Two years ago, Sporting Kansas City winger Daniel Salloi had settled into a peculiar routine, one he hid from the team that employed him. After morning practices at a state-of-the-art training facility, he would drive to a local field to meet some friends.
Just to play the game as he remembered it.
Inevitably, at some point during the pick-up matches, someone could not help but ask.
Don’t you have your season going on?
Salloi had come to these fields to escape that conversation. To escape, in retrospect, the truth. His day job had become less freeing, instead more like a burden. He dreaded going in every day.
These off-site scrimmages, he said, became a thing “because I needed to have fun again.”
The Daniel Salloi Story is a look-at-him-now revival story of a player who worried his career was slipping away and then grabbed it back — a model for the slumping athlete with no apparent way out. His adversity came not off the field but right smack dab in the middle of it, thousands there to witness its real-time unfolding.
Let’s spoil the comeback: Salloi and Sporting KC have agreed to a four-year contract extension that will run through the 2026 season. It was formally announced Wednesday.
The agreement, which arrives one season after Salloi finished as an MLS MVP finalist, follows a decade-long trend of the organization locking up its own.
But there’s where the similarities in Salloi’s story end.
Six months after those pick-up games — those cues that, yes, he still loved the game itself — Salloi picked up his phone. He dialed his agent, merged that to a three-way call with Sporting manager Peter Vermes and kept his opening line succinct.
Let me go.
His only way out of this, he figured.
“It’s a funny thing looking back that I’m here signing a contract extension and an amazing deal because I remember that conversation,” Salloi said in an interview with The Star. “It is crazy how life can change in two seconds.”
It did not change in the snap of the fingers, though, which is part of what makes his journey so captivating. All professional athletes endure slumps. The longer they last, the harder to climb out, and it had become a mountain for Salloi.
Salloi, a Hungarian native, stands as proof that the game requires confidence every bit as much as it does talent, something those of us on the sideline too often ignore. He is a reflection as athletes as human, possessing deeper layers than the numbers.
Because his talent never changed. The production sure as heck did.
Salloi enjoyed a breakout year in 2018, with 11 goals and seven assists. He clinched a playoff series that fall with a no-look goal against Real Salt Lake — and I’ll never pass up the chance to remind you his manager called it a forget you goal, using a bit of different language. Could there have been a more confident take?
How did that player lose it all? And if that player can lose it all so quickly, who is immune?
That’s one lesson here.
“You have moments where you’re just hating everything around you and even people who have nothing to do with what’s happening to you,” Salloi said. “And you just start blaming everything and everyone. You question many things.”
It started bad in 2019, and then it only grew worse. As he struggled early, he found that just about everyone, even those he passed on the streets of the Country Club Plaza, had some sort of advice. He took it all, and then ignored it all, and before he knew it, two years of his career were gone. He scored one goal in 2019 and 2020 combined and doubted whether he’d ever again have the chance to get it back.
This tale has a comeback, you already know — Salloi had 16 goals and eight assists in 2021 and was named an MLS MVP finalist — but some don’t. Many experience the slump. Many miss the rebound.
“Obviously you need luck, and you need timing, but at the end of the day, you need to push through situations,” Salloi said. “When you’re down, you never know how long it will last — it may be a couple of weeks, a couple months, or maybe it’s a couple of years. That was as interesting two years for me. But the (next) year, 2021, it changed my life.”
Vermes rebuffed the transfer/loan request on that phone call, it should be obvious by now. He insisted his belief in Salloi never wavered long-term, and he told him he envisioned a larger role for 2021. The organization deserves credit for that. But the two sides came to an agreement before ending the call — if the season would start off like the last two had concluded, they’d look for a move in the summer.
Salloi arrived at preseason, in his words, “with the best mentality” I could ever have.
That’s the other lesson here — that the fickle nature of sports can sometimes swing in your direction, too.
Salloi all but begged out, and now he’s signing to stay.
His contract was set to expire at the end of the season. The way the world of soccer works, he could have agreed to a pre-contract with a team in a different league earlier this summer, securing his future and making a reality a dream he once had to play in Europe. He had interest — from leagues in Spain, France, Portugal and others — but ultimately that interest was one-sided.
“I’m staying home,” he told them.
Kansas City is not home, not literally, but he’s grown to call it such. There’s another intriguing piece of his odyssey.
Salloi arrived in Kansas City from Hungary as a high school foreign exchange student in 2014. He came alone on a several-hour flight and did not see his parents for the next nine months. Sporting KC placed him in its academy, meaning Salloi’s first professional contract was technically as a homegrown player, a wink from Vermes to the MLS rulebook.
He thought he might stay a couple of years before bolting for Europe. If that opportunity had come in 2019-2020, he would have sprinted toward it.
It came now. He passed.
Let’s use his words: It’s crazy how life can change.
