Get ready folks

MLSnext age bracket change update
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MLS Next age brackets are still undecided.

I work for a club from Madison/Milwaukee area, we’ve got MLS Next AD and HG teams at North and Mid America divisions.

We talked last Thursday with our regional MLS Next representative. He confirmed to us they are still debating, pros and cons.

Clubs are pushing to align AD and HG age cutoffs, otherwise it’d be very difficult for us to organize the rosters and feeders from younger teams, below U13s.

Again: it’s still undecided.

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Did they give any indication of when the decision would be made?
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No indication at all.

Regional representatives are gathering input from p2p clubs like us.

I believe there is a conflict of interests between MLS academies (they prefer BY) and we MLS Next p2p clubs (we push for SY).

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If HG stays BY, what is your clubs plan as to how you will handle the younger feeder teams? Will they stay BY as well?
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Good question! Also undecided on our side, however our CEO gave us hint about maybe moving to ECNL/ECN-R.

Our girls do ECNL, so having the whole club under the same umbrella (and age cutoff) would be easy for us.

Now, we consider absolutely unmanageable to have a BY team at Homegrown and SY at Academy.
 
Biorjin said:
MLSnext age bracket change update
--------
MLS Next age brackets are still undecided.

I work for a club from Madison/Milwaukee area, we’ve got MLS Next AD and HG teams at North and Mid America divisions.

We talked last Thursday with our regional MLS Next representative. He confirmed to us they are still debating, pros and cons.

Clubs are pushing to align AD and HG age cutoffs, otherwise it’d be very difficult for us to organize the rosters and feeders from younger teams, below U13s.

Again: it’s still undecided.

-------
Did they give any indication of when the decision would be made?
--------

No indication at all.

Regional representatives are gathering input from p2p clubs like us.

I believe there is a conflict of interests between MLS academies (they prefer BY) and we MLS Next p2p clubs (we push for SY).

------------
If HG stays BY, what is your clubs plan as to how you will handle the younger feeder teams? Will they stay BY as well?
------------

Good question! Also undecided on our side, however our CEO gave us hint about maybe moving to ECNL/ECN-R.

Our girls do ECNL, so having the whole club under the same umbrella (and age cutoff) would be easy for us.

Now, we consider absolutely unmanageable to have a BY team at Homegrown and SY at Academy.
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As suspected it’s the academies making the pushback. The academies in turn are getting pressure from Europe: the English as the originators of the game have a long standing exception but the others do not. The entire point of the shift when they made the ga was to align better with Europe.

Small prediction: 1. As the post said a hg/academy split is likely unworkable and if they do that some clubs will hop to ecnl, but 2. If they do go both of them sy I suspect the academies break off into their own league (league competition from the olders is already separate) while using mls hg still as essentially scrimmage partners. This will hurt a few clubs like Barca and strikers that do put up teams that compete with the academies. Eventually we see a reshuffle so those clubs make their way back into inclusion in some new mls super plus plus which is based on by, mls hg becomes second tier, mls ad becomes third tier recreating the shuffle when they did mls2 before it, when they created mlsn, and when they created ga. Deck chairs on the titanic all over again. Only thing that avoids it is they keep the entire thing by but that’s hard given the number of players (now with mls2/ad) in the pay to play system is massively > than academy players.

The really scary part is that they are beginning to run out of time to make any sort of shift since the academy selections process are about to get underway and they’ve already been scouting the fall season. First targets get set after winter flex.
 
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Carlsbad7 said:
Interesting that the City pdf said one thing and others are saying something else. Not sure which side is right.
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If MLS1 stays in BY and MLS2 switches to SY, it will be hard for any new MLS2 club to sell the pathway to MLS1 to potential customers (paying parents).
 
CAZZZ said:
If MLS1 stays in BY and MLS2 switches to SY, it will be hard for any new MLS2 club to sell the pathway to MLS1 to potential customers (paying parents).
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Why?

What parent is going to say "Its amazing my son is so talented that a MLS Homegrown team wants to roster him. Oh wait a minute, MLS Homegrown is BY better turn down the offer."

Your logic doesnt make sense. Nobody is going to turn down the level right below playing professionally just because the league is BY grouped.
 
Carlsbad7 said:
Why?

What parent is going to say "Its amazing my son is so talented that a MLS Homegrown team wants to roster him. Oh wait a minute, MLS Homegrown is BY better turn down the offer."

Your logic doesnt make sense. Nobody is going to turn down the level right below playing professionally just because the league is BY grouped.
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It’s the other way around I think. The entire point of mls2 was sold that it provided mls 1 bench and reserve players a place to play, and mls 2 would provide proving grounds for clubs (like Juventus or Laguna) to build up the club and earn mls1 and to provide players on the lower teams the chance to compete for an mls1 slot including through the 2 guest slots. But now let’s say you have a bench player in mls 1 with a June or July birthday…if there’s an age split moving them down isn’t going to provide much relief….and it’s going to be hard for the November December kid on the mls2 team to get a crack at the mls1 team. Rather than put up with the headache better to play at the ecnl team. If soccernomics is to be believed, with such a split the mls 1 teams will have a large supply of January-march birthdays, ml2 and ecnl August-December with ecnl being the favored. As the post indicates, I don’t think that’s sustainable and I think if they impose such a split quite a few clubs either move immediately or after the chaos to ecnl.
 
