US Soccer giving MLS full control over youth development

US Soccer has given MLS full control over its youth development, but what will that mean for the future?

By way of a swift Friday evening news dump, the US Soccer Federation announced the split-up of the Development Academy (DA) U18-19 age group into two tiers. The top tier will encompass all 22 MLS academies along with 14 others club teams. The bottom tier will include the remaining 44 DA clubs, who were effectively demoted into a lower tier without any prior knowledge or notification.

First the good news. This new restructuring will make for a less-intensive travel schedule for the MLS academies allowing for a more optimal training and games schedule. Unfortunately, this is where the good news begin and end.

In fairness and in full transparency, another potential benefit, at least according to DA Director Jared Micklos is allowing for more “meaningful competition” and “providing top teams with more games against top teams, and more games between mid-level tier against mid-level tier games”.  However, dig a little deeper in this last claim and Micklos’s argument holds no water.

In the most glaringly unfair instance, Crossfire Premier out of Seattle was forcefully demoted to the lower tier despite winning their regional division against no less than four MLS academies (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and San jose). In at least three other instances, three club teams finished in the top half of a 12 team division, ahead of various East Coast MLS academies (PA Classics, Christian Pulisic’s youth club is one example, along with BW Gotschee and Weston FC).

Perhaps splitting the DA Academies in two tiers is the right decision from a logistical perspective as well as from providing more optimal level competition. In that case, the only fair option would have been to allow the existing 80 DA teams to compete in the upcoming season for a spot in the top tier. By not allowing clubs to compete for a spot in the top tier, US Soccer is losing any claim to being an independent organization. Playing favorites with the MLS academies is a telltale sign that US Soccer is essentially in the pockets of MLS owners.

Beyond the inherent unfairness of this rash decision, such a move further restricts the talent pool by only allowing a smaller number of players to have exposure to top-level scouting and competition. In turn, a larger number of promising players will go unscouted and unnoticed. With results at the senior national team level as bad as they’ve ever been in the history of the sport, US soccer simply cannot afford to lose any promising young players through the cracks of a lower-tier level of DA club soccer.

Additionally, many of the talented players who are currently on “demoted” DA club teams are faced with a tough life choice. There is a tremendous personal cost to this decision that US soccer simply did not think through or does not care about. All the promising sixteen and seventeen year olds that have spent a large portion of their childhood training and whose parents spent significant sums of money to support them have been marginalized and posed with a tough decision. In order to continue playing at the highest level they need to consider relocating to a different city, thus potentially uprooting their life.

There is also the choice of leaving for Europe, as almost all of the current members of the US Mens Under-20 team have done, a move that while very beneficial for a high-potential young player does nothing for the domestic system, essentially proving that players need to leave the DA system altogether to truly make it in the sport. To make matters worse US Soccer does not have any solidarity/training agreement in place at a FIFA level, which means a youth player can up and leave for Europe at any time, and if they end up getting picked up on a transfer fee by a bigger club (as was the case for DeAndre Yedlin and more recently Cristian Pulisic) the youth club that developed them through formative years will not see a penny of that transfer fee. This is unlike any other country in the world that participates in FIFA’s compensation model and inherently unfair to the independent clubs that pay a key role in youth development.

In summary, the DA re-tiering move does nothing to alleviate the growing and warranted criticism of American youth soccer as a money grab operation and ultimately serves to further stoke criticism against a system rigged in favor of MLS’s closed-loop system, confirming, yet again, that any soccer entity not part of the MLS monopoly is headed down a dead-end road.