There is nobody more self-loathing and hyper-sensitive than an MLS fan being told MLS is about as good and irrelevant as the Belgium League.
How is the Belgian League irrelevant? Eighth ranked league in Europe. Home of Anderlecht and FC Bruges. Bringer of greats like Kevin de Bruyne, Thibaut Courtois, Vincent Company, Philippe Albert and Jan Ceulemans.
I don't understand the dumping on MLS. What's the point you are getting after? Do you think the national team would be better without a domestic league? Do you think there would be better quality Americans playing in Europe if it didn't exist? MLS is what it is. What do you want it to be and why do you think it could achieve what you want? So what it's not as good as the EPL or La Liga, or whatever other league you want to compare it to. So what? I don't understand the point. It seems most of the complaining is really "It's not good enough for me." And that says more about the person complaining than about what they are complaining about.
Likely member of our upcoming U20 team. Kochen of Barcelona, Eyestone, and Gavin Beavers of RSL We had a USMNT camp a few years ago that was 1/3rd players that had spent time at the FC Dallas academy. We need to get back on track there, and Eyestone is one for the future. On this current pre-Copa roster there are only McKennie, Richards, Pepi, and Moore. Moore only spent one year at Dallas. MLS ruled he couldn't sign for them as he was from Atlanta's territory, so Shaq went to Spain instead. Sources: Brentford finalizing a deal to sign highly rated USYNT GK Julian Eyestone.Eyestone, 18, came through FC Dallas academy. Starred at Duke University for a season. Now off to England. https://t.co/6L3SnrOz5P pic.twitter.com/uaampJfSJM— Tom Bogert (@tombogert) May 25, 2024
I believe he has an Italian passport so he could move to Europe before 18. https://t.co/rkVGWu9sml— Marcus Chairez (@chai_asc) May 26, 2024
*Turner Jedi Robinson Richards CCV *Miles Robinson *Ream Dest *Scally *Adams McKennie Musah Reyna Johnny De La Torre Pulisic Weah Wright Balogun Sargent *Pepi Here’s the top 20 depth chart off the top of my head. Maybe I missed somebody. Only 6 have MLS first team experience. Scally played 7 times for NYCFC. Historically, yes, MLS has been very integral in the development of the national team. Currently, the league is less and less integral. Nobody who isn’t in Europe before 21 has a very good shot of contributing to the squad as presently constructed. The only way this changes is for MLS to have a payroll increase of 250%-300%. That scenario would lead to (hopefully) short-term deficiencies in the player pool as we saw with Dempsey, Bradley and crew, and are seeing with Mexico now, who overpays their domestic players. If you are making the argument that today’s American players would have developed the same if they all developed here? We can’t think about 2024 with 2010 perspective, and if you watch MLS and top-4 European competition consistently, you aren’t left with any illusions about where players develop more completely.
Ok, someone explain how this is a good move? Rapids to Hajduk Split? I'm guessing it's really a step down.
I left out Aaronson. Philly is one of the great exceptions. Trusty, McKenzie, both Aaronsons, now the deal with Cavan. McGlynn probably next. That’s why this board has specific youth threads about FC Dallas, for instance. And yes, McKennie and Richards have academy roots there. I am disappointed to not see more MLS clubs develop players like the Union and FC Dallas have done. Why are both LA teams so awful at this? Why does Houston not produce anybody? For all the players we have from New York, has there really been enough from both of the clubs there? MLS is what it is, but it could be so much better. And some clubs are getting better. Columbus has gotten better. I’m excited to see what SDSF can do.
What's your point? The Dutch, Belgians, Argentinians, Brazilians, Portuguese, on and on, all have top notch national teams that have very few domestic players. I'm not making any argument. I'm just trying to understand the underlying argument for dumping on the MLS or saying, "it's not good enough". MLS is what it is, which almost all other domestic leagues are, a feeder for the giant clubs in Europe. I'm fine with MLS selling players to Europe. I don't need our stars to stay here. I now live in Richmond and have a blast going to Kickers games and their payroll is like $400k.
Because nowhere else in the entire world outside of a couple European countries and Saudi Arabia, does a country have the financial resources to have the best development system in the world. We do. And I do want us to be the best in the world. I want our national team to be the best in the world and I want MLS to be the best in the world. I think those are realistic goals, especially for MLS. Americans own half of the Premier League anyway. It’s about the investment of resources.
Looking at just first team matches doesn’t make any sense. Clubs won’t have academies unless there is a big boy team for those kids to graduate into. You either need to count McKennie and Reyna, or you have to figure out how or why there would be academies in Dallas without FC Dallas or in NY without NYCFC. There are I believe 26 American academies now, representing 10s of millions of dollars spent every year on youth development. That goes away without a league. Am I missing something?
