The College Soccer Youth Guy weighs MLS Next's drawbacks against its benefits. Players often feel like numbers and leave disillusioned, but MLS Next affiliation dramatically improves odds of reaching the national team, going pro, or earning a college scholarship. Entry at 13 is highly competitive.
Do MLS Next teams have bad coaching and should you even play for them? I'm the College Soccer Youth Guy and I help you play MLS Next or ECNL. So yeah, you hear a lot of stories about players leaving, say, 8K, one club that's smaller, and then going to an MLS Next team. You're there for a couple years, they don't treat you super well, or they treat you like a number. You don't like it anymore, you fall in love out of the— you fall out of love with the sport, and then you go back to your other team. And then your club director's like, I told you, you should have never left to the MLS Next team, they don't care about you, blah blah blah. Now that directors means well, like, they're like, look, the Galaxies and the LAFCs of the world, they're just turning out players. And that is correct. They are a business. That is what their job is. Their job is to go, there's a better player, there's a better player, there's a better player, there's a better player. I got to grab that one. I got to grab that one. Your clubs, which might be very high level, might even better than MLS Next teams in some cases, are like, hey, look, we want to develop you as a person. You're paying a fee. We owe something to you. The high-level MLS Next teams don't owe you anything. You're not paying anything. Their job is to make talent. Which is to say that while there's a huge emphasis on that for them, if you're in those clubs and you can make it and you stick it out and you get to the next levels, you're way more likely to join the national team. You're way more likely to join a better club team later in your life. And you're way more likely to play college soccer, which is the job. And you'll find that if you join an MLS Next team or try to join an MLS Next team that's directly affiliated with a pro team at 13, they're usually full and it is very difficult, if not unrealistic, to join that team. There are of course exceptions to that, and that's a good thing. You wanna go try out for them, you wanna make it happen, but the sooner you get involved with those teams, generally the better. If you want more help, DM me, call, and I can get on a call with you and your parents to discuss your situation.
