In A Surprising Move, Rapids Wave Yaya Toure

Earlier today Colorado released news that they had waved young homegrown attacker Dantouma 'Yaya' Toure.  Toure was still coming back from the ACL injury he suffered late last summer and was not yet cleared to play, which makes this unusual timing for the move.  Generally teams don't waive players who are recovering from injury. even if they don't have a future with the club, as the right thing to do is to still help the player get fully healthy before letting him go. 

I was going back to Twitter to get the statement from earlier today from the Rapids about this move, but 20 seconds ago Brendan Ploen of the Denver Post tweeted this statement he just got from Padraig Smith:

So I guess that answers that.  Hopefully whatever is going on in Toure's life turns out ok and he can get back to playing at the level he was at before the injury.

You Get a HG Contract! And you get a HG contract!

Coming off a day with two homegrown signings the Rapids decided to double up and sign two more homegrown players today!  The newest signings are both "trade and signs" in that we traded for the homegrown rights for both of them from other team and signed them as our homegrown players.  Which, yeah, don't seem to make much sense but MLS is going to MLS.

The first move was to send $75K in GAM to DC for defender Michael Edwards.  He's returning to the U.S> after playing in Wolfsburg's reserves after leaving the DC academy.  Depending on performance DC could get additional GAM in the deal.  Edwards signed a 2 year deal with 2 additional option years.  He had one look from the U.S. UJ-17s back in 2016.

After that the Rapids doubled up by sending $50K in GAM to RBNY for the rights to winger Dantouma "Yaya" Toure.  Again there's an incentive in the contract that could result in more GAM for RBNY, and they retain the rights to a small percentage of any transfer fee the Rapids may get in the future.  16 year old Toure signed a 4 year deal with 2 additional option years.  He has played regularly for the U-16 and U-17 U.S. National Teams.

With this week's signings the Rapids now have 12 homegrown players on the roster.  The squad's average age is 24.6 years old with a median at 25.  This is a crazy young squad right now which has its advantages and disadvantages.  We're going to need a lot of leadership from our older guys like Yarbrough and Moor.