San Jose Earthquakes Academy is on its way!

Major League Journeymen had Luis Robles (MLS Next Technical Director) on their podcast. Because Journeymen are all dads now, some with sons playing soccer, they asked Luis about what MLS next is trying to do and what the quality of play metrics are for. Luis finally starts explaining it more clearly around the 23rd min, so don’t give up on the episode’s beginning. (It’s actually good background stuff to understand how these guys developed).

i found it interesting that one of Luis’ selling points was that they analyze games and mark videos so that coaches and players can learn from the tapes. But that basically MLS Next is not competing with the clubs and is trying to serve everybody in order to grow the game and increase the funnel for MLS

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/major-league-journeymen/id1685200482?i=1000704312270

 

Tomo Allen v Palmeiras @ GA Cup -

 

Spivey

 

Tomo should be starting every game he's available for the The Town. The forwards that have been starting have not been effective.

 

It keeps happening...

Will Ostrander

From the USA to Eindhoven 🔴⚪️
Welkom in Eindhoven, Will! 🤝#CreatingStarsTogether️

— PSV (@PSV) May 15, 2025

🇺🇸🚨 | Will Ostrander, 2009-born midfielder, officially moves from the San Jose Earthquakes Academy to PSV Eindhoven!

Ostrander has a Maltese passport and has featured for the US U16s and U15s.

With this addition PSV now has 7 American-eligible players in the club!#usmnt https://t.co/KDQMdt4ige

— USMNT Report 🇺🇸🇹🇷 (@USMNTReport) May 15, 2025

My advice to all players with the ability to go to a top European academy at 16 is if you are mentally ready, go.

Places like PSV are a much more proven environment for developing top players.

Congrats to Will. https://t.co/CahZtvj316

— Marcus Chairez | US/SC (@USSoccerColl) May 15, 2025

USYNT winger Will Ostrander (‘09) 🇺🇸🇲🇹 is joining PSV U17 from the San Jose Earthquakes! Excellent move in every aspect, SJE has notoriously been a bad place for prospects in recent years and PSV’s academy is really good at getting the most out of young talent. Congrats Will! https://t.co/uxyFoLSiGF

— American Ultras Talk (@usmntaut) May 15, 2025

The ‘09 has been rumored forever to be joining a big club in Europe.

It was just a matter of which club.

Ends up being PSV.

Think it’s a great move compared to staying with San Jose, and somewhere you feel he has a better chance to develop at than most big European academies. https://t.co/UYhNeb5vU3

— USMNTProspects (@ProspectsUsmnt) May 15, 2025

You asked for a center mid... time to update the list!

 

Things will be getting worse I’m afraid. Bruce has shown that he’s more interested in college players than in developing our academy players. Verhoeven was our most promising academy guy in terms of getting minutes, and Bruce seemed to like him, but nope, loan with buy option to SD and will probably never play for the Quakes again. Bruce appears to be not high on Niko. His playing time will be taking a big dip this year very likely. Cruz can’t get a look, even in preseason Quakes games or USOC. We’re using our The Town home games to get 1st team players minutes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Verhoeven already has 33 minutes over 2 games for San Diego after getting 5 minutes with the Quakes

 

Can't wait to see how much RSL sell Diego Luna for... sigh

Apple broadcast says Pablo Mastroeni told them he’d be surprised if Diego Luna is still with RSL after the summer European transfer window. I agree.

— Caleb Turner (@calebturner23) May 18, 2025

 

So I guess he has no say in the matter and he's just speculating what GM / ownership will do?

 

They are probably already getting offers for him, or at least inquiries...

Edit: Oh I see what you mean. I would hope in a well run team the coach can't veto a multi-million dollar offer because wouldn't it always be in his best interests to do so? That's why there's a GM above the coach, to make those decisions... well not here with Bruce but at almost every other team. With RSL specifically it can't even be argued they're in "win now" mode, they sold Andres Gomez for $11 million last summer and then sold Arango to us, and went from one of the top teams in the west to currently in 12th place with just Luna carrying the offense. Time to start the rebuild.

 

Yeah, if they sell Luna, they may be kind of semi tossing up the white flag for this season and looking to rebuild for next year.

 

I'm not convinced that a transfer is in Luna's best interests right now. He's got a shot at making the WC team. If he's transferred somewhere where he doesn't play much, he could quickly fall out of the picture. And Poch has been watching him play in MLS.

Also, maybe he's over it, but Luna has had difficulty adapting to new places. If adapting to Phoenix or Salt Lake is hard, then adapting to England or Germany or wherever would be like an order of magnitude harder. He should definitely go and give it a shot at some point but with WC coming next year I'm not sure it's the best time. Sure if he goes to just the right place and gets playing time and does well it could *improve* his WC prospects, but it's a risk.