Carlsbad7 said:
Why?

What parent is going to say "Its amazing my son is so talented that a MLS Homegrown team wants to roster him. Oh wait a minute, MLS Homegrown is BY better turn down the offer."

Your logic doesnt make sense. Nobody is going to turn down the level right below playing professionally just because the league is BY grouped.
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The Pay 2 Play MLS clubs are pushing MLS Next to go to SY because they over sign MLS Next HG because it's their most expensive them then use rotate players into AG for playing time. Some of them actually charge almost identical prices for both HG and AG.
 
But MLS already has biobanding to accommodate late developers.

At what age does RAE (which it sounds like the reason people have an issue with different groupings) no longer applies?
 
Carlsbad7 said:
But MLS already has biobanding to accommodate late developers.

At what age does RAE (which it sounds like the reason people have an issue with different groupings) no longer applies?
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And to your second question, my guess is between 16-18 for youth soccer. Realistically though, some kids don't hit their stride until their early 20's if they're lucky enough to keep playing.
 
Scrub It Kook said:
And to your second question, my guess is between 16-18 for youth soccer. Realistically though, some kids don't hit their stride until their early 20's if they're lucky enough to keep playing.
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If you have to bioband in a P2P MLS club, you are not good enough to be a pro or even play in college.
 
Carlsbad7 said:
But MLS already has biobanding to accommodate late developers.

At what age does RAE (which it sounds like the reason people have an issue with different groupings) no longer applies?
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True. MLS has biodanding. So.it wouldn’t be a big deal. The problem is the rest of the club, mls2 and ea/socal, and girls programs will all be SY. So how do you evaluate and coordinate players with different age groups. It becomes a big pain.

I don’t think playing academies in Europe is actually happening much. It’s usually a team from England (SY) or Mexico.It may help to identify and get players on the youth national team. And those clubs want as many as players on the YNT.

In any event,the mls academies rely on other clubs to recommend players / recruit players. The best players will be fall birthdays..so how is that going to work? I think the end result is the mls academy ends up being mostly fall birthdays in 5-10 years..those are the kids who will be good in rec, pulled to club, told they are good, get better coaching and sign up for the all extra activities. The majority of top players entering u13 will be fall birthdays.

So maybe just delaying the inevitable. And mls needs the non mls clubs..at this point I think the non mls academies want SY. So, I think they will end up switching or just have the mls academies play SY with a BY team (some of the academy teams are playing up a year now anyways).
 
CAZZZ said:
If you have to bioband in a P2P MLS club, you are not good enough to be a pro or even play in college.
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Maybe. Especially in the US model where we favor athleticism over skill. However, even European academies use bio-banding and there have been a few notable professionals who did not mature until their late teens/early 20's. It's the exception, not the rule but it happens. Conversely, some of the players who sky rocketed at early ages eventually fell off because they hit their ceiling at such a young age.
 
CAZZZ said:
If you have to bioband in a P2P MLS club, you are not good enough to be a pro or even play in college.
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I disgree. On the boys side…a mediocre kid that went through puberty > skilled player that did not. Clubs..even most mls academies I have watched…appear to play to win, not develop kids. Maybe my standards are too high, but I am shocked at low their soccer iq is…and many players with poor technical ability.

Coaches play to win and big players win games. u13-u15 100% puberty is a difference maker.
 
Bells said:
I disgree. On the boys side…a mediocre kid that went through puberty > skilled player that did not. Clubs..even most mls academies I have watched…appear to play to win, not develop kids. Maybe my standards are too high, but I am shocked at low their soccer iq is…and many players with poor technical ability.

Coaches play to win and big players win games. u13-u15 100% puberty is a difference maker.
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100% agree. American soccer at it's finest. If that skilled player can hold on and keep their passion for the game until they hit puberty they can many times surpass that mediocre early developer. The problem is so many of them wash out because the clubs don't put the effort into them or they lose their love of the game because of the physical disparity.
 
Bells said:
I disgree. On the boys side…a mediocre kid that went through puberty > skilled player that did not. Clubs..even most mls academies I have watched…appear to play to win, not develop kids. Maybe my standards are too high, but I am shocked at low their soccer iq is…and many players with poor technical ability.

Coaches play to win and big players win games. u13-u15 100% puberty is a difference maker.
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My, then 8th grade, kid was playing CB for an RL team last season and had to mark this giant striker, who was probably 6' 4" at least (9th grade, 'cause my son asked him). He won the game with a header of course, but that was his only skill... No touch, no vision, no speed. Just... big.

He's playing MLS Next Homegrown this season.
 
Scrub It Kook said:
And to your second question, my guess is between 16-18 for youth soccer. Realistically though, some kids don't hit their stride until their early 20's if they're lucky enough to keep playing.
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So RAE lasts until players are 18 and then to a lesser degree into players early 20s.

I thought it ended around u14-u15 for girls and boys somewhere around u16.

Interesting.
 
Scrub It Kook said:
It's a good question on whether bio-banding will still exist under SY.
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Teams are capped in any case with the number of players they can bioband. IIRC, I think it's 3 for HG. In my experience, the p2p coaches use them more to bring down impact players that can make a difference on the lower aged teams rather than to move benchers who are struggling because of size. Part of the issue is that this is a coach driven process rather than some assignor evaluating who can really benefit from it for the right reasons.
 
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