PBP: Aiming for “mid” - the 2026 consolidated match thread - all competitions

I think he looks good when he's next to Pirani in the same way that Cup Noodles looks good next to deep fried diarrhea. But I'm not under any illusions that Peglow is capable of playing at an MLS level. I appreciate that he at least tries to do something. But he's far too dumb and far too talentless to be an MLS starter.

 

Play the got damn kids FFS!!!!!

 

My point is that they are so derived of talent that they clearly choose the path of less resistance.. Route 1 football which is BTW the most pragmatic and easy to defend style of play

Get some talent who won't turn the ball over under pressure and this team could look a whole lot different

 

In a nice world this talent comes this summer but I don’t want them to lose every game up until then.

 

And anyway, they got, what, eleven new players over the last offseason and none of them are a clear upgrade over their replacement. (Except for Sean Johnson but, let's be real, that says more about the poor state of the previous goalkeepers.) And the big acquisition has been a spectacular bust so far. The only decent players on this team right now are the central defenders and Peltola, all Ally McKay signings.

Are we really going to trust that crew to nail the summer transfer window? I don't.

 

The world definitely ain’t nice.

 

There are a lot of people (like Roche) who fetishize young players. I suppose it's a neat system if you have a good team every year and you cycle in young players and then sell them on. But MLS doesn't generally work that way. For all the youth Philly cycled in and out over the last decade, they missed badly on a couple of DPs and now they're right back in the soup with us. So what did they get out of it? A couple million dollars for the owner. Color me unimpressed. And every nickel that goes to a youth team is a nickel they could have been spent on players for the real team and weren't.

(Also, I think it's going to be a lot harder to transfer young players once they switch to a winter season because the quality of play is going to drop off a cliff, as anybody who's ever tried to kick a ball in the winter knows. But that's a different thread.)

For a few years there, DC had a strategy to grab 28-32 year olds in the waiver draft. Not the sexiest plan but they made the playoffs nearly every year. With MLS' newish cashfer system, you could probably build a decent team made up of veterans just slightly past their prime. Nobody's out there buying a team of Chris Rolfe's anymore.

 

He got a run, like Ku Di P. He's trying. I'd rather play these guys than older guys who have no resale value or future , so to speak. Im happy to see Turner and the other 16 year old play.

If were not going to compete at least try and develop players and sell or integrate them.

 

And like Ted, he is showing he wasn't ready for prime time. While Roche may oversell young players generally, the young players - with the exception of Andy Najar, Bill Hamid and Kevin Paredes -- who have come from the youth pipeline have not been MLS starter quality. The jury is still out on Turner and the jury hasn't even been seated for Avilez. The jury has reached a verdict on Hopkins and it's not good enough.

 

It seems odd to leave out the middle class of this topic.

Chris Durkin has 169 MLS appearances sandwiched around 3 years in Europe. Griffin Yow left for Europe in his teens before making much of an impact here but is back playing regularly for New England. Donovan Pines suited up almost 100 times for DCU before testing himself in England.

Eryk Williamson and Ian Harkes have 267 appearances between them for MLS teams, albeit most of that total wasn’t with us.

I’m all for a discussion on what DCU’s academy can be doing better, but these examples should be included in the discussion because they’re relevant and absolutely count as success stories for a pro teams youth academy.

 

Granted, pretty much everything feels zero sum when it comes to Jason Levien, but this isn’t entirely true.

Homegrown players on their first contract don’t count against their team’s salary budget. They can fill supplemental roster spots while earning far above those wages, providing another cap workaround. MLS teams keep 100% of the revenue from homegrown sales.

 

I'll give you Durkin - maybe. But Yow is a sub for a bad NE team and fell out of favor in a league worse than MLS. Harkes is on the bench for SJ and also fell out of favor in a league worse than MLS. Pines was an off again, on again starter for DCU, played a season and half in League One and is now out of the game -- also he was coached by Cirovski at Maryland. Williamson ran away from DCU at the first opportunity. Again, outside of Najar (who really wasn't an Academy discovery), Hamid and Paredes none of these Academy products have been stellar. Durkin today wouldn't make this team better, nor would he make it worse, problem is this team is not very good.

 

First of all, I'd argue that any player making it from a team's youth academy to the first team is a success story. The percentages are stacked against that happening in every country and league in the world. There are, of course, widely varying degrees of success for those that make it.

We can all agree that Najar, Hamid, and Paredes are the top 3 success stories of DC academy grads. I think we all also agree that we feel DC should have more of these types of stories given how talent rich the area is, and that's a source of frustration.

