San Diego may not be the only MLS team with a Danish connection: Philadelphia Union in Talks on Bid for Danish Football Club https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-back-bid-for-danish-football-club-aalborg-bk
Set to be completed by January, @sandiegofc are making progress on their training ground/Right To Dream campus pic.twitter.com/HG9i2Wgn8N— Cesar Hernandez (@cesarhfutbol) April 10, 2024
I just love the debate in this thread, but I will have to remind the MLS lovers and European "haters" that Right to Dream is essentially all about moving the absolute top African talents to the English PL through the most successful European youth academy, while the Academy in Egypt and the USA is all about their own progress. The future UK academy and club purchase will be much like the Brentford and Midtjylland connection, trying to minimize the cost of a possible new Premier League club.
' Just so that you know, quite a lot of the Danish top transfers are not from the top 12 Superliga itself, but from their youth academies and the 2nd level clubs, so your comparison is totally false, because they are not included in this list.
No, Youth transfers from Superliga or 2nd division youth academies are NOT included in the Superliga transfers by transfermarkt, just so that you know.
Perhaps not $10 of millions, but Zidan Sertdemir and Christian Rasmussen moved from the Nordsjælland U-19's and their youth academy to Bayer Leverkusen and to the Ajax U-17 a few years ago for a €2.5 and €3 million fee, and these kind of youth academy transfers are not unusual, but will not show up in transfermarkts Superliga transfers.
Actually they would, because he was counting the value of all million $ transfers from the MLS and the Superliga to make a comparison. In any case the point is that Denmark is a youth gateway to the top leagues of Europe, while MLS is not, and is not supposed to be either.
But those are both top 10 lists of individual players where the 10th biggest transfer is around 10-12 million Euros, so transfers of less than that wouldn't crack the top 10 list by definition?
It's all irrelevant, only the age of the youth who are sold is relevant for the Right to Dream concept. The top-3 (€17 to €25 million) transfers from Nordsjælland were all at the age of 19, and happened in 2023 and 2024, so going further back than 2023 is also irrelevant, if you want to compare the Right to Dream Nordsjælland concept with MLS transfers in general.
So examples that wouldn’t fall into the top 10 for either league and of which we have similar examples from MLS. And the same sorts of transfers one could do from MLS if they wanted. What it doesn’t show is that there’s much of a difference between Denmark and MLS in terms of access to bigger leagues in Europe. You could argue for a slight advantage to Denmark which makes sense with them being in Europe, but it’d be a small one.
No, FC Nordsjælland is even more incomparable to MLS as it is to the Danish Superliga in general because of their RTD business model that would have been long gone if they had not teamed up and merged with the Nordsjælland academy, so it's a symbiosis that cannot be replaced by it's Egyptian, US or future English academy. Considering that the Ghana RTD academy are exporting their very top youngsters at the age of 13 to Nordsjælland, then you need to understand that it took around 6 years for the top-3 (€17 to €25 million) transfers from Nordsjælland to emerge, and which is also the reason the rich Egyptian made the investment in the first place, and both MLS and San Diego were so eager to join this project. If not for Nordsjælland it would have never happened. There is nothing about MLS that resemble this project or export of youth from a club at any rate, so please stop pretending that MLS clubs are doing the same or could do the same. As for San Diego, it's not going to take 6 years, because they are heavily going to lean on Nordsjælland, not only by signing some older experienced players, but also by some of the Nordsjælland Danish coaching staff moving to San Diego, just as they have been signing up and doing so in the top of the Danish Superliga in general, to improve the youth development.
The objective truth is that things have changed drastically since England left the EU. All foreign players now need a GBE visa and you get these through a points system. Whether you agree or not it is objectively true that for MLS is Band 3 league while Denmark is a Band 4. Playing 80% of the minutes in MLS will assure you a GBE. For the Danish league it is a bit harder.
While I'm skeptical that San Diego will get top African prospects that are currently going to Nordsjælland (it seems more likely they would tap into a different source, although I have no idea where that would be -- maybe somewhere in SA?), it's ridiculous to claim that MLS is not a path to the top leagues in Europe. Scally, Paredes, Reynolds, Aaronson, Clark, etc. say otherwise.
Any league will sporadically or randomly export players to the top leagues of Europe, like a player here and a player there from different clubs, which are then adding up over time. What is special about Nordsjælland is that they are able to field two youth teams of top-flight quality and likewise now produce top-shelf youth sales objects for the top leagues every year.
San Diego FC hires founder of free, national scouting program to lead academy https://theathletic.com/5421404/2024/04/17/san-diego-fc-academy-joaquin-escoto-mls/ Joaquin Escoto spent years building out a program that had one mission: to find kids, especially from underprivileged communities, and give them a chance to showcase their talents to professional scouts. As the former co-owner of Alianza de Futbol, Escoto created a free, national scouting program that placed several top Latino players at pro clubs, mostly in Liga MX. Among the Alianza alumni are Santos Laguna forward Santiago Muñoz, Toluca left back Mauricio Isaías and Monterrey midfielder Jonathan Gonzalez. Now, he’ll look to apply the same lessons he learned in building out Alianza for one MLS club. On Wednesday, MLS expansion team San Diego FC and Right to Dream Academy announced that they had hired Escoto as an executive vice president – a position that will see him oversee all of San Diego’s Right to Dream Academy decisions. “Looking at the residential academy (that San Diego FC is building), that’s what was different, that’s why I took the job,” Escoto said. “Working at an MLS team for me, wasn’t something that I was so intrigued by, but an MLS team with an academy that’s gonna give opportunity to those young players and being able to scout kids all over the U.S. and put them into residency with the Right to Dream model, it was kind of it’s hard to say no to it.”
The previous failed RTD/England connection in the Premier League has nothing to do with the present Nordsjælland setup, except that RTD were dying because of a failed export of youngsters directly to poorly run top-flight academies in England that were not capable of anything but ruin the very young talents they received.
local story https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...n-right-to-dream-youth-academy-joaquin-escoto The first MLS academy with an integrated grade 6-12 school... the others (Philly, RSL) must be high school only San Diego FC will feature MLS's first residential academy with an integrated grade 6-12 school when it enters the league next year.Now, the club knows who will lead it: Alianza de Futbol founder Joaquin Escoto.@PaulTenorio on the hire: https://t.co/B7KZ95PbGp— The Athletic Soccer (@TheAthleticSCCR) April 17, 2024
That's great about Nordsjælland. However, MLS is not "sporadically or randomly" exporting players. It will take some time due to the nature of the process/business, but a youth focused club will no doubt be able to sell products to the top leagues regularly if they do it right. Given the track record of the Right to Dream folks and the recent trends in the American player development landscape, it's easy to imagine San Deigo being a big success in this space.