FC Dallas striker Kenny Cooper is on a hot streak that’s taken him to the top of the Major League Soccer goal-scoring chart. Clubs in Europe are suddenly interested, and his side has already turned down offers from Rosenborg Trondheim in Norway and Cardiff City in Wales in favor of negotiating a new contract. But according to his Dad, Kenny Cooper Sr., the club will have to aim high.
“It comes down to everybody having a value, everybody having a worth,” Cooper Sr. told Pat Martin. “Either people accept it and pay you what you’re worth or you move on. That’s just the way life is.” He wouldn’t name the asking figure, but said it was not out of the question that his son should be offered “Landon Donovan money.”
Donovan earns a guaranteed salary of $900,000 a year. Cooper is currently on just above $80,000, while Martin reports that the team offers to the player “are believed to be in the $300,000 to $400,000 per year range.” Presumably there is still some negotiating to be done.
“Kenny at this point in time is not Landon Donovan,” Cooper Sr. conceded. But he said that he’d told MLS Commissioner Don Garber that “David Beckham is a soccer icon, but Kenny will be playing when David has retired. David is the face of soccer around the world, Landon in America. Kenny could become that face. I think he could become the face of American soccer, I really believe that. He has a long, long way to go, we don’t suffer with illusions of grandeur, but Kenny is a very good player who’s getting better.”