As transfer offers flood in, Sporting KC’s Gianluca Busio likely soon on the move
One summer morning in 2017, Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes drove to the Raphael Hotel for breakfast with a 15-year-old academy player and his parents. As they enhanced the foundation for his first professional contract, Gianluca Busio had been nervous to reveal that his long-term goals resided overseas: How do you tell the team about to sign you that you’d like to play somewhere else?
Well, you just say it.
“One day,” Busio finally revealed, “I’d like to go to Europe.”
That day is near.
Sporting KC and Busio are working through the framework of a transfer that’s increasingly likely to occur this summer. The two sides are reticent to call the move a certainty — what in sports is? — but European teams have made offers for Busio, now 19, and the club and player agree on the best timing.
Now.
“I’m not forcing my way out. It’s not like that,” Busio said. “It’s mutual that we both talked about this from the beginning. This has always been the stepping stone.”
Vermes has the same reply he gave Busio four years ago during that breakfast meal on the Country Club Plaza. We’re here to help, not hold you back.
In fact, this has long been part of Sporting’s big-picture plan for its academy — develop from within, receive contributions from young players and, when possible, turn a profit.
But damn if it ain’t difficult.
Sporting enters the weekend just one point shy of the Western Conference lead, yet it’s on the verge of selling its teenage sensation, a player who entered the academy system at age 14. Busio has sat only 18 minutes all season and has operated as perhaps the team’s most valuable player in 2021.
“If you ask me if I want to sell Busio, I’d say no; I want him to be here,” Vermes said. “But I also understand Busio has an ambition to go overseas, and I respect that.
“All of my decisions here have always been long-term, not short-term. I’ve presented my vision to ownership about how this pro player pathway would work. Part of that is there are players who are going to be sold. This is just a validation of that.”
When speaking to The Star separately this week, Busio and Vermes alternated between phrases that indicated an inevitability to a summer transfer and pausing to correct their language with a qualifier that nothing is set in stone.
The latter is currently true — there’s no deal reached or even a landing spot settled. But the momentum indicates the former will rest on the side of accuracy by summer’s end.
There are several European teams to either submit Sporting KC an offer or their intentions to proffer one during the upcoming summer window, multiple sources told The Star.
The most noteworthy attention has come from Serie A, the top league in Italy. Busio’s father is from Italy, and Busio holds an Italian passport, easing the logistics. He acknowledged Serie A makes “a ton of sense,” but he’s not limited to the league in which he grew up watching. If another good offer comes, he will go.
The asking price? It’s somewhere north of $5 million, and Sporting is seeking additional incentives to sweeten the pot, sources said. Appearances. Goals. National team appearances. Things of that nature.
That number could fluctuate depending on a number of stipulations. Absent incentives, for example, the price could grow. Or Sporting could agree to the lower end of its range in exchange for a sizable sell-on fee. In such a scenario, if Busio is transferred again, Sporting would net some of that fee, as well.
Given the number of teams interested — which also include clubs in the top flights in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — Sporting has not advanced talks with any single entity that makes clear how the situation will conclude.
But that’s coming. The transfer window for those leagues open July 1 and close Aug. 31, and just like American sports, deadlines have the tendency to prompt urgency. Multiple offers in its hands, Sporting will be operating over the next two months with the luxury of leverage.
To an extent.
Busio’s contract runs through the 2022 season, leaving three European transfer windows before its conclusion — this summer, this winter or next summer. European teams prefer to build their teams in the summer, directly before their seasons begin, lowering the potential price in the winter. And because he will be just six months shy of the expiration of his contract in summer 2022, Busio would then be allowed to sign with a team for free, leaving Sporting empty-handed, a scenario it encountered with Erik Palmer-Brown.
The time, in other words, is now.
But it wouldn’t necessarily mean his time in Kansas City is up.
A year ago, the Philadelphia Union transferred then-teenager Brenden Aaronson to Red Bull Salzburg, then retained his services through the remainder of the MLS season as part of that agreement. That arrangement would certainly have some attraction for second-place Sporting, and in his interview with The Star, Busio expressed an intrigue by the possibility.
“I was made here,” Busio said. “It’s not like I don’t like where I’m at. It’s not a situation where I hate the club and I want to get out of here. Obviously I want what’s best for me, but we’ve had a good relationship for four years. I trust them. They trust me.”
Busio’s ideal destination
At just 14 years of age, Busio left his family behind to pursue all of this. Moved to a city in which he had no friends or relatives, some 1,000 miles from home in Greensboro, N.C.
