Photo credit: Dante Sealy / Instagram
23-year old will head back to Canada after underwhelming Colorado stint
Matt Wells’ first signing as a head coach is already on the way out.
The Colorado Rapids have traded Dante Sealy to CF Montréal for $1.4 million in General Allocation Money (GAM) and up to an additional $300,000 in GAM, the club announced on Friday. The Athletic’s Tom Bogert first reported the transaction before Rocky Mountain Soccer Journal confirmed it.
The GAM from Montréal will come in waves — $400,000 in 2026 GAM and the remaining $1 million of the upfront fee will be available for use in 2027.
Colorado first acquired the 23-year-old winger from Montréal in December of last year, only days before Wells was officially named the club’s newest head coach. The Rapids acquired Sealy initially for $1.9 million in GAM plus an unspecified amount in added incentives.
The Trinidad and Tobago international joined Montréal before the 2025 season, where he broke out for one of the worst teams in MLS. An inverted right winger, he scored nine goals and added two assists in 30 appearances. It was the exact profile Wells wanted to build his attack around, having already had Paxten Aaronson and Rafael Navarro in the building.
However, Sealy hasn’t lived up to his goalscoring expectations this season. He never scored a league goal for Colorado, though he did score the only goal of the U.S. Open Cup round of 32 match against the USL’s Union Omaha. He provided five assists in burgundy — only two of them were primary assists.
The secondary transfer window, which closes next Wednesday, Sept. 2, is an important one for Colorado’s front office. Club president Pádraig Smith is in a contract year, and the minimum criteria for another extension would be to make the playoffs this season. Before the window, the Rapids sat outside a playoff position looking in, but a roaring start post-World Cup has put them in seventh in the Western Conference with 13 games to go.
Smith and the club vowed to be “bold” in the approach to the rest of the window after Lucas Herrington was sold to Premier League side Hull City for a club-record $17 million up front. The window has been relatively quiet since then, at least until the past couple of days.
Aside from the free transfer of midfielder Youssef Maziz, the Rapids reportedly are finalizing a $6 million transfer to acquire Sayed Abu Farchi from Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv. If that’s made official, it would be the second-highest inbound transfer fee the Rapids have ever spent, behind Aaronson’s $7 million figure a year ago.
After the Herrington sale, Smith hinted at the possibility of there being other significant outbound transfers if needed. If anything, Sealy’s departure signals the Rapids are willing to move on from players who aren’t producing far sooner than in the past. That’s a positive evolution from this front office, which has kept players for far longer than acceptable in hopes they may eventually hit.
Now, the pressure is on for the club to bring in one or multiple key players before the window closes. Bogert reported the Rapids are after a Designated Player winger by the end of the window.
Unless the club was to sell Rafael Navarro or Paxten Aaronson before Wednesday, it would have to revert back to the Designated Player model, under which a team can have three DPs and three U-22 players on its roster. Before the season, the Rapids switched to a U-22 Initiative model, consisting of two DPs and four U-22s.
The rules behind reverting back to the DP model mid-season are somewhat strict. First, a club must not have more than three U-22s, which the Rapids do not (Ted Ku-DiPietro, Darren Yapi and Sayed Abu Farchi — if and when that deal gets over the line). Second, the club must not have spent more than $1 million of the additional GAM it received when converting to a 2/4 system (clubs received up to $2 million upon converting).
It’s unclear whether the Rapids have stayed below that threshold, but the club’s reported interest in another DP, coupled with almost no fresh rumors of a Navarro departure, it’s likely eligible to revert to a DP model and follow through with constructing the roster in that manner. Colorado has until the window’s end to declare the change.
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