"Our verdict is we're very pleased with how Cavan Sullivan performed this season and look forward to him eventually joining Man City"
Taking 851 teams in the top 53 leagues worldwide in a survey completed towards the end of last year, the New York Red Bulls ranked 51st for minutes by players under 21. NYC were the next MLS team in 81st. Nashville were ranked worst with 0% but they're a new team. Napoli and West Ham also scored goose eggs. Considering that the academy system is fairly new, a third of the teams are a decade old or less and we still have the draft, it doesn't look too bad. https://football-observatory.com/WeeklyPost434
Another survey of average age of players on the pitch by league. MLS is third youngest in terms of average but in terms of appearances by players under 21: Brasiliero 9.4% Argtin 9.3% Ligue1 9.2% ALeague 8.3% Chile 7.9% MLS 7.0% Bund 7.0% Colombia 6.8% KLeague 5.6% JLeague 4.7% Serie A 4.7% La Liga 4.6% Prem 4.2% CSL 3.5% Liga MX 3.4% Not sure why they didn't include Belgium, Holland and Portugal. https://football-observatory.com/World-demographic-study-15-leagues-comparison In terms of appearances by HGPs MLS is next to bottom and MLS is third in that list in minutes by non- domestic players but it excludes a lot of second tier European leagues.
Tomorrow in UCL there are 2 winnable USMNT YA matches. Celtic (8 points) with their USMNT starting CB pair of Trusty and CCV take on Dinamo Zagreb (7 points). PSV (8 points) with Tillman scheduled to start at LCM take on Brest (10 points), currently a mid-table League 1 squad. We should expect to see Pepi also get minutes. On Wednesday Pulisic, Musah and Milan (9 points) takes on the top team from the Serbian league (3 points) while Weah and Juve (8 points) play Man City (8 points). I believe McKennie is injured? Monaco (10 points) goes to Arsenal (10 points) and Dortmund (12 points) hosts Barca (12 points) so perhaps a Reyna sighting.
I don't think MLS will improve very quickly trying to import players for the last 35% of minutes (and 50% of roster spots) using the resources they currently have to with American players. Nothing I said is counter to that. But improvement will be in part paying higher salaries and in part getting that large baseline of domestic players to simply be better. I'm not criticizing the current balance but I wouldn't want it to go further.
I think the real point is that MLS is and has been changing at a rapid pace. Making an evaluation based on 5-10 year old data assuming it will give a meaningful predictor for the present won't work. I realize it is extremely incomplete but it does illustrate the level of change in the time that young americans have earned in a relatively short time. (I only have data for the 2018-2021 seasons) All U21 USMNT players 2018: 44 players with appearances. 10 with >=1,000 min. Total number of minutes given to U21 players: 28,732 2019: 45 players with appearances. 11 w/ >=1,000min. Total minutes: 30,102. 2020: (covid shortened season). 60 players with appearances. 14 w/ >=1,000min. Total min: 31,438 2021: 68 players with minutes. 17 players with >=1,000min. Total min: 47,691 (does not count G Busio, T Tessman, D Sealy who transferred mid season and does not include J Araujo, D Ochoa who changed allegience) That represents a 66% increase in minutes leaguewide and 41% increase per team over 4 years. (23 teams in 2018 vs 27 in 2021). I wouldn't expect that kind of increase since then. I don't have data but I would expect that it has continued to improve.
Part of the reason that more imports makes sense is that we have increased the number of teams by 50% in ten years and at the same time the draft has become almost irrelevant. In 2014 the backbone of most teams was made up of draftees and Central Americans. Today they're largely made up of academy graduates and South Americans. That means that American players are getting opportunities earlier and when they do get opportunities they're playing at a higher level. If you go back and watch a watch a match from 2014 it's like the Stone Age. I mean Liam Ridgewell helped turn the Timbers from also rans into contenders. Liam freaking Ridgewell!
There's an appeals process that can take 6-12 months..... if that's what "soon" means, then yes a verdict will be dropping "soon" Man City 115 charges timeline as Premier League champions await verdict after trial concludes https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/man-city-115-charges-timeline-204219750.html When could the verdict come out? The Times recently suggested it is unlikely the verdict will be announced before the end of the 2024/25 Premier League season. Meanwhile, a report from the Daily Mail claimed a conclusion could be reached in the 'spring or summer.'
The funny thing is much of the American base, including who posted this, has an adjacent attitude. They think you can't play if you're in America. We should be sledding against not w/ them too. It’s because European soccer’s worst nightmare is the USMNT 🇺🇸 actually being good. Having players that can compete in their leagues. Europe doesn’t know how to digest it. pic.twitter.com/5yHoxYG0fK— Tactical Manager (@ManagerTactical) December 9, 2024
This is key for the US national team. It helps the more players you have to choose from but we can tell pretty early if they have any chance of contributing so the optimum is not the number but the quality. We need as many quality, starter level players as possible so upgrading MLS continually as it's done makes any player getting minutes better incrementally every year. The league keeps creeping upward in quality and is somewhere between 15 and 7. It will keep moving slowly forward until it's between 10 and 5. Just watch an MLS team that stands still in the off season and their inevitable slide. Young players getting lots of minutes are better collectively than those who did 5-10 years ago and will be even better 5 years on.