He hated it here at first.
Hated it.
But his mom, who had been reluctant to let him leave home, now told him he had to stick it out. Best advice he’d ever received, he’ll tell you now.
He blossomed in Sporting’s pathway. Grew to love it. Just 89 days after his 15th birthday, he inked a first-team contract, the second youngest signing in MLS history. The following preseason, Sporting coaches developed a blueprint for his track.
A month later, they shredded it.
“His acceleration was so fast, I was astounded,” Vermes said.
At 16, he started a match, the third youngest in league history. He scored three months later, the second youngest to do that.
That’s all to say this: Busio has thrived in the environment in which Sporting has provided, and so as he seeks his next destination, he first provides a CliffsNotes version.
“Hopefully I can get something close to like this,” he said, “because it’s a pretty special place here.”
He wants the family-like atmosphere Sporting has provided. But there’s more to it than that, of course. The finances will play an obvious factor, though he says he’s leaving that to the trust of his agent, Mike Senkowski.
At the top of his priorities, Busio keeps it simple. He wants to play. After all, he’s growing and improving in Kansas City, so why move to a club that will just turn around and loan him out?
That preference might eliminate the brand names. At one point during the process, he’d learned Juventus had interest. A situation that would have excited most teenagers, he worried about a lack of real opportunity.
His ideal spot isn’t a Juventus.
It’s the move before a Juventus.
“I know I’m going to have to prove myself again. I think here, I’ve had to work for my spot, but they gave me a chance,” Busio said. “I want to go somewhere I have a chance to play.
“I’m not saying they’re going to guarantee me a first-team start every game. But I want to go somewhere where I can really show them and try to push for a spot. If that’s a lower or mid-level team, that’s something I’m open to. If that’s a team playing in the relegation battle, but they have a plan for me and take pride in putting time into trying to help me, I think that’s something I’d look forward to doing.”
What it means for Sporting KC
Ideally, this situation comes up a lot — Sporting KC is talking about selling a player during a season in which it occupies a post near the top of the standings. Sure, that runs counter to other American sports, like the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL in which if you’re in contention late, you look to add, not subtract.
In reality, Vermes and Sporting made this decision nearly a decade ago, long before breakfast with the Busios. Selling a player for this price range is a coup, a feather in the cap for an academy system built from the ground up.
But it will sting in the moment.
“I hate losing the player,” Vermes said. “I don’t know if we’re going to, but if that’s the scenario, of course it hurts. It changes a lot of things. But when you embark on the pro player pathway where you’re developing players from within, that’s inevitably going to happen.”
So what’s the advantage? It’s multi-faceted.
Sporting is fulfilling a promise to help facilitate a player’s dream. Busio has been thinking about playing in Europe since “well, forever,” he said. They were transparent about helping him get there.
Sporting’s embrace not only aids its culture but could attract others like him. His path is well-known to perspective academy prospects who might want to follow.
And, oh, yeah, there’s the money. Sporting will recoup a large portion of its overall academy investment. It can pat itself on the back — or it can reinvest.
It can reverse some of the funds back into the academy or use it on other facilities improvements. Or, more likely, it will look to replenish the roster. It can turn a portion of the fee into general allocation money, which, in short, swells the team’s salary cap. It can utilize the funds on an incoming transfer. Or transfers.
Perhaps a figure such as $6 million would be split into three players at $2 million apiece. For reference, Sporting has only twice bought a player for that amount in its history — striker Alan Pulido and midfielder Gadi Kinda.
While the offers come in for Busio, they’re likely to go out, too. Sporting saw this coming more than a year ago, when they received offers hovering around $3 million for Busio. They waited. Thought the value would grow. Their search will be active in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, the beat of the season marches on. Sporting will travel to Portland on Saturday, offering Busio his first ever appearance at Providence Park.
And likely his last.
Even if that’s far from his mind. The same quality that has helped Busio excel on the field in his teenager years is exhibited throughout the process —a sense of calm.
“These guys built me to the player I am now,” Busio said. “I owe them as much as they owe me. I owe them a lot, and that’s me showing up every day and working hard.
“Sporting will always be in my heart, however long I play here. I’ll always watch the games no matter what. It’s still my team. It’s the team I’ve grown up with.”
This story was originally published June 17, 2021 at 10:57 AM with the headline "As transfer offers flood in, Sporting KC’s Gianluca Busio likely soon on the move."