I don’t know if this is a responsible thing to be doing.
As the Sebastián Driussi saga continues on — Will the designated player stay at Austin FC or move to River Plate? Will he report to training Monday like his teammates will be? — Albanian winger/striker Myrto Uzuni, a 29-year-old currently playing for Granada in Spain’s second division, is rumored to be coming to Verde.
(By the way, Driussi is conspicuously absent from the team’s Instagram video documenting players reporting back to St. David’s Performance Center this morning. Just sayin’.)
There are caveats built into this rumor, of course. There’s a reported $10 million transfer fee that Austin FC sporting director Rodolfo Borrell would have to meet, even though his estimated Transfermarkt value is around $5 million. Either would certainly put him in the designated player stratosphere, only gettable if Driussi (or, much more unlikely, Osman Bukari) was headed out the door.
He’s also reportedly holding out from training — perhaps to engineer a new deal with Granada, who is trying to make a run to get back into La Liga. (As of Saturday afternoon, they were in eighth place but only five points off the league leader.)
Also, though he’s capable of playing left wing, which is likely where he’d slot in at Austin, he’s more of a second striker or even first striker, and judging from his numbers and his video highlights — we’ll get to those momentarily — he appears to be a scorer first and a facilitator second.
Here’s my theory on how this rumor has come to be: Uzuni was not meant as a Driussi replacement, but rather, a Plan B that Borrell was sniffing out if the Brandon Vázquez signing didn’t work out. Now that Vázquez is Verde, Uzuni isn’t a target for Borrell anymore, but his agent registered all that prior interest in his client and is now levying it against Granada to force a better deal. Letting the Spanish press know that Austin is interested (or was interested, as the case may be) would be part of that overall plan.
But let’s do the exercise all the same.
