The Multi-Eligible Player Recruitment Thread (2026 WC Cycle Edition)

Nsien had his assistant call and Mascherano (Argentina U-20 coach) called himself. I heard it made a difference.

 

Alexander Staff

Alexander Staff is an extremely promising German-American center-forward.

The Dieburg native has only ever played for the German Youth teams. He has two caps with the U15s, six goals in eight caps with the German U16s. Staff is currently with the German U17s, scoring once two… pic.twitter.com/nEQ0M2iDf5

— USMNT Report 🇺🇸🇹🇷 (@USMNTReport) September 7, 2024

Alexander Staff 🇩🇪🇺🇸 had a brace against 🇲🇽 today in their 3-0 win. He also created another great chance.

I have seen enough of Staff to say he is the best 🇺🇸 eligible striker in the youth pool, but he is one of Germany's best, so it's going to be tough to recruit him.

— Marcus Chairez (@chai_asc) September 7, 2024

Not really, no.

— Marcus Chairez (@chai_asc) September 7, 2024

 

Vargas is a significant loss. But I don't think he would have surpassed Adams and Johnny. Plus we still have Soma, Terry and Emenalo coming up the ranks.

 

After watching the USMNT crap Copa America and then today get taken apart by Canada I feel that I should only profess undying loyalty to U.S. YNTs. Hope springs eternal.

 

bye Esmir

This view of Esmir Bajraktarevic assist to Edin Dzeko yesterday is insane 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/k1WK2CYw3D

— Kpt. Clank ⚜️ (@kapetanclank) September 8, 2024

 

I hope the U.S. U-20 team looks at Aidan Dausch at Coventry for the forward spot. I've heard he's pretty good.

 

Yeah, I think Dausch would be an upgrade on Zambrano and Figueroa. Most people would be shocked for a Coventry player to be better than a Liverpool player and a former Benfica player (that flunked out of Benfica and Figueroa will flunk out of Liverpool soon too), but the best players don’t always come from the biggest academies.

 

Figueroa has always seemed more name than accomplishment..............................
Even when he was back in the Dallas academy, which is quite a long time ago now.

 

USYNT history is littered with players who were in the youth systems of big clubs and never amounted to much. It's actually the norm.

 

Indeed there was a time i thought Zak Whitbread was a sure thing just because he was on the books at Liverpool.

 

Zak Whitbread still had a nice career, he even played in the Premier League. But he became established in the Championship.

I am talking a lot about players like Boxi Yomba, Matteo Ritaccio, Kyle Scott (who is okay in the USL), Mario Rodriguez, Junior Flores, Danny Barbir, Josh Perez, Mukwelle Akali, Chris Gloster, George Acosta, Fabian Hurzeler (yes, great coach but failed professional), Alex Zahavi, Gale Agbossoumounde, Gedion Zelalem, etc

 

We can make an endless list.

The failure rate is extremely high at those "big" academies regardless of the nationality of the player.

It almost made sense 20 years ago. Our pool was so small that we paid attention to every player with a pulse in an overseas academy. Vincenzo Bernardo and on and on and on. We put a lot of eggs in those baskets.

Now we're much less naive.

We focus on the success stories. You look at ALL the players that have left the FC Dallas academy over the years without a homegrown contract........................how many have ended up playing regularly at clubs better than FC Dallas. The list is extremely short. Everyone thinks they're going to be another Weston McKennie story. They're not. Those are the rare exceptions.

 

It's funny to see these side by side as I went to an Oakland Roots game where they were both playing for New Mexico United. In a fitting US National Team connection, Dom Dwyer scored the winning goal for the Roots late.

I wasn't on here then, but I have read the epic thread on Akale with the dude who just melted down after he spent years claiming he was going to be a star just because he was in Spain.

 

I thinks it’s important for people in these forums to read threads like that. People get so sure of this kind of stuff. The poster who lost his mind in that thread went to the point of making separate accounts pretending to be Villarreal fans who were there to praise Akale. Don’t get lost in the sauce people! You’re almost certainly wrong about who will and won’t make it.

 

I still think there is a percentage of fans that just can't conceptualize that some of these players aren't that good because they don't understand the academy landscape well (what it's like at a big club abroad or even domestically). I don't blame them either, not many of us spend time trying to understand it, but there's a real disconnect that I think exists.

The U-17's at Bayer Leverkusen or Sevilla gotta have 20+ players too. Of those 20+, how many do you think end up pros? Maybe 2-3? 5 in a great year? There might be years when none have pro careers of any note. We are just talking about "being pros" here. The difference between being a pro and being a notable pro that could play for the USMNT, for instance, are two different things. Being at Bayer Leverkusen or Sevilla doesn't make you special. They don't get all the trendy finds for U-17 players around the world and recruit them with higher salaries than what an MLS team can. Youth academies don't really work like that. It's usually the best local players in a given region, and then maybe a little bit towards the older youth age groups they'll bring in a few players that aren't locals (with real pro potential) sprinkled in.