Maybe Hajduk Split offers more playing time right now. Or he could be repeating the mistake a number of kids have made, going to Yurp for Yurp’s sake. Maybe in three years he’ll be another kid whose career took a detour due to a bad move. (Caden Clark, for example.)
So what if we are the richest country in the world? What does that matter? Most of the people who have all of that money aren't interested in soccer. I quickly found a article that states the EPL's US tv rights are $450 million a year and MLS gets $90 million a year (and it's a 10 year contract). And MLS's just jumped last year due to Apple buying them. It's reported in 2019/2020 over 3 billion people worldwide watched an EPL game. MLS averaged 384,000 views in 2021. No idea why anyone would expect MLS to catch the EPL any time soon. resources of the country mean squadoosh. It's revenue of the league and the EPL brings in well over 3 times the revenue of MLS and the Bundesliga and La Liga bring in well over double MLS's revenue. MLS has grown leaps and bounds since it started and if guys can't appreciate where we are now compared to where we started that's too bad.
If MLS is joke level not sure our national team is significantly better aside from two or three players.
Weston McKennie is a good example. He spent years in the Dallas academy and was about to take a football scholarship when Schalke signed him. If he wasn't in the FC Dallas academy and had to pay to play would he even have continued playing soccer? Haji Wright is another who may have been lost to soccer had it not been for a MLS academy. Chris Richards went on trial to Bayern as part of an exchange deal between the two clubs. Otherwise he may have chosen college. Scally and Reyna may have not been able to adjust to German football so quickly had they not had high quality professional coaching from the City Football Group. And remember that many of those dual nationals were recruited for the USMNT by former MLS players, coaches and administrators. Without MLS would that infrastructure have been in place? Previously we'd had to rely Klinsy's personality. How many foreign born, foreign based dual nationals did the US have in the 1990s and 2000s?
We're currently ranked 11th in the world by FIFA (and we all know how bad these rankings are) but you look ridiculous calling the 11th best team in the world a joke. And how exactly is MLS a joke considering the expansion fee is $300,000,000 and you need to have a 20,000-seat (minimum) stadium to go along with that fee to get into the league. It's honestly gotten to the point where reading MLS trash talk is hilarious.
I didn’t call MLS or our national team a joke. I responded to the idea, though, which many loud NT-first/only fans online adhere to. If people want me to adopt this ranking system, my version would be more complex than all MLS players are jokes while all Americans in Europe are non-jokes.
The reality is that the league is changing very rapidly. As you say, it is 2024 now and you can't use that the 2024 landscape and apply it to the 2010 population...or the 2015 players...or even the 2020 players. That list is only a snapshot of the present...which is fine for predicting the future if the everything is relatively static, but it is not. (a you say/imply) I fully agree with you that attempting to extrapolate history in that way is futile, it also doesn't make sense to extrapolate that way in the future. What if I used the same logic going forward? What if I said that, based upon the current copa roster, going forward, you would be very unlikely to make the team unless you are 25 or under...unless, of course, you are a goal keeper. Several years ago (4-5ish?), many people were making statements about the minimum age to go to Europe was 18...anything more would lead to failure. Now it's 21? Why 21? I think almost all of those players went before 20. as you say, some barely could be counted as staying (7 appearances for Scally). So why 20? I'm not going to make any predictions about what it will be going forward other than to say it is probably not the same as it was when Adams left MLS (2017) and it probably isn't the age that it will be in 2030. The other thing to consider is that not all European leagues are created equal. There is an awful lot of disagreement about where MLS would fit in but I hope there isn't much disagreement that there are the top 5 (all European) and then there is everyone else. I don't actually hear people claiming that Belgium is on par with EPL, B1 etc. With that in mind, how do you grade the players going overseas. Bottom line is that you make an excellent point about using today's MLS to speculate about what would have been if our best players had stayed in MLS is folly but it is also folly to use the results from the past to make predictions about the current MLS (what is the optimum age now?). The other thing is to compare players that went straight to top 5 leagues AND got playing time relatively early (Pulisic, McKennie, Reyna, Scally etc) and put them in the same basket as players that went over to lower leagues (Wright, Shaq Moore, LDLT, and others)...and then there are the players that were raised abroad.
“Things should be like I think they should be. Here’s my plan.” If you don’t have a step 2, you don’t have a plan, just whining that time isn’t moving as fast as you want. You listing several players who were in MLS academies as players MLS didn’t help produce is…I don’t get it.
A number of those players did also play in MLS academies at some point in their development. I believe that’s true of McKennie, Weah, Reyna, Sargent, and Richards. Of those they were all basically there until they were able to go to Europe except for Weah who didn’t spend a ton of time there. And then look at the U23 and U20 teams where it’s even more MLS heavy in terms of the development side.