2021 Breakout Youngster

A lot can happen in two weeks.

✅ @OfficialASRoma debut
✅ @USMNT debut

🤩 pic.twitter.com/SGhw1yMzup

— Football Wonderkids (@fbwonderkids) March 28, 2021

 

Oh contraire. I think perhaps Yueill has helped cement a spot on the Sr. team with his performance. Alas, I fear several other players have put themselves further out of contention...

 

fair enough in general, but this is the breakout youngster thread

 

Former FCD academy player that left the club for Louisville in the USL. Can't move to Europe until he turns 18 in the fall.

Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund, PSV, Chivas, Werder Bremen, Porto.

All are tracking 17-year-old fullback Jonathan Gomez, a player that joined Louisville City last season in search of a different path towards Europe's top leagues.https://t.co/NHwWwVD43A

— Ryan Tolmich (@RyanTolmich) April 1, 2021

 

Hope Louisville make something if Gomez signs abroad.

 

Hope he strikes gold like Gio Reyna. Can’t say how much we need a left back in this player pool.

 

You better hope he doesn't sign with Chivas, then.

 

I would add Acosta to the seriously hurt list

 

For me Richards is starting to distance himself.
After the initial explosion, Hoppe has hit the inevitable dry spell.
Still, being a consistent starting #9 in the Bundesliga at his age is a great achievement.

We do have a new contender in Dike. Even though he'll only be in the Championship for half a season, his impact has been substantial.
He's broken out in both club soccer and the USMNT. So he's clearly a contender.

I think those are the only contenders for the award. There are dark horse candidates, but none of them really have a chance to catch those three.

I still feel like Ledezma would have been a significant contender if he hadn't gotten injured. Bummer.

[I personally feel Aaronson and Musah had broken out before this year. But we each have our different views on that.]

 

I remember back in the 2018 June Friendly vs Ireland how good Luca De La Torre was (especially his ability in tight spaces, ball control, passing, and overall intelligence) and kept pushing on here for the federation to keep him included because i did not trust his situation at Fulham. Well he produced in the limited minutes he got for the Fulham first team, but that wasent enough and he fell into the same EPL- 2 purgatory that we have seen other Americans fall into from the ages of 18-22.

Special Player.

 

Did De la Torre just hit a late growth spurt? He always seemed talented, but I recall that he was a little weakling on the ball. He seems to have beefed up some, which I could see how that would translate to improved play on the field.

 

This is a really interesting year. I think it will take next season to seal the deal. While I typically don't consider any players outside of the top 5 leagues it really seems like both Dike and Aaronson might warrant a transfer there anyway. We might have to implement some voting scheme to determine the winner the way things are going.

 

good call on Acosta

I would say that Acosta's stock was (or should hve been) hurt far more than the others. Acosta is 25 and in his prime. All the others are 21 or under and for them it's not likely to be a decision making camp. For Acosta it could very well be a camp upon which a decison is made.

edit: I forgot where I was. Ignore my comments about Acosta....meant regarding USMNT

 

how is richards distancing himself while hoppe is falling? theyve both become regular starters in the bund (though huntelaar started for schalke this weekend, so watch this space)- which is fantastic- but richards isnt lighting anything on fire.

for my money its between aaronson and dike. rbs were already the class of their league, so barnsley being promoted is the real knockout punch variable- otherwise its just gonna be personal preference (or a split decision, to keep with the boxing metaphor).

 

For me Aaronson already broke out.
For me you don't break out twice................once in MLS and once in Europe.
You break out once, and he already did it. He became a full time starter in MLS, and based on his play earned a USMNT callup to the camp following the 2019 MLS season.

[For some reason people view a breakout in Europe in a similar league as MLS..............to somehow different to one in MLS.]

Dike plays in the Championship. For me he's 3rd place after Richards and Hoppe. That's still great, by the way. Not an insult. He's had a really nice MLS plus Championship season.

Maybe I'm being unfair to Hoppe. I personally judge forwards on goals. Just the way it is. I'm not say Hoppe isn't in the running.
Simply as the goals have dried up for Matthew, I've appreciated Richards' breakout more than Hoppe's.
Its not all Matthew's fault. He plays for a historically bad Bundesliga team. A team he wouldn't be starting for if they hadn't purged all the other forwards making the slightest bit of money (like Ibisevic, who they just cut loose).

Also, part of this for me is breaking out to the USMNT thru club play. We're not in the Yanks Abroad forum. Hard to say a person is a USMNT breakout, when they've never played for the USMNT. Again, not necessarily Matthew's fault. Just reality of the situation.

 

It was interesting to me looking back through some of these threads and noticing that there didn't seem to have been any formal vote to decide the winners of these threads in the past. Am I getting that right? I guess the winner was always obvious or uncontroversial enough that it wasn't necessary.

 

We maybe need someone to act as gatekeeper of who is in and who is out when it comes to a breakout player.

Personally, I would advocate that a player must be Olympic-aged eligible for that cycle. But you can do it by a yearly cut off - it just would be a lot more work to keep track. And, I would advocate that the player must not have previously played a consistent and meaningful role for club and/or country (club level must be MLS or higher).

 

I think we also have different rationals for offensive and defensive players. Offensive players need to be "proactive" and create something to have a good game while a defensive player who doesn't "screw up" has a good game. Not getting your name called during a game is good for a defender but bad for an attacker. Since soccer is such a low scoring game I think defenders can naturally look better then attackers.

 

I'm still good with the cutoff we've been using all along and which was included in the opening post of this thread: U22 (1999 and younger) with fewer than 10 USMNT caps at the beginning of the calendar year.

If we added club criteria to that, it would potentially have disqualified some of our past winners. For instance, Tyler Adams was our 2018 winner, even though he had started 25 regular season and playoff games for NYRB in 2017.

 

Aaronson is still in play in my definition, but it's largely based on his play so far for the National Team. Where I feel he is in the process of breaking out for the USMNT even if his club play was a breakout last year.

Yes, semantics.

We've gone Adams-Dest-Reyna?

 

Yep. Pulisic-McKennie-Adams-Dest-Reyna.

Which also means we've gone 5 years straight gradually adding at least one new U-22 player a year to our presumptive starting XI (without any of those players dropping out of the lineup so far). Musah has very likely already brought that number up to 6 years in a row, even if he doesn't win the award this year.

 

That or Richards. For the good of the trend, it makes more sense to give it to a CB rather than a CM.

That means we're left with a GK, RB/LB, CB, CM/RW, and a ST to finish off the 11. I think the obvious choices are any one of a plethora of options at CM, Gomez at LB, but CB, GK, and ST don't really have any great options.

Pepi's really the only ST I can think of with a chance of exploding. There also just aren't really any high-level CBs in the pipeline I can see winning it, and GK is even more bleak. What a shame.