Major League Soccer announced plans for its new youth development platform, incorporating 65 youth clubs along with 30 MLS academies.
The platform will include more than 8,000 players in the U.S. and Canada. Five of the teams will hail from the USL Championship, with the remaining 60 non-MLS clubs spread out across the United States.
"There is strong positive momentum and excitement among MLS club academies and elite academy clubs to co-create a platform that will deliver an unparalleled experience for the nation's top players and clubs," said Fred Lipka, Vice President and Technical Director of MLS Player Development. "The development of professional and elite players requires a comprehensive and integrated approach, beyond just the competition format, and we are having daily conversations with academy clubs across the country who are committed to building that environment with us."
The initiative seeks to replace the U.S. Soccer Federation Development Academy, which shut down last month. The USSF stated this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the reasons ran deeper. There were also complaints about how the DA was run, with MLS clubs asserting that games against non-MLS teams weren't competitive enough. MLS teams also expressed a desire for there to be more room in the calendar to participate in international tournaments and compete against international clubs.
The new platform will be governed by a combination of what MLS described as "technical working groups" that will "provide recommendations on the platform's strategic objectives and standards, outline competition guidelines and formats, as well as introduce platform programming."
On a video call with reporters, Lipka said the age groups would be the same as those that existed in the DA, including Under-13, -14, -15, -17 and -19 age groups. Lipka added there are also discussion in place to have a U-16 age group, with a final decision made "in the next few weeks."
In terms of who would govern the new platform, Lipka said, "It's an MLS thing, no doubt about it." But he added that through a Competition Committee he intends to get input from "people on the ground, which know soccer, which know the region, which know the kids."
He added: "We don't want New York to make all the decisions without having a clue about what happens on the field."