Louis Munteanu: DC United's $7 Million Dollar Man

Is DC's second 2026 designated player more like Cucho Hernández or Erik Sorga?

I said I would take my time with offseason updates, but the news that DC United has signed Louis Munteanu as their second Designated Player has been rumored for so long it already feels like I’ve had months to consider it.

After signing Tai Baribo from within MLS as its replacement for Christian Benteke and first DP signing of the offseason, DC United has gone younger and outside the league with Louis Munteanu. He’s 23 years old and won the Golden Boot in the Romanian first division last season. The $7 million DC says they paid (other reporting says there are escalators that could bring it to $10 million) sets a new transfer fee record, as DC’s more famous acquisitions like Wayne Rooney and Christian Benteke (edit: oops, DC never announced a fee but apparently they paid $6m for Benteke!] came on free transfers.

Munteanu is a forward, not a winger or midfielder, so the clear intention seems to be to play a two forward system with Munteanu alongside or perhaps just underneath Tai Baribo. This raises a lot of questions about other players on the roster, but I’m going to save those for my long-threatened roster roundup article and for today, focus on Munteanu himself.

How He Got Here

After breaking into the lineup and scoring a few goals for his hometown team in Romania, he moved to the Italian club Fiorentina while still a teenager. He never broke into the senior team and at age 20 was loaned back to a different Romanian team, Farul Constanța, that was also his original club (don’t ask). He quickly broke into the starting lineup, scored goals at a decent clip, and also tallied some assists.

After two seasons of being loaned back, one of the top Romanian teams, CFR Cluj, bought him from Fiorentina for 1.8 million euros. His first season with Cluj, 2024-2025, was the one where he scored 23 goals and won the Golden Boot. This season, he’s played ten games’ worth of minutes for Cluj this season but his goalscoring is sharply down. More on that soon.

It’s also worth mentioning here that after his Golden Boot season, there was allegedly a lot of transfer interest from major European teams. Nantes in France’s Ligue 1 and Celtic from the Scottish Premiership were supposedly both after him. Supposedly last summer Celtic offered about what DC United just paid, but were rejected.

It’s very hard to know exactly what happened, both because “transfer rumors” on the Internet are so often nonsense and because it’s hard to find much intelligible coverage of the Romanian league, but it seems like what happened is that CFR Cluj got excited, thinking they could earn an absolutely massive profit on Munteanu by selling him for something more like double what DC just paid. But they asked for too much, the potential buyers moved on, and Munteanu was mad to find himself stuck for another year in the Romanian league instead of advancing his career.

Recently he’s also begun playing for the Romanian national team. He’s scored two goals in four games, which sounds great, but one was in a 7-1 victory over San Marino, so maybe there’s a bit of an asterisk there.

While some Romanian fans commenting about the deal say he’s a great player, there are also some very salty Cluj fans who feel he sulked and didn’t put in enough effort after the club failed to transfer him.

The Case Against This Move

There are three different areas of concern that will worry DC fans afraid of repeating the Erik Sorga experience.

The Romanian League Isn’t That Good

Speaking of Erik Sorga, did you know that when he was twenty years old, he scored 31 goals in 34 games in the Estonian first division? That’s an insane scoring rate. They didn’t call him the Estonian Messi for nothing! At least, I think they called him that? I googled “estonian messi” to fact-check this and the Google AI said some people Eric Sorga this and to prove it, it linked to...this very newsletter’s 2025 season preview.

Anyway, Sorga is a cautionary tale because DC United paid $500,000 for him after that 31 goal season and he went on to tally 1 goal for DC in 21 appearances and according to Wikipedia has been spending his prime athletic years playing in Azerbaijan and now Vietnam.

Sorga was playing for by far the best team in a division where many players weren’t even professionals. You know how lots of people tell the story of playing against some forgettable MLS journeyman, either as a teenager or in a rec league after the journeyman retired, and how against mere mortals he was unbelievably good? Well, when playing with professionals against semipro players, Sorga was incredible too. His team won the league with a +89 goal difference that season.

But what does that mean outside of Estonia? Well, Sorga, as we saw firsthand, looked like a USL player at best. His all-conquering team went on to lose to some Lithuanian squad in the murky outskirts of Champions League qualification.

All of which is to say: not all European leagues are created equal. I am not one of the few who can say they have watched a game in the Romanian league, so I can’t tell you if it’s closer to the English Premier League or the Estonian Meistriliiga, but the conventional wisdom is that’s not as good as MLS.

