Fabian Castillo’s move from FC Dallas to Turkish club Trabzonspor last summer wasn’t exactly a clean break, but the club announced a unique initiative earlier this week that should help ease any lingering pain for fans.
In wildly creative move, FC Dallas announced on Wednesday that, starting with Castillo’s sale to Turkey, any time an FCD player is sold to another club, 1 percent of the portion of the sale retained by FCD will be automatically paid out to current season ticket members.
According to FC Dallas VP of ticket sales and service Kris Katseanes, the checks from the Castillo sale – which totaled $4 million, $2.8 million of which went to FCD – were sent out on Wednesday. Each season ticket holder was sent $5.40 per seat owned on an official FC Dallas check.
Just in case that wasn’t enough, FC Dallas encouraged their fans to share their plans for the cash on social media using “#Cashtillo.”
Katseanes said that FCD owner and president Dan Hunt came up with the idea a few weeks ago. The club have seen plenty of response to the idea, which FC Dallas believe is the first instance of a team paying out a portion of a transfer fee directly to their fans.
“Fans just appreciate the thought and the gesture that an owner would take in terms of including them in something like this,” Katseanes told MLSsoccer.com over the phone on Thursday. “And who knows with the future of MLS what this becomes, right? It was announced in perpetuity, so as the years go by and we develop more players, who knows what this will turn into for our fans?
“But it’s kind of a cool thing. Fans are appreciative of the creative thought, of being the first. A lot of our fans think it’s just kind of a clever thing to make positive light of a thing that wasn’t necessarily positive in the way that it went down.”
