MLS: Youth recruitment and development the new name of game
After rejecting the moniker of being a ‘selling league’, MLS clubs are beginning to embrace the benefits of the transfer market. And in doing so, youth recruitment and development is now the name of the game.
Major League Soccer has always had a pride problem. It is inherently an American thing. The league cannot accept that it is not ‘greatest in the world’. This inherent sense of undeserved superiority works in leagues like MLB, the NFL and NBA. They are the best in the world. But the same cannot be said for soccer.
In fact, the pinnacle of soccer is a long way from North America. South America, Europe and Africa produce much higher-standard players than North America does. In South America and Africa, the domestic clubs have embraced the fact that European competition is where the elite players and teams compete. They have become selling leagues and clubs. MLS never wanted to be an apparently inferior league.
But in recent years, the league has grown up. It has realised its prideful, arrogant errors and amended the manner in which it is both managed and maximised. As Don Garber said after the Vancouver Whitecaps sold Alphonso Davies for a record fee in 2018:
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"“As a person who has been selling this league for nearly 20 years, I’ve always believed that you needed to have the players that resonated in your market to be those that could be aspirations for young kids who are peeking through the fence when they see them train. We all need to get used to the fact that in the world of global soccer, players get sold. We have been buying for so long, and as we’ve gone through the analysis, it’s hard to justify that investment and the investment that we have to make in player development. We’ve got to have something that turns this model around or else it’s going to be unsustainable.”"
And Vancouver’s sale of Davies is the ideal pinnacle of what Garber highlights as is important. The Whitecaps, while not all that competitive in senior play, have a very clear focus to be one of the premier player development clubs in the youth ranks.
Speaking with reporters on a conference call on Wednesday, Vancouver sporting director Axel Schuster made the rather ambitious claim that the club should aim to be the best academy in the world:
"“Of course it is a high target if I say why we should not be one of the top in the world. But I think this league should, and we as a club in this league should, first of all, define our role and define what we want to be, and second, we should be brave enough to say ‘Why not? This league is growing more than every other league in the world.”"
Now, you are not always going to uncover an Alphonso Davies, who is now a regular starter for one of the greatest and most historic clubs in the world is widely seen as the next great left-back in world football, but this offseason, Vancouver signed 10 supplementary players after breaking their club-record to add Lucas Cavallini.
Not all of these 10 players will make it. In fact, any more than three would be quite the hit-rate. But Vancouver only needs one to be special and the rest to be merely serviceable to both make a return on their investment and improve their own first team in the meantime. This is where MLS is heading.
FC Dallas, the Red Bulls, Salt Lake. They have all recognised the potential outsmart the global market by developing their own talent, benefitting from having them play in the first team at a young age, then selling them on for a significant fee.
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Smart recruiting and developing of young players is how MLS teams with smaller budgets will compete with the free-speding Atlantas and Los Angeles teams. And it seems as they have finally swallowed their pride to admit as much.