That Golden Boot Season Was An Outlier

Domestically, Matt Doyle has led the rhetorical charge against this move from the very first rumor about it. His argument is pretty simple: sometimes the stars align and a striker scores a bunch of goals in a season. That’s great for them and their team, but no one should expect to have it happen twice, especially not if you transfer the player into a tougher league. Munteanu’s goalscoring totals in Romania were 10, 12, 23, and then 2 in the partial season this year. A guy who scores 23 goals might be ready for the next level, but the guy scoring 10? Not so much.

Doyle’s point is that Munteanu is much more likely to be the 10 goal guy than the 23 goal guy (or the 2 goal guy I suppose), meaning DC is paying millions and using a DP slot for a guy who really should be a TAM attacker at best.

He’s Got an Attitude Problem

This is what those salty Romanian fans say. He thought he was too good for his club, and when the transfers fell through, he sulked and stopped playing hard. CFR Cluj’s fans expect success. The team won the league five straight years from 2018-2022 and since has finished 3rd, 2nd, and then 2nd. This season, they’re currently in 11th place out of 16 teams. It makes sense fans are out for blood from anyone who might be in part responsible, and they may have a point.

The Case For This Move

The Romanian League Isn’t That Bad

As I said, I have no firsthand knowledge of the Romanian league, but there are a few crude ways to try to quantify this:

• Romania has a population of 19 million (compare to Estonia’s 1.37 million)

• The UEFA country coefficient for Romania is 25, compared to Estonia’s 8 and, say, Scotland’s 30

• Transfermarkt’s team value for CFR Cluj is 28m euros, compared to DC United’s 26m euros (as you’d expect, CFR Cluj is near the top of the league in player value while DC United is near the bottom)

Of these measures, the country coefficients seem the most useful, though you can’t directly compare that with MLS. Because this is based on play in continental competitions, it reflects the quality of the top teams, not the league overall. So Scotland’s 30 is based mostly on Celtic and Rangers. CFR Cluj is a top team in Romania, though, so it should be a reasonable guide. Most people believe Celtic and Rangers are usually at least as good as the very best MLS squads.

I still think the conventional wisdom that MLS is a decent-sized step up from Romania is accurate, and there’s no guarantees that a player like Munteanu can do it, but I think the gap isn’t so huge as to make it impossible.

Actually, That Golden Boot Season Wasn’t An Outlier

Normally we use xG to try to see if someone’s scoring at a sustainable rate. Unfortunately I don’t know where to find reliable advanced stats for the Romanian league, assuming such a thing even exists (I found one site that claims to have xG for it, but the numbers didn’t make sense). However, when you look at non-penalty goals and assists per 90 minutes played, across 8,000 minutes suddenly things don’t seem so outlierish:

This is the kind of chart that lets you choose your own adventure. Goalscoring went up and is now down! Oh no! But goal contributions are surprisingly steady across four years and two different teams. The fact he’s been able to provide more assists this year seems especially positive in a DC United context where he’s going to be coming into a team with another goalscorer in Tai Baribo but, so far at least, absolutely no proven chance creators.

It’s also worth restating that the team outcomes are a lot worse this season. His previous teams finished 1st, 4th, and 2nd, but this year they are in 11th. Now maybe that’s partly on him. Surely some more goals would help! But strikers need service, and if a previously top team is down in 11th place, I think it’s likely there are a lot of problems.

Munteanu Is A Young(ish) Ambitious Player

Okay, so maybe Munteanu’s form was impacted by the lack of a transfer last summer. He’s only human! In fact, like all good professional athletes, he’s a competitive human who wants to reach the highest level he can. Every game he stayed in the Romanian league, his value was dropping and so were his chances of reaching the highest levels of the sport.

Unlike an older player like Tai Baribo who is moving slightly downward, Munteanu still has a plausible path that uses good performances at DC United as a stepping stone to one of the big four leagues. Cucho Hernández and Miguel Almirón were both about the same age (okay, they were both a year younger) when they arrived in MLS, did great, and then moved onward and upward. There’s every reason he will arrive both grateful to DC for helping him finally escape from Cluj and determined to play well and reach for even greater heights.

