U.S. Soccer: Balancing travel and competition in youth development

The MLS Elite Player Development Platform was unveiled on Wednesday. To succeed in U.S. Soccer development, the league must balance travel and the level of competition.

Last month, The U.S. Soccer Federation announced that the Development Academy would be disbanded amid the financial pressures caused by the coronavirus. Some questioned that the USSF was taking advantage of the situation to find an excuse to end a broken system that was not working and they wanted to bring to a close anyway. Others believed that this was an opportunity for U.S. soccer to grow. In the end, both might be true.

In the DA’s place will be the Elite Player Development Platform. Major League Soccer will run the scheme, which included 95 clubs across the country. All 30 MLS teams will have academy teams that partake in certain age-group leagues.

The plans for the new league, which is yet to be named and still needs many of the finer details ironed out, were broadly announced this week. Quite how it will work remains to be seen, but among MLS coaches there is one issue that needs to be fixed: travel.

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“At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this, I really don’t,” Minnesota United head coach Adrian Heath told mlssoccer.com on Thursday. “But the most important thing is I don’t believe certainly up to the age of maybe 15-16 that you need to travel. You should be able to stay in market with good coaches and get the necessary coaching that you need.”

That sentiment was echoed by Sporting KC head coach Peter Vermes last month when discussing how he would structure the new system.

“I think your competition has to change,” Vermes told 810WHB. “14 and below should be local and regional. I don’t think kids should be flying all over the country at 12, 13 and 14. It’s not necessary. We should be training and playing games. We can do that in and amongst our local and regional markets.”

Certainly, as Heath and Vermes highlight, there is no need to have younger kids flying all over the country to play matches. It is unnecessary, and hugely expensive — this, among other factors, drove the need for the DAs’s pay-to-play system which meant that many children from poorer backgrounds slipped through the cracks. However, it must also come with balance.

If leagues become overly localised, the quality of play will drop drastically. And it is very difficult to produce high-end players with a poorer level of competition. The wider you cast your net, the higher quality of opposing teams you will find. This is why some MLS teams want to send their academy teams abroad, and there have been suggestions there will be opportunities in the new schedule for them to do this.

Vermes satisfies this need for balance by splitting the system in two. The younger age groups stay local; the older kids, at which point the entire system is geared towards a more competitive game in which producing the best possible players who can flourish at the elite level, travel a little more in search of suitable levels of competition. Whether this would be a suitable solution or not is difficult to say. At what age do you make the cut-off? Surely the kids that are special should compete against the best, no matter how old they are? These are questions that some will have.

Next. MLS: 3 potential pitfalls of Elite Player Development Platform. dark

Nevertheless, it helps to illustrate the difficult tightrope that MLS now has to walk. It is one that the USSF routinely fell off, and U.S. soccer suffered as a result. Perhaps now, with a club-orientated approach, MLS can do better.

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