – on loan again, as Nantes hold his rights until June of 2026.
Sidnei Tavares
Date Acquired: 8/3/2023
Date of Departure: 2/23/2024
Loan/Transfer and Fee: 11 month loan from FC Porto
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 299 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists
Grade: C-
On August 3, 2023, the Rapids sat 2-10-10 (WTL), putting them firmly in the bottom of the Western Conference with little hope of recovery. The team would make five summer moves, either with hopes of righting the ship or with an eye towards 2024. Colorado would sign Daniel Chacón, Andrew Gutman, Rafa Navarro, Sidnei Tavares, and Luis Diaz. Only Rafa would stick around to start 2024.
Tavares was a 21-year-old native of Portugal who had spent his youth days at the Leicester City academy. In 2022 he was playing for FC Porto B, and they loan him out to Colorado. Oddly, the Rapids gave him the #10 kit number, which, considering he was young, a loanee, and a box-to-box midfielder, made no sense to me. On September 5 the Rapids fired Robin Fraser, and it was inevitable that, unless young Sidnei set the world on fire, whomever the Rapids brought in as their new manager would be remaking the team in his image. Alas, Sidnei did not set the world on fire. I barely remember him touching the ball.
After departing Colorado back to the Porto U23 team for 2023, he was loaned to Moreirense in the Portuguese first division in 2024, where he played 1296 minutes, getting a goal and an assist. That was impressive enough for Blackburn Rovers in the English Championship to pay $2.3 million for Tavares on June 20. Clearly he’s a useful player, but he came to Colorado at the wrong time. Oh well.
Rafael Navarro
Date Acquired: 7/10/2023
Date of Departure: NA
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Loan from 2023 to 2024, Transfer 7/24/2024 for $3.5 million
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 5599 min, 25 goals, 4 assists
Grade: A
Rafa’s been exceptional for the Rapids. He scored just one goal at the end of 2023 as the very bad Colorado Rapids skidded through their worst season in history, a 5-12-17 nightmare (0.79 points per game) that resulted in a pretty dramatic offseason makeover. That next year, though, Rafa bloomed with Djordje Mihailovic and Cole Bassett in support, and the Rapids leadership did what some thought was unthinkable: they whipped out their checkbooks and paid Brazilian club Palmieras a lot of cash to permanently acquire Navarro.
The way this move went down – a loan with an option to buy – has been a very common Pádraig Smith tactic the past few years. And that’s good. Under his predecessor Paul Bravo, the foreign transfer moves that were made weren’t particularly costly, but they were busts. I’m talking about Luis Solignac ($600K transfer fee) and Juan Ramirez ($2 million transfer fee) and Gabriel Torres (unknown - somewhere between $100 and 500k). Had they been loans, maybe we’d think more fondly of the Bravo era. That said, clubs are only willing to entertain ‘loan-with-an-option-to-buy’ moves for a certain caliber of player. Big players are not going to come under those terms.
Anyhow, Rafa’s a win all around. And if his numbers aren’t as good in the next 12 months, I think we will likely point to the quality of the players around him as the culprit, and not the man himself.
Marko Ilić
Date Acquired: 2/17/2023
Date of Departure: 3/8/2024
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Loan till 7/14/2023; Transfer fee of $800K
Minutes Played / G-xG3 / Clean Sheets: 1,170 minutes, +6.20 G-xG, 2 clean sheets
Grade: F
To end the 2022 season in which a mediocre Rapids team finished 10th in the Western Conference, Colorado had William Yarbrough, Abraham Rodriguez, and Clint Irwin in goal. Yarbs had been solid in 2021 but his 2022 wasn’t great, and so the front office was searching for a solution. I guess somebody fell in love with Marko Ilić because they went after him on loan as the replacement for Yarbrough, or at least to challenge him for the job, paying $800K for a transfer and handing him a deal for two and a half years, making $442,850 for his first year, 2023.
Yarbrough mostly held his job for the first part of the year and played well in 2023. Ilić was handed a bunch of games in 2023 - he was being paid like a starting GK, but he was unable to convince the Rapids coaching staff that he was better than Yarbrough. In the 13 games he did play, he was good somedays, bad on others. Overall, his G-xG was second-worst in the league. He allowed 32 goals. His PSxG expected he would allow just 23. In 5 of his 13 games, Ilić allowed in 0.6-2.0 more goals in the game than the PSxG model expected. Oops.4
From a player acquisition standpoint, Ilić was a train wreck. Acquired on loan from KV Kortrijk in the Belgian 1st division, by the time his six-month loan was up, Ilić had only played in 3 US Open Cup games and 3 MLS regular season games. That meant that the Rapids neither had a large enough sample size to evaluate him for a buy. But also – Colorado couldn’t figure out whether Yarbrough was going to hang on to the starting job, either. So the front office just decided to invest the money to lock up a keeper they thought was starting-caliber for the rest of 2023 and 2024. And they didn’t really have a ‘Plan B’, so they paid Kortrijk a transfer fee, and played both goalkeepers for the rest of 2023. Ilić was bad, Yarbrough was meh, and the Rapids needed a full rebuild to end 2023, including at goalkeeper.
