Silly Season Rumors: Sporting Chasing Winger Gerso Fernandes

Ask pretty much any Sporting Kansas City fan what the club's biggest positional need is this offseason, and most would probably respond with winger. Sporting Kansas City's wings struggled greatly in the 2016 season, through injuries, lack of form, and lack of production. The team though has already started that make over with Cameron Porter and Graham Zusi as the only players that regularly played the wing on the roster right now.

Today out of Portugal though came rumors of a new signing coming in. Twitter user, Tiago Estevao, a writer in Portugal was Tweeting about the game between Belenenses and Maritimo when Gerso Fernandes scored. When Tweeting about the goal, Estevao said that he was MLS bound. When pressed further, he mentioned that Sporting Kansas City were the leaders to land the winger but that other teams were interested.

The story has been picked up by other sources in Portugal and have mentioned the price for the Guinea-Bissau winger was 1.5 million Euros, almost $1.6 million, meaning a DP contract or using a lot of the new TAM money that MLS has allocated to teams would be needed to acquire him from Belenenses.

Greso, while not a prolific scorer would certainly fill a need for KC. Watching highlight videos (which obviously don't give the full story) he appears to have pace and dribbling skills, something that KC sorely lacked on the wing in 2016. He's started in eight of 12 games so far for Belenenses, who he joined from Estoril on a free transfer in late June, where he is teammates with former KC midfielder, Oriol Rosell. He's also still young at only 25, is basically in the prime of his career. If he can provide some further scoring punch he'd be a very good addition to Sporting. On the negative, he is only 5'7" tall, which will continue the trend of KC not having much in the way of a target in the front three, something the club really hasn't had since the trade of CJ Sapong after the 2014 season.

I haven't seen enough of him outside of his highlight videos to form enough of an opinion, but I'm intrigued by the rumor and like the idea that Kansas City is actually going to jump into the transfer market more instead of just looking for players that are out of contract.