I know it's been said before (numerous times), but we're well past the point where US Soccer needs to step in and obliterate all this idiocy with respect to different fractured leagues.
My son plays BU16. Currently his team is in EA2. There are rules for EA/EA2 (and SoCal, and presumably most of the other leagues) which prevent cross-league play for most players. Currently, these are the major fall leagues for BU16 in SoCal, as far as I can tell:
- MLSN-HD
- MLSN-AD
- EA
- EA2
- ECNL
- ECNL-RL
- ECNL-RL Regional
- N1L, with 4x divisions
- SoCal League, with 4x regions, and 3x divisions
- PSSLU
- SWSL
Almost every single league is all over the map, in terms of team levels. The EA2 league alone ranges from Top 15 in the state, to equivalent of SoCal Flight 3, and this is not an anomaly. This make competition levels absurd and unbalanced, and for absolutely no good reason, other than the competing pathways, club priorities, and walled gardens the leagues have created and propagated.
Having 10+ leagues would be acceptable, in concept, if there was a hard and enforced rule that leagues could not prohibit cross-league player participation. This might lead to a lot of league forfeits and scheduling issues, but at least in that scenario, kids could get playing time in competitive games. The current status quo is utterly ridiculous, though: teams which are at vastly different skill levels are being forced to play each other, just to satisfy arbitrary divisions in competition groupings, just because all the league operators want to "win", at the expense of the kids and the sport itself.
The only real cross-league competition happens at tournaments, which are expensive and often travel-heavy. Truly, is this the best US Soccer can do? Or are they just completely asleep at the wheel here? As a parent, this is immensely frustrating (and I'm not even considering other concerns here, such as practice squad players on high-end teams, etc.). How has soccer become this terrible?
I actually think it's caused by things that normally make this country great.
First, we’re huge. The geography alone makes everything harder. Once a league gets big enough to call itself “national,” suddenly national showcases and tournaments necessitate travel, and 12-year-olds are flying across the country to play soccer. And because different regions are so far apart, fragmentation becomes almost inevitable.
Second, we’re incredibly entrepreneurial. We don’t just accept what’s given to us. That's not what us Americans do. If someone looks at an existing system and thinks, “This sucks, I can build something better,” they go build something better.
Normally that’s one of America’s greatest strengths.
And as regular consumers, we usually want that. We want competition. We want choices. We don’t like monopolies because competition usually forces everyone to improve.
But youth soccer is weird because we aren’t just consumers. We’re also participants in the product itself.
10 leagues are splitting up the same finite pool of players and team... and that competition can actually make the product worse. The thing we’re “buying” is good competition, and every time you fracture the player pool, you dilute the very thing everyone is looking for.
That’s why I actually think youth soccer may be one of the rare places where a more monopolistic approach would be better. I'm not saying no accountability and do whatever the heck they want but one broad structure where the best teams are actually in the same ecosystem and disagreements get worked out within that system instead of everybody creating a new league every 6 months...
ECNL vs MLS Next and high school soccer is kind of a perfect example. You can make a reasonable argument for either philosophy. The problem is that instead of everybody sitting under one umbrella and figuring out the best policy, we create competing umbrellas.
And that’s basically what keeps happening. One group builds a better league. Another group sees flaws in that league and builds another one. Then another. Then feeder leagues underneath those leagues. Everyone has a legitimate reason why their version is better, but at the end of the day all we’ve done is divide the same player pool and the same clubs into more and more separate ecosystems.
The irony is that by "solving one problem", we are massively diluting the player pool/teams and fracturing the previous league and now teams within that league are farther apart... and it's worse for everyone...
