Update (25-Jan-2025): Portland’s signing of Castellanos was made official on Saturday, at about 9:00 a.m. Pacific time (press release, x.com post). The below post has been updated.
On Thursday (press release), Bay FC announced the mutual termination of midfielder/forward Deyna Castellanos’s contract with the club. Later that day, Sandra Herrera of CBS Sports reported that Castellanos had been signed by the Portland Thorns through the 2026 NWSL season, with a 2027 club option.
Portland’s signing of Castellanos was apparently confirmed by the Thorns in a press release that was sent out to the media on Friday (OurSportsCentral.com version) and covered by outlets such as the AP and USA Today’s Pro Soccer Wire. However, that release was deleted from the club’s website (Wayback Machine archive) and there was no mention of the signing on the Thorns’s social media accounts on Friday.
On Saturday, Portland’s social media accounts posted (x.com post, Instagram post) the news of Castellanos’s signing with a link to the now undeleted press release. The contract details initially reported by Herrera matched those stated in the press release: A two-year contract, with a 2027 club option.
At the time of the contract termination, the 25-year-old Castellanos was in the second year of a three-year deal with Bay FC (January 2024 press release), which was valued at $450,000 per year (January 2024 ESPN article).
In Bay FC’s January 2024 press release announcing their signing of Castellanos, then general manager Lucy Rushton was quoted as saying that Castellanos “will make an immediate impact playing for” Bay FC. That forward-looking statement did not exactly come to fruition.
In her one season with Bay FC, Castellanos started eight of her first nine regular season matches, where she scored twice and tallied one assist, but only had four starts during the rest of the regular season and did not register any additional goal contributions (NWSL game log). For more on Castellanos’s struggles while in a Bay FC uniform, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Marisa Ingemi provides a comprehensive summary in her article on the departure of Castellanos.
At the international level, Castellanos has at least 38 senior caps and 22 senior goals.
After winning the Golden Boot at the 2014 FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup, Castellanos played NCAA soccer at Florida State from 2016 to 2019, where she scored 48 goals over four seasons, including 19 goals as a sophomore (FSU player profile). During that time, the Seminoles won a national title in 2018.
Former Bay FC general manager Lucy Rushton was recently announced as a “strategic adviser” to the Thorns.
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