 

On the Total Soccer Show, they said Mastroeni inferred that Diego would be in Europe after this season.

 

How Philadelphia Union set the standard for youth development

Thanks to the high-powered offerings at YSC Academy, the affiliated college prep school for its student-athletes, every kid gains a cutting-edge education for wherever life takes them, be it soccer or otherwise, led by Dr. Nooha Ahmed-Lee, a head of school with a specialization in the neuroscience of learning.

“As we've seen in other parts of the world, the real winning formula is when you join together young, talented players who are very motivated to improve, and then you give them the tools and the training facilities to succeed,” Union chairman and principal owner Jay Sugarman told MLSsoccer.com. “But then the last piece is you have to put them in a highly competitive environment, and you really have to challenge them to raise their game at every level.

“We started with a strong viewpoint that combining the educational piece with the soccer piece was going to be a really powerful thing. But how do you actually, logistically, pull that off? How do you give kids the chance to train in the morning, then go to school, then train in the afternoon or go play? It's a complicated process.”

 

I listened to the recent "Unfiltered Soccer" podcast (or whatever it's called) with Landon and Tim Howard, and they interviewed Diego Luna. They asked him why he left to go play with (eventually) USL instead of staying in the MLS path, and he basically said it was because he saw a lot of guys just sort of get stuck in the in-between the academy and the 1st team, and he wanted to play and prove himself at the next level. He also said that his dad (who was a coach) always pushed him to play at a higher age level, and he wanted to prove himself against older players.

We also have to remember that we didn't have Next/Pro at that time. I think in 2018, when Diego left the Quakes academy, our USL affiliate was Reno. So it's possible he could have played USL anyway if he stayed with the Quakes. Gilbert Fuentes played 16 games with Reno. So not sure that his explanation entirely makes sense.

One of the things LD emphasized is that if you're a say 16-year old prospect the most important thing is that you play. You don't want to go somewhere and sit on the bench. Luna said playing in Europe is a goal of his, but I think everyone agreed it's gotta be somewhere where he plays. I think that would be especially true if he leaves before WC and he wants to stay in the nats picture.

 

Leaving the Quakes and deciding to start his pro career in USL were two different decisions. He left the Quakes before his 15th birthday; if he had stayed, he probably wasn't on track to get senior-level minutes in Reno anytime soon. He started in USL in El Paso in 2021, when he was 17, after Reno folded and before MLSNP started.

 

Yes, that's why I said that his explanation didn't quite make sense. He spent 3 years or so at Barcelona academy before going to El Paso. I don't see why he couldn't have stayed with the Quakes academy and wound up in the same pathway (Reno folding in 2020 or 2021 was unforeseen circumstances).

BTW Gilbert Fuentes played with Reno when he was 16, so I don't think it's a non-starter that Luna couldn't have done the same and played with Reno if had been offered a Quakes HG contract.

 

He has already stated elsewhere that he left the Quakes for other personal reasons. Sounds like Landon and Howard were more interested in why he went the USL path than why he left the Quakes. Probably unstated is that the USL path was more available for him at that point in 2021.

 

The question they asked him was explicitly about why he left the Quakes academy. As I said, his answer doesn't entirely make sense. "Personal reasons" - whatever they were, would make more sense but he didn't mention anything like that in the interview.

 

Notwithstanding whatever happened with Luna, I have to wonder if any other academy has produced as many pro players with no benefit to the team as we have... It seems to me like the academy staff are good at judging horseflesh but there is an utter disconnect between the academy and the first team.

 

And as the saying goes, "you can lead a horse to water, but, you can't make it drink."

 

Perhaps the Quakes execs need to read that article about the Philadelphia Union

 

Former academy midfielder Tarun Karumanchi is playing for Brown Ballers FC in the 7 on 7 tournament this summer and he’s apparently also playing for Asheville City FC in the USL League 2 (North Carolina). He will be a senior at UCLA in 2025. Wondering if he’ll go Superdraft or if Chris Leitch can swing a Homegrown deal before the draft. He’s got more pro potential to me than either Mendoza or Rajagopal. Bigger, stronger, covers more ground and has beautiful passing range.

 

On a related note....

It does ask real questions about the environment they are in with their club. San Jose is considered to be arguably the toughest environment within MLS right now for a prospect to succeed.
They really do need to work on shedding that label because right now the questions about their best prospects center around the coaching, the dysfunction, the first team plan for them, the poor ownership.
​

One thing I was thinking about recently is that Spivey sure does tend to ball out for USYNT’s. In my estimation, he’s been clearly the top performer for this ‘09 group in their camps the last two seasons since they started having camps.

On the other hand, his form with his club… https://t.co/FxkNPdxfoC

— USMNTProspects (@ProspectsUsmnt) June 4, 2025