By DAN KARELL
On Wednesday, 19-year-old forward Juan Agudelo joined his third club in the last 12 months, as the New England Revolution completed a trade with Chivas USA for his services.
The trade highlights some of the issues with the homegrown player rule, largely championed by Major League Soccer but not actually producing enough results.
For those who don’t know, MLS defines a homegrown player as this:
“A club may sign a player to his first professional contract without subjecting him to the MLS SuperDraft if the player has trained for at least one year in the club’s youth development program and has met the League’s Homegrown Player criteria. Players joining MLS through this mechanism are known as Homegrown Players.”
Agudelo is one of 74 of these players that have been signed by the clubs since the Los Angeles Galaxy signed Tristan Bowen on November 12, 2008, many of them to Generation Adidas contracts, which don’t count against the salary cap.
Unfortunately, outside of Agudelo and Bowen, only a handful of others have been able to get consistent playing time in MLS. Some of this could be because of age. But others, I fear, is because team’s don’t give them a chance.
I’ll use New York as the prime example, because Agudelo confirmed it himself last September in an interview with Goal.com. Former manager Hans Backe, for reasons only known to him, failed to adequately play and develop three of the four homegrown signings made during his tenure, causing them all to be cut or traded away by the end of his three years at Red Bull Arena.
The lone remaining homegrown signing, Conor Lade, was a starter for nearly all of last season, though he lost his starting job to Brandon Barklage over the offseason and has been seen mainly just off the bench under Mike Petke.
For every Bill Hamid (D.C. United), DeAndre Yedlin (Seattle Sounders), and Jose Villarreal (LA Galaxy) success story, there are numerous cases like Sacir Hot (Red Bulls), Ruben Luna (Houston Dynamo), and Nico Muñiz (Real Salt Lake), players who passed up a chance to go to or continue playing college soccer or go after other opportunities, to never get a professional opportunity and end up on the scrap heap.
Around the world, youth players in clubs get chances to play regularly against other local youth sides, however, though there is an MLS reserve division, it’s still relatively unorganized and not occurring often enough to be able to gain match fitness and experience from that just that alone.
I understand that some people will say that they have to earn a place in the team, but there is only so much an 18-year-old rookie, for example, can do to make the squad. Even the rookies from the MLS SuperDraft have for the most part struggled to find places in the starting lineup, with teams preferring foreign players to the American talent.
So what can be done about it? For one, MLS’ plan to allow teams to loan players to USL-Pro teams is a terrific start. If a manager feels that their signings aren’t going to be getting any playing time this season, then they can be sent to a lower division team, where hopefully they’ll be able to be given a chance to develop.
Another idea could be to have teams limited on the number of foreigners in their starting 18, giving the homegrown players, assuming they have a U.S. green card or passport, a better chance of playing week in and week out.
One of the few positive signs about the 2013 MLS season is that more homegrown players are getting MLS playing time. Bruce Arena at the Galaxy has a great track record of playing his youngsters, and across the country from London Woodberry at FC Dallas, Shane O’Neill at the Colorado Rapids, Ashtone Morgan (Canada) at Toronto FC, and Diego Fagundez with the Revolution have begun to see regular playing time.
It may end up sacrificing the quality of the league for the time being, but without the ability to develop American, homegrown talent, within the league, I believe it will cost the league and national team it’s future. There’s still something special about rooting for the hometown guy, and it’s the dream of every U.S. Men’s National Team fan to field a starting eleven of players who came up through MLS and can compete with the best in the world.
I hope that MLS addresses this issue further in the offseason, so that there will be more success stories and less cases like Agudelo where teams don’t seem to care about developing their signings. Luckily the Colombian born forward is still young enough to find his form and show off the potential and talent that he has shown at times for his club and with the USMNT.
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What do you think of the homegrown player rule? Do you think there should be any changes? Do you see the current system lasting over the next 20 years?
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