Former Real Salt Lake striker Yura Movsisyan wants to come back to Major League Soccer.
Movsisyan, 27, left RSL after helping the club to the 2009 title, signing with Danish first division side Randers FC that winter. He moved to the Russian Premier League in 2011, scoring 23 goals in 50 appearances for FC Krasnodar before joining Spartak Moscow in December 2012 on a reported $9.7 million transfer fee.
The Salt Lake Tribune spoke on Monday with Movsisyan’s agent, Patrick McCabe, who told the newspaper that the Armenian international would like to return to MLS.
RSL offered Movsisyan a contract before he left for Randers on a free transfer, meaning that the club still holds his MLS rights.
“He’s very interested in a return to the MLS,” McCabe said. “It would be a number of options I think he would have, but he’s definitely open-minded at this point. If that’s Salt Lake, OK, or another MLS team, he would certainly be open-minded to pursuing. We’ll have to see what shakes out here within the next few weeks between his clubs and himself and the other teams that are interested.”
The No. 4 overall pick in the 2006 MLS SuperDraft, Movsisyan spent the first two seasons of his career with Kansas City before being traded to Salt Lake halfway through the 2007 season. He scored 20 goals in 81 regular season appearances in the league, with 15 of those tallies coming with RSL.
Movsisyan and his family immigrated to the US from Azerbaijan when he was 12, eventually settling in Pasadena, Calif. He starred at Pasadena High School and played just one year at Pasadena City College before joining MLS as a Generation adidas signee ahead of the 2007 season.
McCabe told the Tribune that family considerations are the leading factor in Movsisyan’s desire to return to MLS.
“For anybody that knows Yura, there’s nothing more important than family,” he said. “For him I think it’s been difficult to be in Europe for as long as he has for. He and his wife Marianna have two young kids and they’d like to obviously raise them closer to Yura’s family and her family in California. That’s a major consideration I think at this point.”