It's probably better than being at Seattle Sounders or Atlanta United, but the real gap between the average player at those academies is a lot smaller than most think. We have players at some of these "big Euro academies" that are nothing players. Only a small percentage will be good. That's just the odds of how it goes.

From being "good" to amounting to a player with USMNT potential is like a whole different equation to consider. Using the examples of Sevilla and Bayer Leverkusen again, if you are the third best player on their U-17 team, chances are you won't amount to a La Liga or Bundesliga player. As helpful as transfermarkt can be with the stats it offers for youth leagues, a lot of people don't conceptualize what the stats they're looking at mean. If you are an attacker at any academy and don't have good stats against players the overwhelming majority of which will not end up pro soccer players, chances are you won't either. Even if you do have good stats, not all players with good youth stats amount to good pros.

I'll give an example. I remember years back on those great Atlanta United teams with Carleton, Goslin, Garces, Bello that they had a striker named James Brighton. I believe he led the DA in goal scoring. If you watched any of their games, you'd see that he wasn't even that good, but someone has to score the goals on the best team in the country and he was their #9. If you look up his career, he went to Clemson for college soccer and barely had an impact there. No pro career.

Philadelphia Union U-16's won a game 13-0 (or something like that) last weekend. Someone has to score the goals (and get assists) in a game like that when you play a team where the average level of player is just so drastic 1-11. If transfermarkt listed stats for MLS Next, you'd see a whole lot of players with elite stats that are not high level pro prospects. A lot of these MLS Next players are out of sight, out of mind too with fans. They conceptualize that if you aren't a true top player for Philadelphia Union's U-16's that you aren't going to amount to anything significant and you aren't worth knowing about. They see there's an American at Roma U-16, the equation is just different. They want to know about this Roma U-16 player. They can't conceptualize what they might for an MLS Next player for the Roma's U-16 player because they look at the difference between the first teams and see the gap. It's a much narrower gap with youth soccer, and it's hard to anchor your mind to understanding that "Big Euro academy" isn't as exciting as it might sound.

 

Academies are like stock portfolios. Teams will take on a young player with a high upside that they don't think has a greater than 20% of reaching it, because if they take on 10 of those guys, they'll get one or two to hit.

They smartly deal in volume. It's not like the NFL or NBA draft, where your first round pick needs to contribute. It's like baseball, where you have 200 prospects and just seeing who falls out.

But US fans often see a risk-free signing on a free as some kind of endorsement of stardom.

 

This and we see a guy come out of the college draft who played ECNL, and then four years of college, and end up getting atleast one cap with the USMNT. Obviously a worse path than going to Spain at 14, but development just isn’t linear.

I think fans need to think about how there’s a high likelihood that not only is it likely that a prospect they respect may be worse than they think. But also it’s 100 percent plausible that a kid playing ECNL and going to college may get more caps than him.

Guys like Daryl Dike get 10 caps, and probably would have gotten more if not for injuries. I don’t think he was getting mentioned for the 2015 U17 WC cycle.

 

This is exactly the reason almost no one should be in a stock only portfolio, or any stocks at these success rates.
You shouldn't own individual stocks where you lose on 8 of 10 of those investments. Diversified, balanced Index Funds are the way to go.

 

How did Ben Lederman and Josh Pynadath not even make the list... when they were 13-14 year olds at Barcelona and Real Madrid they were going to be the saviors of the USMNT!

 

I would like to think we're not as naïve anymore.

But then you look at the list of players who have been capped by the full USMNT, and it only keeps the insanity alive (at a time when we should be calming down and learning from history that players on the youth teams of big clubs, or any clubs, are typically nothing special. Heck, even players who have made a first-team debut can still go either way).

Uly Llanez, Sebastian Soto, Konrad de la Fuente, Owen Otasowie, Caleb Stanko, Jerome Kiesewetter, Gale Agbossoumounde

All of these players have actually been capped by the full national team on the basis of less than 5 first team appearances.

Then you have Klinsmann saying Gedion Zelalem was good enough to help the USMNT at a time when he was an Arsenal youth player or you had Tab Ramos saying Chris Gloster at Jong PSV would start for just about every MLS team.

The insanity isn't just created by the online circus, the federation has joined in.

 

Its OK. We're fans. Insanity is allowed.

There are a bunch of kids that didn't make it after being derailed by injury. We can't make a long list of those. I put Gedion Zelalem in the list.

I do think people go totally overboard, particularly in the demand that we call up every young dual-national with a pulse at some big Euro club. There's just an assumption that those kids are better than domestic kids. Maybe the reason that kid is in Europe is because he has a Euro passport; not because he's better than a domestic kid.

What's crazy is when those kids come to MLS as a last resort and don't even look MLS level. That really throws people for a loop.

We have Rodrigo Neri, formerly of Valencia and Athletico Mardid, playing with Atlanta 2. Those kinds of guys. There's no guarantee he'll be a decent MLS player. But there were people on the USMNT boards demanding his callup to the senior USMNT because we didn't want to "lose him."

 

Or my vote as one of the greatest threads ever...Vincenzo Bernardo at Napoli
https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/what-is-issue-with-vincenzo-bernardo-for-u-17-ymnt.507263/