But I feel like you're moving the goalposts or nitpicking a bit here talking about who's being coached by who, people leaving the academy, how their new team is doing, etc. Your original statement was:

Ian Harkes has started 51 games since coming back to MLS in the middle of 2023. I'm not sure why it's 1 out of 7 this season but prior to this year he started 76% of his appearances. Yow has started half of his appearances so far this year and is still 23. Durkin has started every game for STL, is the 2nd highest rated player on his team (per FotMob), and as much as I appreciate Brandon Servania's quiet and understated game, would be a clear upgrade next to Peltola in the middle.

Pines started 89% of his appearances for DC by the age of 24 but because it didn't work out for him in England we can't count him as an "MLS starter"? By the way, he's not out of the game at all - he's a week in week out 90 minute player in the Austrian Bundesliga.

We haven't even mentioned Akinmboni who, despite being very raw, was thought highly enough by a solid EPL team to be bought at 17 and try his luck there. Pretty sure he'd be getting minutes for DCU regularly by now or in the near future.

It sounds like you need to qualify your thoughts with "top level starter" or "MLS All Star" or something that's a tier below "resounding success that plays for their country" but still above "person who earns regular starts over multiple years/teams/contracts".

I do think DC should have more academy grads making a difference, but I don't think we can ignore a half dozen that have gone on to have successful MLS careers just because their careers didn't take them to the Champions League or their national teams.

PS I don't understand your comment about Najar not being "an Academy discovery" - discovery is certainly the operative word here, but he was noticed playing pick up soccer in front of his high school and then spent 2 years in DC's academy before signing with the first team. That's a perfectly reasonable academy success story.

This isn't Hale End where Bukayo Saka, Ethan Nwaneri, Max Dowman, and Myles Lewis Skelly are signing "contracts" at 8 years old and sticking with the team and staying with the team for decades.

MLS teams simply don't have that infrastructure, and the geographic size of MLS would make that much fewer and farther between than what you see in Europe even if you shifted those leagues with their budgets and infrastructure directly over here

 

Pines isn't out of the game, he's playing in the Austrian Bundesliga as @Th4119 said.

 

Ethan White also had over 100 appearances in MLS with DC, Philly and NYCFC. He also started in the last game DC won hardware, the Open Cup final shutout v RSL.

 

I'm sort of going to disagree? Those type of players are nice as a by-product of the point of your academy, but the point is the occasional big hit. Like Philly sold Aaronson for 10 million Euro, and then got a knock-on when Salzburg sold him for 25. You need those from time to time, or you need several 4 million sales, to justify real investment. There's a geometric scale here, and it's better to have one Aaronson than all those guys combined.

I'm not convinced that level of player wasn't what the old select team system was spitting out before MLS YDI/USSFDA/MLSN came around. (It's just that the league has improved, and those guys are a little further down depth charts now, where they used to have bigger roles).

Agreed.

Given what I said earlier about the geometric scale, I'll note that Durkin, a solid enough MLS player, has a market value in the high six figures, and DCU got about 500k for him between loan to Belgium and move to StL. Again, not a bad side hustle, but it's not going to pay the freight for the academy as a whole. Not unless you can come up with like 8 of those per year, which is not a reasonable ask.

I'll agree with you here as well. Identifying talented players, recruiting them, and putting them at a level where they are more challenged and more seen is part of the game. We were able to do that with Najar, though we need to be doing it more often.

For the sake of the national team and for transfer profit, we need to get as far as we reasonably can though. That's going to take some creative thinking about how to influence the game at lower age levels and across a wider geographic spread. Some MLS teams are clearly doing that better than others, and we're others.

 

I get your points, but producing a few players who "sort of" become starters on poor teams either here or overseas is not an Academy success story. Yow was given away to Belgium because Olsen and others didn't see any long term value in him. His teammate, Moses Nyeman is now at Columbus Crew 2. Harkes also was cast aside by DCU and isn't making the starting lineup for a now good San Jose team. The point being that DCU doesn't invest in its academy, rotates directors constantly and isn't getting full value out of the DMV. Producing, at best, journeymen players who can crack the starting lineup on mediocre or worse teams is not success no matter how you want to measure it. It takes more. #3stars on the crest

 

This is an old but very good (and unfortunately paywalled) article on the topic of youth development and academies. Highly recommend if you can get around the paywall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html

 

So the RBNY DC United showdown tonight is an 8 v 9 clash in the eastern conference. I at least have some optimism about DCU gaining a point because on the road DCU doesn't show any compulsion to play "attractive attacking football".

 

Also the R** B***s' primary offensive strategy is to steal the ball from a defender and shoot. Since DC just hoofs the ball upfield as far as they can anyway that tactic may not work.

 

Tons of pull-quotes in this one, this isn't nearly all of them.

 

Didn’t even realize there was a game tonight until I opened FotMob this morning.

 

I didn't realize it until I saw song219's post

 

Let's hope the DCU players realize it before they step on the pitch.