YNT-eligible MLS players: 2020 In-season thread

Still no Bayer Leverkusen. Durkin was the lone American I can remember in the last five years being linked with that club, at all.

When are we going to have a player play for that club?

 

Aaronson involved in the Philly goal

59' 👉 Sub into the game
68' 👉 Score the opener

Ilsinho put @PhilaUnion in front (but not for long) with this fine finish. #PHIvORL pic.twitter.com/Qv4lQd2Zr3

— Major League Soccer (@MLS) July 21, 2020

 

What is so special about that club?

 

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I didn’t say it was. I find it odd that with all the Americans in the Bundesliga, they are the one bigger club that has taken no participation in the American market. I’d love to know why. Do they know something that the other Bundesliga teams don’t?

 

they were hurt once by landon and never got over it

 

ayo kind of falling back to earth in this one. a few instances of indecision in prime positions as opposed to the decisiveness that had served him so well throughout the tourney

 

For the record, Revolution started Buchanan, Jones, and Kessler today. We talk about getting rid of the college draft, I think Bruce Arena could single-handedly keep it alive

 

The teams that have been relying on players born in college have been winning the MLS cup so it’s hard to totally discount it. There will always be late bloomers

 

For all the talk about how college is a dead route and totally useless for MLS, it's amazing how many effective MLS players are still going through it -- Yeuill, Miles Robinson, Reggie Cannon, Robertson in Miami, Gressel, Mason Toye, Achara looked great before the ACL, etc.

Of course it's not going to replace a professional route nor will we see a ton of USMNT representation running through it in the long run, but the demise of college seems something more in people's head than actual reality for the MLS level.

 

I think that some people on this site are too critical of the college option, especially when you consider that a lot of guys only spend a year or two before moving to the MLS. College soccer can still be a viable pathway to the USMNT, especially if Yuiell, Robinson, Cannon, Lima etc. get moves to Europe in the near future.

 

out of all those college guys named, how many of them woudlve been better served developing under this - covid notwithstanding - version of usl? i think college soccer is nice, but a year or two there is pretty much akin to a less immersive second division experience. so were these guys better by college or having a non first division place to mature/develop?

 

Maybe it was a better place for their maturity to develop.

 

I don't know how college soccer could be better for their soccer development. It's less development. How could that be good? It's about half the length of a season of a professional soccer.

I don't think the fact that some good players have come out of college soccer recently proves that it's a better option.

 

It doesn't prove it's a better option and I'm not sure anyone said that it did. I'm not sure why everything needs to be so black and white.

But for years, every time someone goes to college, people just say their career is over. And people rant about the pointlessness of having a draft in MLS because there's supposedly no good players.

Going to college is clearly not a death knell, and in some players' cases, I bet it is better than whatever situation they were in before. And good players come out of college.

That's all. I think it's great the US has a route for potential later bloomers to keep playing and developing, but also get education paid for since for most of them, they won't bloom.

Georgetown won a national championship, sent two players to MLS, and for the rest that didn't late bloom, they are in a MUCH better situation with a Georgetown degree than if they had gone to USL or something.

 

If they're born in college, they sound more like early developers, not late bloomers!

 

we arent on this forum deciding whats best education-wise for these kids - we are talking about how to make the best youth players into national team caliber pros. so the only question for me is would those 2 georgetown grads in mls now been better served had the usl of today been an option for them prior to their matriculation and i think they probably wouldve been, yes.

 

It's simultaneously true that NCAA soccer is not an amazing developmental vehicle and also that it is handy to have around.

1) NCAA is a useful safety net for late developers and off-the-radar kids. It keeps them involved at a higher level than DA or HS soccer and creates a platform for them to move into the pros later on.

2) The NCAA isn't harmful at all to the one-and-dones. These are guys who show up for a 3-4 month season, and then immediately leave. No harm done, and they had a nice stint competing against mostly players a few years older than them.

3) Two years isn't ideal because there's the loooooong offseason and over time the balance switches from "competing against older players" to "competing against younger players". Once you get to 3-4 years in NCAA, the stagnation really starts to set in.