Colorado signed Zack Steffen on January 4, 2024, and that made both Yarbrough and Ilić redundant. They sent Yarbs to SJ for a draft pick5, and loaned Ilić to Norwegian side Sarpsborg in March of 2024. In July, 2024, the Rapids sold Ilić to Red Star Belgrade for just $150,000, taking a hefty loss for their speculation and disappointment.
This whole deal was a debacle. The timing, the spending, all of it was a mess. It was all probably avoidable if Colorado could have worked out a 12-month loan, or just decided after six-months that Ilić wasn’t gonna be the guy. They tried to hedge their bet and hold onto the promising goalkeeper to see if he might be the guy. And that meant that they paid too much for a not-good player. He was, in fact, not the guy. Oops.
Ilić didn’t really suffer though. Red Star started him in goal in 2023-2024 on their run to the Serbian League championship, then played him in four Champions League matches to start 2024. He was shellacked by both Monaco and Barcelona for 5 goals each, including conceding a brace to Robert Lewandowski (!) In the winter he was transferred back to Kortrijk on a free, played a few matches, and lost his job. Kortrijk were relegated to end the 24/25 season, and they start 2025 in the Belgian second division. Lord only knows if they’ll chance it to give Ilić the starting job again.
Andres Maxsö
Date Acquired: 1/27/2023
Date of Departure: NA
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $750K, Contract thru 2026, Club Opt for 2027
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 8144 minutes, 3 goals, 1 assist
Grade: B-
Maxsø’s been a solid and dependable centerback for Colorado for three straight years. Knock on whatever, he’s been healthy and dependable. No, he’s not as fast as Moïse Bombito. No, his out-of-the-back distribution isn’t as good as Drew Moor. No, he doesn’t clear or head balls like vintage Lalas Abubakar. Yes, he is a designated player, earning $1,392,500 this season.
I mean, I think a DP centerback is expected to be top-five at his position, and he’s not. He is pretty consistent, and probably above average for MLS centerbacks, and at the time the Rapids signed him in 2023, that was pretty good. In the context of ‘Colorado developed and sold Auston Trusty, and they developed and sold Moïse Bombito, and for a fraction of the cost they got Andreas Maxsø’, this is a good acquisition. If the barometer we’re applying is ‘DPs should win trophies or make all-star teams’, then no, this is not a good acquisition. Yeah, I’d rather have Walker Zimmerman or Aaron Long, especially at that price. But I’m OK with Andreas Maxsø.
Alex Gersbach
Date Acquired: 1/30/2023
Date of Departure: 2/23/2024
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $350K
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 261 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists
Grade: D
At the risk of saying something only six people will understand, Alex Gersbach is the Declan Wynne of Mike DaFontes.6 When Colorado started 2023, they had a left back depth chart of Steven Beitashour, Anthony Markanich, Sebastian Anderson, and Alex Gersbach. All were so bad they went out and got Andrew Gutman to plug the hole.7 It really says something when the entire left back core is bad – and you’re fourth on the LB depth chart. All that for $270,433 in salary.
Gersbach, coming over from Grenoble Foot 38 in the French second division, was signed to a three-year deal, but was disappointing enough that he was waived after just one season in the post-2023/post-Robin Fraser purge. He spent 2024 in Sweden with a team called Kalmar, and then went home to his native Australia to play for Western Sydney Wanderers for 2025.
Conor Ronan
Date Acquired: 1/23/2023
Date of Departure: NA
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $619,000
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 5,283 minutes, 2 goals, 9 assists
Grade: B
It’s unfair that, because he came from Wolverhampton, and because he came after Jack Price, and because he’s a feisty diminutive midfielder, I have always thought of Conor Ronan as ‘Off-brand Jack Price.’ But that’s basically what he is: Jack Price without the amazing crossing and corner kicking. That’s still pretty good.
