San Diego FC capped a flurry of moves by landing a veteran forward for the stretch run.<\/p>\n
Congolese national team goal-scorer C\u00e9dric Bakambu has joined the club through the 2026 season, with SDFC holding options for the 2027 spring season and the 2027-28 full season. The free-agent signing was announced Thursday morning, following the closure of Major League Soccer\u2019s transfer window.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old Bakambu spent the last two seasons with Real Betis of La Liga, where he scored 15 goals and had seven assists in 74 games.<\/p>\n
\u201cC\u00e9dric brings an incredible level of experience and proven quality to San Diego FC,\u201d said SDFC sporting director Tyler Heaps. \u201cHe has built an outstanding career competing at the highest levels in Europe and internationally, and his ability to consistently find the back of the net has been a defining part of his game. He understands what it takes to perform on the biggest stages and brings a winning mentality that will be extremely valuable to our group. We\u2019re thrilled to welcome C\u00e9dric and his family to San Diego and look forward to seeing him make his mark with our club.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in France to Congolese parents, Bakambu has seen the world. He came up with France\u2019s FC Sochaux, then played professionally in Turkey, Spain and China before returning to Europe in 2022. He made 24 appearances with France\u2019s Olympique de Marseille, then moved to Greece\u2019s Olympiacos and Saudi Arabia\u2019s Al-Nassr. He helped lead Galatasaray to a Turkish S\u00fcper Lig title in 2024 before moving on to Real Betis.<\/p>\n
Bakambu played for France at the youth level before choosing to represent Congo. He has made three World Cup appearances, forging a draw with Portugual during this summer\u2019s tournament.<\/p>\n
Bakambu is the third player to join SDFC\u2019s ranks this week. The club acquired Houston Dynamo defender Sam Vines and FJ Nordsjaelland midfielder David Mimbang on Wednesday, part of a flurry of activity that included the sale of defender Luca Bombio to Stoke City and the trade of Lewis Morgan to CF Montreal.<\/p>\n
San Diego FC (8-8-6) travels to Orlando City (7-11-4) on Saturday afternoon. The azul and chrome currently hold the eighth (and final) Western Conference playoff seed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Diego FC capped a flurry of moves by landing a veteran forward for the stretch run. Congolese…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[181,74,1254,76,75,1083,127],"class_list":["post-452367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-latest-headlines","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-fc","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}