4) It used to be more problematic that there were so few exits from NCAA soccer (a handful of slots in the Generation Adidas program). But now with so many having MLS academy connections, many are fished out of the pool via HGP deals. There just isn't that much high-end talent left, so it's easier to throw them a lifeline via GA deals now. Would Henry Kessler have gotten a GA deal ten years ago, when so many more of our better 18-21 year olds would have gone the NCAA route and been competing for the same GA deal?

5) Player development isn't an engineering problem where there are simple inputs and outputs. Players are human beings, so their maturity really matters to their capability to make the most of their abilities on the field. Even though development in the NCAA from a soccer standpoint is suboptimal, in some cases the NCAA route is still worth it for a year or two if a player would implode from a socioemotional standpoint in a pro environment.

 

I don't know why anyone would think it benefits players. It is true that some players have successful pro careers having played college soccer. It doesn't mean its good for their development. I'm struggling to understand how it could. They receive less and worse development. How could that possibly benefit the player?

They might receive other types of benefits from playing college soccer, but improving their soccer ability compared to if they were playing pro soccer isn't something that I think there's any real argument for. If there's a good argument, I'd love to hear it.

It also should be mentioned that players who play one season should not be mentioned in the same discussion as those that play more than one. The deficit of college soccer is not felt by those who only play one season.

 

It really benefits players whose careers would otherwise end at age 18.

 

Bingo.

I think it benefits players if they don't have any other options...................which is frankly quite a number of players in our pool.

It used to be that defenders in particular used to go thru the NCAA route. And we still see that, but not to the degree that we used to. Reggie Cannon, Miles Robinson, Walker Zimmerman, Mark McKenzie, the list goes on.

One college season is "OK" for some of these players. You come out of a DA playoff season, play one season in the fall at a good soccer school, and sign a homegrown deal to play MLS ball in the spring. Its not really that much downtime.

FOlks can read Reggie Cannon's thoughts on the subject. He's really appreciative of the time he spent at UCLA.

https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2018...tay-how-reggie-cannon-found-himself-fc-dallas

"Everyone wants to go straight from academy to the first team, but a lot of factors go into that," said Cannon. "Personally I wasn't ready to get to that next level professionally, and I think UCLA really helped prepare me in all aspects for that professional career."

 

I'm not really convinced that every USL coaching staff is better than every college coaching staff.

More importantly, and more relevantly, I think for some players, a change of coaching staff is valuable. Perhaps the professional staff doesn't value them. Perhaps the style of play doesn't suit them.

More importantly, as a late bloomer, perhaps when they go to college, they become more of the focus of the gameplan where they are just another guy in USL.

People focus a lot on competition, a little on coaching and playing time. But I think the role that you're asked to play is huge. You've mentioned it before with Pomykal or Araujo, and I see it in a positive way with Aaronson -- he's not just getting playing time; Curtain wants him to be an offensive force, not just screw up.

I think the gap between low level professional and collegiate competition and coaching is lower than people think, and I think finding a place to shine can create a different dynamic for a player who isn't a top player.

Either way, my original point was more from the players' POV. College allows them to stay in the game when continuing as a professional seems super risky for someone who's not a top prospect. USL pays poorly. Hell, typical American in MLS pays poorly.

 

I still think Akinola played well. His finishing could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t bad.

He’s definitely good at getting opens and making runs.

-He had two breakaway type of shots that were decent shot wise, maybe one of them a different keeper doesn’t stop on another day
-One of them he could have gone down and it likely would have been a penalty
-Another was initially called a penalty, but was just outside the box

Most strikers don’t score every game so I think he played well enough today to warrant another start since Jozy probably won’t be back to full fitness anyways.

 

In other countries, their careers wouldn't end in most circumstances that it otherwise would in this country. We have a different culture in this country. I don't think we should use our culture as the barometer when the whole world does it differently, and a lot do it better than we do.

I'm not criticizing these people either. They might have an eventual better standard of living than someone in France or Spain does that continues their pro career until age 26 in the lower divisions of those countries. It doesn't mean though that player development isn't getting worse for these players that play college soccer. All these players would be better off improving their games in a pro environment.