Apparently this college player was/is on yhe radar of Maccabi Netanya and was supposedly going to sign before the season started. Perhaps one to track for the future.
He's a fairly highly rated prospect. He has a couple of U20 callups this cycle (he's a '99) including the most-recent camp, which given the challenges around the current calendar suggest he's in the mix for qualifying. Had a pretty good freshman year at IU and, FWIW, is still on the fall roster shown online.
This older article (in Hebrew) says a couple of clubs have been following him: Hapoel Haifa follows the midfielder Griffin Dorsey The American Jew belongs to the young team of the United States and plays in Indiana, and Netanya is also interested. Hapoel Haifa decided to strengthen the team in three positions during the break, including a back, back midfielder and wing player. This could lead to a decision to lend Ofek Fishler to another group. In addition, the wounded Idan Golan may also receive a release. Nir Klinger prefers to strengthen himself with a foreign back-knot and bring in two more Israelis. https://sports.walla.co.il/item/3117184
I'm curious about the Israeli league. Is there some connection where anyone who is Jewish counts as domestic, or why do they seem to recruit Jewish-Americans? If that's the case, then why don't any of these teams try to establish academies over here when our country contains almost half the Jewish population, and a heck of a lot of people who like sports?
The Law of Return in Israel allows anyone with a Jewish parent to apply for citizenship and thus, not count as a foreigner. Clubs in Israel are constantly trialing American, Argentinian, French and Russian Jews but very few actually are successful. In the eyes of an Israeli, development of the sport in America is still rather new. More professionals in Israel have come from Argentina which is a smaller Jewish community but requires no investment on the part of the clubs. At one point, Maccabi Haifa had some kind of training arrangement with a Jewish school in Mexico but it didn’t produce anything. If the USSF allowed or enforced training compensation, I think the situation may be a little different for a lot of foreign club academies in the US. But I don’t see how it would work for an Israeli club. A player would do well enough and decide between RBNY’s academy or flying 5,000 miles to a country they may not be all too familiar with?
Anecdotally, it seems like Israeli clubs do watch the U.S. pretty closely, though perhaps not in a broad, highly structured way. No doubt there are clubs with part-time scouts (or, at least, semi-formal reps) in certain cities. Also, the Maccabiah teams often get pretty highly rated players -- Jake Rozhansky in 2017, for example -- and so clubs get a convenient look at them that way. https://www.maccabiusa.com/maccabi-...ccer-team-for-the-20th-world-maccabiah-games/