Signing Diego Valeri, which happened the prior season when they had the 3rd best record in the league.
5 from England 0 USWNT... wow the English must have really impressed at the biggest tournament of 2024 the summer Olympics
This is why you don't let players vote, or at least care about it. I am willing to bet that the majority who voted neither put any time into it nor did they actually read the criteria. And I also suspect the English FA forced / made it really easy for their players to vote. As someone else noted online, there's exactly ONE Olympic medal on this team, a silver for Marta. And she was a sub in the Gold Medal game. Earps literally lost her national team job during the year, so that might be the most absurd one. England didn't even make the Olympics ... they didn't even make the final four of QUALIFYING for the Olympics, having finished second in their group in UEFA Nations League group stage. Oh, well, better locker room material.
Lots of issues at play. 1) More than half the teams founded since 2011. 2) Rapid expansion diluting the quality domestic pool. 3) Few young players of MLS-level being developed by the 2nd/3rd divisions to "promote" to MLS. MLS clubs are buying those players [Brookyln Raines, Fidel Barajas, Diego Luna, etc.], but there aren't a ton. The list goes on. Fewer and fewer draft picks ready to contribute to the level of MLS. Also, we can't demand that MLS clubs sell their good young players to Europe, and complain that there aren't more domestic players in MLS. If FCD didn't sell Pepi, Reynolds, Tessmann, Richards, etc. then their squad would look different. [I remember there was some sort of survey conducted by MLS about what would contribute to putting more butts in seats and more eyes on tv screens. it wasn't more young, domestic players. it was STARS. Lionel Messi puts butts in seats. Not Ben Cremaschi. I think that survey even determined that if they increased the salary cap by 20%, it wouldn't make much of a difference. Acquisition of more above average players nobody has heard of from Argentina doesn't move the needle. STARS move the needle.]]
That opinion in that tweet is so off base. European fans are club centric, and they don't care where their club's players come from as long as they good. They certainly don't care about the USMNT, or whether or not the USMNT is good. The worst nightmare is the one a certain segment of USMNT centric fans have about MLS actually being good to very good. They have no clue how to digest that.
Some Yank Abroad news. Pulisic out for a month. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_...stian-pulisic-torn-right-calf-muscle-ac-milan
USL has about 6 teams with the resources to build academies and they're more interested in selling on to Europe. Not sure how long it will be before we have an effective inter-league transfer market, it's a whole different culture.
I think you hit the nail on the head. That is the key. Of that group, some will go, but many will stay and become "MLS lifers". A slur to some, they are the key to MLS' continued growth and improvement. They won't be a key component of the USMNT (at least in the near term) but some will likely be fringe players.
As you note, the big gap is that most USL teams don't have the resources to add on an expense that only pays off after years. That said, I think they will absolutely sell to MLS if MLS is willing to pay and MLS is proven to be willing to deal if they like the player. There's no artificial wall here even if they are competitors. Every year there are some USL to MLS transfers. Diego Luna and Fidel Barajas are two; so was Brooklyn Raines, I think. I know MLS teams also put offers in Wynder. It's really just the supply that is at issue. There's very few USL teams even trying to develop players. Barajas and Luna were MLS guys who went to USL to show their stuff; they weren't USL academy kids. (Raines was a Barca AZ kid, IIRC). A number of the kids who do go there as an academy do so expressly to go to Europe as more or less a free agent -- both the Roots' 'sales' and most of OCSC's are players who didn't really ever play there and went for cheap. Or maybe a year, like Jonathon Gomez at Louisville. (And note that the vast majority of examples seem to be players who don't want to sign for the Quakes, which, you know, I get.) Wynder is the rarity -- a real academy kid at Louisville who played for them, largely, I assume, because he's in the area. I think Luna and Barajas, and to a lesser extent, Raines and Corcoran, are showing that USL can be a nice showpiece for a player that the MLS team didn't want to sign (or they didn't want to sign with that specific team), but we really have absolutely zero success stories of a player developed in USL for longer than a season. Wynder would be the first if he pans out. Corcoran might count given how much time he'd be at Birmingham.
As far as I'm concerned, the gap between MLS and the USL is ENORMOUS. We can't really compare our system to that of Germany or Spain or wherever in that regard. There were some USL players in the 2023 U17 World Cup squad. I wouldn't be surprised to see one or two of them move to MLS this off-season. In fact, we've heard such rumors about Bryce Jamison of Orange County. The truth is that Fidel Barajas, Diego Luna, Brooklyn Raines were in MLS academies. Then they dropped down to the USL without signing MLS homegrown deals (for varied reasons) and were signed back by other clubs. Maybe Matthew Corcoran of Birmingham Legion will be the next in that line. We'll see. [He's formerly of FC Dallas.]