The thing is of course things can improve. But it’s a process and the academies for the most part haven’t even been around for that long.
........................and the left back, Peyton Miller, who might be the best prospect of them all. When people watch teams in top 5 leagues, do the clubs have entire squads full of homegrown players? No, of course not. They supplement their first team squads with only 1-2 new academy players each year. If you want to win, then you maximize the talent you have at each position within the constructs of your finances. And in MLS that means a team like the Revs can make some roster adjustments if they love Peyton Miller. He's cheap. They can trade DeJuan Jones for assets and invest in a different part of the team. MLS has crazy parity this year. EVERYONE in the East is still in the playoff hunt. Last place in the East is two points out of the playoffs. So, EVERY GAME MATTERS. There is no game in which a coach in the East can say "let's start our 15-year-old forward for the experience." Jim Curtin isn't going to play Cavan Sullivan for the fun of it all. They're one point out of the playoffs.
The Varas news is a little surprising to me. They've been acting very ambitiously, so I thought they'd go more "big name" than that.
mls isn't a top 5 league. The top 5 leagues have active and viable lower divisions, which all have academies. "within the contructs of your finances." - those finances are heavily tilted toward bringing in name-brand imports with mls's byzantine cap exceptions.
They've been acting as if they are entering MFL. Maybe they see Varas as a good tool to sway US U-##'s to the southside.
We've had this discussion a thousand times and it's clear your facts are often very dated, but there's tons of MLS mechanisms that favor player development and homegrown players. There's a massive incentive to develop these players: homegrown players don't count against the cap. And there are special roster spots that only homegrown players can occupy. There's also incentive to develop and sell: because homegrown are assigned an acquisition cost of nothing, sales of them allow for maximum conversion to allocation money and maximum retention of profit. There's TONS of incentive to develop players in MLS. Actually MORE incentive than in many other leagues where there's no roster / cap incentive to specifically develop your own. What you are mad about is that MLS spends on any foreign players whatsoever. It's silly to be annoyed at something like the DP rule when other leagues don't have a salary cap at all. Every player is a DP in England! Frankly, simply gifting PT to players isn't going to make them better. Playing with really good players and against really good players will help.
1. MLS isn't a top 5 league right now. Give it a few years and it will be, and the leagues that are supposedly better at developing talent will be little more than moldering corpses. Turns out it's hard to develop talent when you're bankrupt! 2. It's true that Europe has lower divisions with their own academies, and we (mostly) don't. It's also true that the weakness of US minor league soccer isn't the concern or fault of MLS. 3. MLS rules are designed to squeeze the middle class. There are huge incentives to make big signings and also to develop cheap talent.
It's a bit of a pick your poison situation for American players and MLS. The better the league quality gets, the harder it is for young Americans to break into lineups. You want a league that is as good as top leagues around the world? That means very few Americans are able to play there at this point. You want a ton of Americans getting minutes? Get used to the level being a bit lower. I actually think there's a decent balance right now where young players like Luna and Gutierrez can make a splash but your lesser guys aren't going to do much. Neither of those guys are exactly players who would be setting top European leagues on fire at this point, but they can still become prominent players in MLS and Americans below that level will play lesser roles unless they step up. Attacking roles in particular do tend to get filled with higher priced imports more often than places further back on the field. But, get rid of the high priced imports and the quality of the league as a whole goes down. I do think the weird roster rules with the different player categories make more advantageous to spend big on specific impact positions instead of improving overall quality, and the marketing folks are all in on spending for attackers but I almost never see anyone splash money of a big defensive signing. I'd love to see a lot of that go away, but I think you'd be just as likely to see more young South Americans taking those attacking spots more often than Americans of lesser quality if we got rid of the DP stuff. To really see more Americans playing big attacking roles in MLS, you'd have to lower the level of play and I seldom see people clamoring for the level of the league to get worse. To think the league can get better AND play more Americans is a whole lot of wishful thinking unless you want our very best to come back to MLS to play and I think there are very few people around here who like that idea.
They do if they’re good. People love local kids. Jordan Morris is always top 10 for sales, Brenden Aaronson was top 10 in his breakout season. https://www.orlandocitysc.com/news/mls-unveils-2020-best-selling-jerseys
Selling prospects is very valuable. You can convert 3 million a year into GAM, basically allowing you to cover the over the cap portions of three or four of your highest paid players off over good transfer.
The San Diego academy is going to be run by Right to Dream. There's a whole thread on it in the youth forurm. The investment is going to be great, and they'll likely develop some players, but its yet to be determined if it means anything for the USYNT/USMNT programs or not. LAFC talked the talk about developing academy players when they first came on board. Well? Where are they? Its been a lot of talk so far. [Their first wave of homegrowns, who haven't actually developed all that much, all represented other programs. Christian Torres, now in the Chivas system, with Mexico. Eric Duenas with Mexico. Nathan Ordaz with El Salvador.] True story. How many players from California were on the Olympic team and Copa America teams combined? I'll give you a start. There were zero players from California on the Olympic team.
So you'd like MLS to start discriminating against Mexican-Americans? Or are you just complaining for the fun of it?
Other than Julian Araujo has their been a Mexican American of note developed by MLS who has gone to Mexico whose been an actual loss. San Diego running a powerhouse youth academy is absolutely a good thing. Some of those players will be Mexican Americans and I’m sure we’ll win some and lose some in terms of dual national recruiting battles. But we’re talking about an academy that didn’t exist before so any gain is a net positive. I also think expect they’ll recruit nationally to the extent allowed under the homegrown rule (and like the Union crossing the lines a bit too).
Having two academies actually rolling instead of one team already being a Chivas second team and Galaxy not even giving a crap about it is progress. We still need more academies in SoCal (or teams allowed to go down there and recruit players more heavily) because having zero players from such a talent rich area is alarming.
The job of MLS clubs isn't to develop players for the USMNT or USYNTs. Its to develop players for their own clubs according to their business plans. San Diego is going to invest a lot in their academy. They're talking to the talk. How much will it benefit the USMNT? Time will tell. As we know, Dallas has developed a plethora of dual-nationals that ended up representing the USMNT. Including Mexican Americans................like Ricardo Pepi.
MLS, like any sanctioned league, is sanctioned by the Fed. The Fed has a responsibility to build soccer in the country, including developing the NT. So, in theory, MLS should be answering to the Fed.
Sure but it’s not as if European teams don’t have players from other countries in their youth academies. A good academy where there previously wasn’t one is nothing but a net positive for US soccer even if every player being developed isn’t necessarily going to play for the USMNT or being USMNT eligible (since they will also be recruiting directly from Mexico).
MLS has trained nearly every player taking the field for the national teams these days. They can always do better but the guys who have never been in a MLS academy are the exception, Of the 11 that took the field in the last Copa America game, only 4 hadn't been in MLS academies/MLS and Pulisic is the only one of that group to have been raised in the US.
Nobody, and nobody, would say the job of Premier League clubs is to develop players for the English national team. That's not how this works. Everyone knows that. In MLS there are foreign player restrictions. Everyone needs domestic talent. Good domestic talent is quite overpaid, actually. You've gotta overpay for Sebastian Lletget and Paul Arriola (then you're stuck with them when they age). But anyway, it thus behooves MLS clubs to develop their own domestic talent. Cheap, domestic talent. But they're doing that to meet their own business objectives. The USMNT has nothing to do with it. I suspect we can look at the mission statement and business plans of every MLS club, and the USSF, USMNT, and USYNTs aren't mentioned once.