Longtime MLS and current FC Dallas defender Bakary Soumare will retire at the end of the season after a nine-year professional career, he announced on Monday, citing reoccurring injuries.
In an Instagram post on Monday, his 30th birthday, Soumare said, “recent health setbacks have made this a necessity.”
Soumar has not made an appearance for FC Dallas after arriving in a midseason trade. He also played for the Montreal Impact and Philadelphia Union and had two stints with the Chicago Fire, the team with whom he started his professional career in 2007. He made a career-high 28 starts for the Fire in 2008 and made 115 starts (125 appearances) over the course of his regular-season MLS career, appearing four times in the playoffs.
The No. 2 overall pick by the Fire in the 2007 SuperDraft out of the University of Virginia was also capped 13 times by Mali and played in the 2010 African Cup of Nations. From 2009-12, he played in France with Boulogne and in Germany with Karlsruher.
In his retirement announcement, Soumare expressed gratitude for his time as a player, saying the game “provided me with an abundance of good fortune and riches, far behind what any child born in Mali, West Africa in 1985 could have imagined.”