In 2023, with Price hurt, Ronan alongside Cole Bassett and both Bryan Acosta and Ralph Priso held down the midfield in a fairly disastrous in which the team could not generate goals to save their life. With the arrival of Djordje Mihailovic and the ascendancy of Ollie Larraz, coupled with an injury, Ronan saw less time in 2024. This year, Colorado added Josh Atencio and Ted Ku-Dipietro, further nibbling into Ronan’s time. He’s been good - a good motor and tidy on the ball, and generally good passing, although not as incisive as you might need to beat the best teams in MLS. Ronan was a good addition at a good time.
I imagine the 2023 Rapids without Ronan would have been absolutely putrid. Remember that as bad as things were that year, Colorado were still only the second-worst team in the league that year. Toronto were five points worse.
Should I review Felipe Gutierrez? Who was Felipe Gutierrez again?
Never mind. Let’s not review Felipe Gutierrez. But he did, in fact, exist, and play 840 minutes for the ‘Pids in 2022.
Max Alves
Date Acquired: 1/6/2022
Date of Departure: 1/24/2024
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $1 million
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 1567 minutes, 1 goal, 1 assist (plus if I remember, another goal in Concacaf Champions League play)
Grade: F- times a million
I have almost no mental energy to re-examine how irrationally mad it makes me that a guy played for the Rapids, sucked, was paid by Brazilian bookies to draw a yellow card, and did so, besmirching the reputation of the game and his teammates in exchange for the puny sum of just $12,000. But I’ll try. To start, I will copypasta what I wrote in 2023.
Fuck this guy with a rusty broken goalpost tube. The absolute unmitigated gaul to come to a team in America from Brazil and then *allegedly* engage in match-fixing for some Brazilian mobsters who only paid you $10,000 to potentially ruin your whole career and make teams avoid you like unshielded enriched plutonium. What was Max even thinking? When he was on the pitch, he was decent; dribbly in a fun way, but not a great passer or finisher. He’s never playing for Colorado again though, and he’s also still taking up a roster slot for the foreseeable future – innocent till proven guilty and all that. No word on if he’s being paid while charges are still pending, but my guess is he is. So again, fuck this guy.
It’s not the front office’s fault they couldn’t tell that a player was both dumb and had low moral character. Matt Pollard, who is a good human being, argued with me at the time that growing up in Brazil, there’s a lot of poverty, and sometimes people kind of have a ‘I gotta do what it takes to get by’ attitude. That’s fair, but also – Max basically ruined any career in MLS he might have ever had with one terrible decision. Also, there are people who would prefer to follow the law and be poor rather than do illegal things to get a few extra bucks.
The gambling scandal broke on May 10, 2023, six starts and 663 minutes into the season for Alves. Max had just one goal, zero assists that year. The thing about Pete Rose betting on baseball is that he was Pete Rose. Max Alves bet on soccer, and he wasn’t Pete Rose.
In 2022, Max *wasn’t yet* a scoundrel for betting on soccer. He was just a disappointment. In my midfielder review of 2022, I wrote:
He was a forward harasser; a midfield connector; a dribbly box-attacker; a midfield line-cutter. The trained eye says he’s an attacking mid that likes to dribble at defenders and shoot his shot. Fbrefs stats are filled with green bars indicating he’s a good passer and great at Clearances. ASA’s numbers say he’s a turnover machine that’s pretty average at everything except defending.
Honestly, what the hell does all of this mean? I have no idea.
But I also concluded my review with this:
It was Max’s first year. He has time to grow and develop. He’s only 21. We have him for four years. It was probably foolish to expect he’d light the world on fire in year one. Maybe all that shuffling around - in the lineup, out of the lineup; left-right-middle; forward/central - hurt his ability to settle in. And if you look at his final four games of the season, he got 230 minutes, he had more touches, and he passed quite well - 40 for 43 and 31 for 34 against FC Dallas and Austin, with a total of 10 Progressive Passes. So he finished strong. All signs point to a better 2023?
Nope. Turns out – this was in hindsight an awful move by the FO.
Whatever became of Max?At the conclusion of the investigation in Brazil,8 many of the other players implicated in the scheme were fined, suspended from playing in Brazil, or even permanently banned. Max was not one of them. I think it was understood that Max was guilty, but that because the Brazilian courts jurisdiction did not extend to the US, it would be problematic to charge or fine him. Plus his banishment from MLS might have been seen as punishment enough. Max returned to him home club, Cuiabá, for 2024, where his club finished last and was relegated from Brazil’s first division. This year he has 1 assist; Cuiabá are in eighth after 21 matches.
