The Colorado Rapids have contacted at least four coaches to replace Pablo Mastroeni.

A league source told The Denver Post that the Rapids have made contact with former Venezuela national team coach César Farías, former Norwegian national team player and Blackburn Rovers manager Henning Berg, Stanford University coach Jeremy Gunn and Columbus Crew SC assistant coach Josh Wolff.

The Rapids would not confirm whether they had been in contact with the four candidates, but did issue a statement.

“It’s a comprehensive global search,” Rapids spokesperson Ryan Madden said in a statement. “Out of respect for the process, we don’t feel it would be appropriate to speak publicly about individual candidates, but what we can tell you is that the club has been in contact with a number of highly-qualified professionals from Europe, South America and Oceania, as well as here in the United States at both the professional and collegiate level.”

The Rapids fired former coach Mastroeni on Aug. 15 and replaced him with interim coach Steve Cooke. The Rapids are 1-4-1 under Cooke, and Madden said the interim coach is still a candidate for the position. He added that the club has received more than 100 inquiries about the opening. The Rapids, he said, are also proactively searching for the right candidate and are using an outside analytics firm to find candidates who have had success playing the attacking brand of soccer they aspire to play.

Madden said the Rapids plan to pare their list of candidates to a handful of finalists in the coming weeks and hope to have a new hire in place by the beginning of November.

The four candidates linked to the Rapids come from vastly different backgrounds.

Farías coached Venezuela for 83 matches between 2008 and 2013, narrowly missing the 2010 World Cup. He also led Venezuela to the knockout stages of the 2011 Copa America. He managed Club Tijuana in Liga MX from 2013-14 and has managed clubs in India, Paraguay and Boliva since then. The Rapids’ potential interest in Farías was first reported by the SB Nation blog Burgundy Wave, which said the former Venezuela coach was spotted at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park over the weekend.

Berg is a former defender who won English Premier League titles as a player with Blackburn Rovers and Manchester United, and was capped 100 times with the Norwegian national team. He coached in the Norwegian first division from 2005-2011 before landing the job at Blackburn Rovers for the 2012 season. Rovers were in the second-tier of English soccer at the time and Berg’s tenure lasted only 10 matches, including six losses. Berg went on to coach Legia Warsaw of the Polish first division from 2014-15 and Videoton FC in the Hungarian first division from 2016-17.

Gunn has ties to Colorado, having coached at Fort Lewis College in Durango from 1999-2006, building the program into a Division II power, including a 2005 national championship. He then coached UNC-Charlotte from 2007-2011, reaching the NCAA final in 2011. He moved to Stanford in 2012 and has guided the Cardinal to NCAA titles in 2015 and 2016. Rapids academy product Andrew Epstein played goalkeeper on both national championship teams.

Wolff is a former U.S. national team striker with nine goals in 52 matches. He spent his club career primarily in MLS between 1998 and 2012, but played for 1860 Munich, then in the second-division of the Bundesliga, from 2006-2008. He served as an assistant coach under Ben Olsen at D.C. United (2012-13) before leaving for his current position as an assistant coach under Greg Berhalter at Columbus Crew SC.

“The ultimate goal for the club is to bring someone in on a long-term basis that shares our vision for the future,” Madden said.

That vision — to play a more attack-minded style of soccer — was outlined recently in an op-ed in The Denver Post by Rapids interim general manager Padraig Smith and chief business officer Wayne Brant.

“I think if you’re a Rapids fan right now, it’s an exciting time,” Madden said. “The future is bright.”