Sporting KC adds standout striker from Tulsa. He has a connection to Kansas City
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Sporting KC signed Taylor Calheira from Tulsa on a 2.5-year deal with two club options.
- He scored 21 goals for Tulsa and earned MLS NEXT Pro Best XI honors in 2024 with NYCFC II.
- Sporting acquired his discovery rights from Minnesota for $50K in GAM.
Santiago Muñoz provided excellent play in backing up Dejan Joveljic last season, but Sporting Kansas City couldn’t find common ground with Santos Laguna to make the loan a permanent transfer.
That left a hole to fill behind Joveljic on Sporting KC’s depth chart.
Enter Taylor Calheira.
Sporting KC on Thursday announced the acquisition of Calheira from Tulsa FC of the USL Championship. The striker is signed to a 2 1/2-year deal with two club options to follow.
Calheira, 23, scored 21 goals across all competitions for Tulsa, which made the USL Championship’s playoff final before losing to on penalty kicks to the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. The previous season, Calheira starred for NYFCFC II, earning MLS Next Pro Best XI honors.
Calheira was selected in the third round of the 2024 MLS Superdraft by NYCFC and David Lee, who is now Sporting KC’s director of soccer operations and general manager.
“Taylor has an impressive goalscoring record at every level he has played from college to MLS NEXT Pro to the USL Championship,” Lee said in a Sporting KC news release. “Taylor has consistently shown high levels of performance as he stepped up to a higher level of competition each of the last three seasons, and he is now eager to prove himself in MLS. He will provide good instincts around the goal to go along with his clean technical ability and an excellent work rate.”
Calheira played collegiately at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), scoring 32 goals and providing 16 assists in 61 games. He was the America East Conference’s Striker of the Year in 2022 and 2023.
After being drafted, he scored 17 goals and provided six assists for NYCFC II in 2024.
According to Joseph Lowery of Backheeled, Sporting KC acquired Calheira’s “discovery rights” (an archaic MLS signing and scouting mechanism) from Minnesota United before acquiring him from FC Tulsa. In the Sporting news release, the club said that “trade” was $50,000 in General Allocation Money (GAM, in Major League Soccer parlance).
Last season, Sporting KC received $50,000 for the discovery rights to Minnesota United forward Mamadou Dieng, whom Minnesota signed from Hartford FC.
Calheira comes from a soccer family. He has a Brazilian passport and his father is an indoor soccer legend. Longtime KC Comets fans may remember Adauto Neto (or, by his full name, Adauto Neto Calheira). Neto spent most of his career in the indoor game, scoring over 107 goals in two separate stints with the Baltimore Blast. He also had 44 goals in 51 appearances with the Cleveland Force in the early 2000s and played for the Dallas Burn during the 2002 MLS season.
Calheira will be available for Sporting KC’s first match of the season on Saturday night, on the West Coast against the San Jose Earthquakes.
Daniel Sperry covers soccer for The Star. He can be reached at sperry.danielkc@gmail.com.