[ad_1]
Minnesota United have sold Argentinian midfielder Emanuel Reynoso to Club Tijuana, cutting ties with a player who has not appeared for the team since going AWOL in March.
Reynoso arrived as a club-record $5 million signing from Boca Juniors in 2020 impressed in his first season with the team. He set a single-season MLS record for the most assists in a single post-season campaign (seven) and looked set to become a centrepiece of Minnesota’s team going forward.
He starred on the field but a series of off-field incidents began to sour his time with the team and he has barely featured under new head coach Eric Ramsay. The club did not disclose Reynoso’s outgoing transfer fee but Minnesota-based Pioneer Press report that the MLS side will receive a seven-figure fee, if performance qualifiers are met.
Minnesota may only receive around a fifth of the fee forked out four years earlier but they do open up another Designated Player spot on the roster, allowing the front office to strengthen Ramsay’s options this summer.
Emanuel Reynoso’s tumultuous time in MLS
Minnesota supporters will look back fondly on Reynoso’s on-field talents, scoring 24 goals and providing 37 assists across the 95 MLS games in which he featured. He powered the team’s 2020 Western Conference finals run and was one of the league’s most creative players on his day.
By the end, however, those days were increasingly rare. A string of disciplinary problems ensured that he missed huge chunks of the team’s campaigns.
In December 2021 he was arrested on charges of making threats with a gun and beating a 16-year-old minor in his hometown of Cordoba, Argentina. He would go on to spend more than a week in jail. He then failed to return for preseason training with the team in January 2023, missing ten MLS games before finally returning in May.
He went AWOL again in 2024, failing to attend a green card appointment in Argentina and refusing to return to Minnesota until early May. Shortly after his return to the US a video emerged online which appeared to show Reynoso posing alongside a man with a gun and a large bag of cash. The incident sparked an MLS investigation which is still believed to be ongoing.
[ad_2]