I admit I really don’t like sulking players, but we’ve seen such players come surging back from it before. Lucho Acosta sulked his way out of DC after the failed PSG transfer and went on to become better than he ever was previously at FC Cincinnati (okay, in this analogy Munteanu going to DC is like Acosta’s move from DC to Atlas, where he didn’t do well). There’s Taxi Fountas, who burned his bridges fighting his way out of Austria’s Rapid Wien and then made an instant goalscoring impact for a pretty bad DC team before, uh, eventually producing much worse impacts.

As a side note, you can do the nickel/twice meme for DC and “players who scored a lot of goals, wanted a transfer, initially didn’t get it, and then there form dropped off” since Baribo and Munteanu both fit this template. Maybe Erkut Sogut just has a type?

Seriously, though, I can think of two explanations. The first is that when you lay off the entire scouting department, deserved or not, you’re going to be “scouting” mostly by going through your email inbox and seeing agents trying to rustle up interest in their dissatisfied player. The second is that the MLS schedule being misaligned with Europe means that the only successful players available on the market in MLS’ offseason must be sulking or else their teams would be holding on to them. In CFR Cluj’s case, from what little I can make out of machine-translated Romanian fan discussion, it sounds like they are in some sort of financial distress as well.

Other Clubs Wanted Him Too

Speaking of having no scouting department, one way to free ride on other teams’ scouting is to find a player who is the transfer target of bigger clubs with capable scouting, hope that his team has unreasonable expectations and so the bigger clubs choose not to buy, then hope the team gets into financial trouble and has to sell at a lower price. I’m not sure how often this strategy can be put into practice, but it could be what happened here. Surely the scouts from both Nantes and Celtic can’t both be wrong!

Now usually the trouble with this argument is that stories saying so-and-so is “being targeted” by a club are often made up out of whole cloth by some ad-ridden site desperate for clicks, and even when someone really told them about it, it’s often the player’s agent and they’re making it up out of whole cloth to try to drum up interest on exactly the “well if Celtic’s in for him, he must be good” thinking. I reflexively distrust all these stories. But I don’t know, the interest from Celtic was so widely reported that a bunch of Scottish sites feel it’s worth running the news of DC United signing Munteanu today because Celtic had been thought to be so close to signing him.

Another flaw in the “Celtic scouts thought he was good” argument is that apparently Celtic are having a world-historical meltdown right now, though I’m only aware of it because it involved them paying the Columbus Crew millions of dollars for Wilfried Nancy only to fire him a month later. The only defense of Nancy’s brief record with Celtic seems to be “he walked into a dysfunctional organization and a terrible roster” so maybe their scouts aren’t that great after all. Then again, checking the standings, this nightmarish season Celtic is having sees them, hmm, in second place, and yeah, still tied on points with Rangers who are in third. Ah, the Scottish league.

You Miss On All the DP Signings You Don’t Make

There are no guarantees in life. Even the best players sometimes come to MLS and fail, either because of injuries or because they came out of a desire to quiet quit the sport. To win trophies in today’s MLS, you have to have at least a few players outperform their contract. Christian Benteke was never going to do more than match his contract, and Tai Baribo is almost certainly in the same boat.

So you’ve got to take some swings. Louis Munteanu is one of those swings. He really could play over his contract and get sold for a big fee. The price DC pays for that upside is that, let’s face it, it’s more likely he underpeforms his contract. But MLS teams need to take these swings and they have at most 3 slots for doing it with players over 22. Going into this offseason, I was kind of expecting a single new DP and then some handwaving about waiting for the summer transfer window when better options would be available. We’ve heard that many times before from DC United’s front office and from plenty of other teams across the league.

But it’s clear that success in MLS requires two good DPs and winning MLS Cup almost always requires three. Time spent without those slots filled is time wasted. Better to swing now for the fences, and if you miss, well, hopefully you can get out of the contract somehow and not have to trade the player to Atlanta United but keep the DP slot full. But that’s life. Poor Ally Mackay never got to sign a DP unless you count resigning Benteke. Given how his international transfers panned out, that’s probably for the best, but Erkut Sogut should be doing everything he can to find three good DPs and persuade ownership to pay for them.

So far the investments seem diversified. Tai Baribo was a floor raising choice, whereas Louis Munteanu raises the possible ceiling.

Anyway, what’s fun about the offseason is you can indulge in optimism, or pessimism, about a move like this and enjoy whatever narrative you prefer in its purest form, unsullied by actual results. We’ll all see for ourselves how good Munteanu is once the games start.

In the meantime, I continue to plan on some kind of roster roundup in the next week or two. Subscribe if you haven’t already to get that by email when it’s ready!