Lucas Esteves
Date Acquired: 8/6/2021
Loan/Transfer and Fee: Twelve-month loan with option to buy, loan extended by six months on 7/1/2022
Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 3,197 minutes, 2 goals, 2 assists
Grade: C
Esteves, as I noted in the season recap for 2022, was the replacement for Sam Vines when the homegrown from Pueblo, Colorado left for Royal Antwerp in Belgium. As a replacement, Esteves was ok. His passing wasn’t quite up to snuff; he had a Passing G+ of -0.97 in 2022. As a loan move with no transfer fee required, and considering he earned $426,092 in 2022, he wasn’t that expensive for Colorado. He held down the left back spot through a not-great 2022 season.
Colorado’s biggest issue in 2022 was probably a below-average midfield that struggled to stay healthy, and so I don’t really think Esteves was the issue. Ultimately, his home club Palmeiras (same club as Rafa Navarro!) asked for $1 million to transfer him, and Colorado balked at the price, and Esteves returned to Brazil at the end of 2022.
In 2023 … Colorado were a fucking mess. And left back was a part of that mess.
The Rapids started either six or seven different players at LB: the aforementioned Gersbach, Anderson, Beitashour, Markanich, and Gutman, PLUS I think Moïse Bombito and Keegan Rosenberry. What if Colorado had paid the measly $1 million for Esteves? They probably still would have been bad: Kellyn Acosta was sold, Jack Price was hurt, Diego Rubio was hurt, and therefore the Rapids were trying to play average-quality football with a replacement-level midfield. But they wouldn’t have been *as* bad. They would have had a solid dependable left back.
Esteves has gone on to a fairly unremarkable career in the Brazilian Série A. He played for Atlético Goianiense, Fortaleza, Vitória, and is now with Grêmio. All are effectively mid-table clubs in Brazil.
…
If we sorted the last ten Rapids foreign acquisitions into four piles titled
Success!
So-so!
Fail!
Epic Fail!
here’s what you get:
Success! – Navarro, Ronen, Maxsø
So-so! – Fadal, Tavares, Esteves
Fail! – Gersbach
Epic Fail! – Diack, Ilić, Max Alves
The odds of success for Alexis Manyoma, then, are better than a scratcher lottery ticket, but worse than betting on black at the roulette table. That said, considering all the effort I spent screaming about Max Alves, maybe I shouldn’t end this article by talking about taking bets.
Definition of Terms: Rafa Marquez for NY/NJ Metrostars was a clusterfuck. The final contract year of Tim Howard was an albatross.
He played alongside former Minnesota United and Chicago Fire centerback Francisco Calvo, who was great when he was great, and turrible when he was turrible.
Goals minus Expected Goals. A negative number means the player concedes fewer goals than the advance model would expect, which pretty much means the keeper is saving better than his peers. Zero would be ‘average’ or as expected. A positive number here means: not good.
An earlier version of this article had some stats indicating poor performance that belonged to Zack Steffen erroneous charged to Marko Ilić. I replaced those numbers (Steffen was bad in 3 games out of 13) with Ilić’s numbers (Ilić was bad in 5 games out of 13), and Ilić’s numbers are worse.
What’s William Yarbrough doing these days, you ask? He started 19 games for San Jose Earthquakes in 2024. They let him go to end the season, and he hung out waiting for a phone call I guess. With Drake Callender out with a hernia, Inter Miami needed some bench depth. So in May, they signed our pal William Yarbrough. Tell me there’s a better life than being paid $150K to sit on the bench, train, and hang out with Lionel Messi.
Declan Wynne was acquired in 2018 as Anthony Hudson began his brief reign as head coach. Wynne wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t good either. Mike DaFonte was a very successful left back in USL in 2016, and the Rapids took a flyer on him for 2017 under Pablo Mastroeni. DaFonte was pretty terrible. Whatever image the term ‘rash challenge’ conjures in your head, that was about 50% of his tackles. Handed the starting job to begin 20217, by midseason he was on the bench, and he was quietly returned to USL for 2018.
If you read that link you’ll see I liked Anthony Markanich very much. I was annoyed they sold him. He’s currently having a stellar year for Minnesota United. Which annoys me even more.
Fun fact: the last press release the Rapids ever issued about Max on January 8, 2024, states “The 2023 MLS investigation regarding Max Alves is open and ongoing. MLS placed Alves on administrative leave pending the investigation and he remained on leave at the time of transfer abroad.”
To my knowledge, nothing was ever announced or concluded by the investigation. I can’t even be sure MLS did much of an investigation, to be honest. MLS, I assume, was just glad the damage was contained to Brazilian bookies and one MLS player, and as soon as he was 10,000 miles away, were content to forget all about it. Or to be more fair, since Brazilian Justice Department officials didn’t indite or punish Max, MLS didn’t really feel a need to do anything. Or maybe there wasn’t enough evidence to convict, but there was a presumption of guilt, and thats why everything was kind of just swept under the rug. Is this justice?