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Youth movement MLS sets sights on the Kobe Bryants of soccer
Posted: Thursday March 16, 2000 04:44 PM
By Ian Thomsen, Sports Illustrated The NBA fears that it's being ruined by teenage players who won't go to college, but MLS has no such worries. Just the opposite: The five-year old soccer league is actively recruiting some of the country's best young players -- the potential Kobe Bryants of soccer -- and asking them to sign professional contracts rather than NCAA letters of intent. So defending champion D.C. United opens the season with the league's youngest player yet, 16-year-old Bobby Convey, who was a freshman at Penn Charter High School in Philadelphia in 1998. Convey figures to earn significant playing time as a rookie; at night, he will sleep in the home of team president and general manager Kevin Payne, as if he were a foreign-exchange student. It may seem primitive, almost panicky for a championship team to demand so much of a player who's barely old enough to drive. Just the opposite again: Convey embodies a new level of sophistication for the league. His fast ascension is a sign that MLS is coming to grips with the larger world of soccer in which it plays. "Bobby Convey as a senior in high school could not get the kind of exposure we're giving him -- the chance to train and play everyday with Marco Etcheverry, against Eddie Pope," says D.C. coach Thomas Rongen, a firm believer in the MLS youth movement. "To me it's a no-brainer. When a player goes to college he can lose some very important years in his development. In America, we think of a college senior as a `young' player. But in other places around the world, a 21-year-old guy is already an `old' player. If you don't make it at some of these big South American clubs by the time you're 17, 18, you're probably going to be a second-division player for the rest of your career." Also expected to see significant time this season is DaMarcus Beasley, a 17-year-old midfielder with the Chicago Fire. At the time of their signings, both DaMarcus and his older brother Jamar, now a 20-year-old forward with the New England Revolution, were the youngest players ever signed by MLS. Pele was 17 when he led Brazil to its first world championship in 1958. As teenagers, Maradona and Ronaldo were both successful professionals living away from home. If American soccer is to grow up, it's going to have to get started at a younger age. "College does a good job, but it doesn't develop players at the rate of our league," says Todd Durbin, MLS vice president of player personnel. "All the research we've done shows that young players benefit from getting in a professional environment -- not just the on-field stuff. A lot of it is off the field: the travel, living in hotels ... plus, they're surrounded by players whose paycheck depends on their ability to stay on the field. They're locked into that environment of competing and striving to succeed." This is not to suggest that MLS is about to abandon the NCAA as a developmental league. The majority of American players will continue to pass through college programs. "Most young players should go to college," says Sunil Gulati, a longtime guru of US player development. But the finest young men are being recruited to Project-40, a program designed by Gulati. Convey is among the more than 20 young players currently assigned to Project-40. Along with earning a $24,000 player's salary and a small apparel stipend from Nike, Convey received close to $40,000 designated for college tuition and costs as he pleases. Also aimed at developing talent for the U.S. national team, the program is carried out jointly with the U.S. Soccer Federation. "Project-40 accepts that players are giving up a college scholarship that has a real value," Gulati says. "It also accepts that education is going to continue to play an important role in American soccer." Gulati points out that the old NASL -- though it was known for signing famous elderly names from Europe and South America -- also was interested in recruiting young American players. Among them was Rick Davis, who joined the New York Cosmos at age 19 in 1978, said Gulati, the managing director of Robert Kraft's MLS clubs, the New England Revolution and San Jose Clash. Current MetroStar Tab Ramos, 33, was drafted by the Cosmos in 1984 our of St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, New Jersey. Though MLS is trying to go younger, the league kicked off the 2000 season with a New York press conference featuring German Lothar Matthaeus and Bulgarian Hristo Stoichkov, two players whose combined age is 74. "We need both kinds of players," Rongen says. "We need to bring in the big marquee names who continue to create interest in the media. We also need to balance them with young players who have a lot of upside." The incentive for clubs to take a chance on Project-40 is that these players don't occupy official spots on the roster. Even if Convey becomes a star for D.C., his presence will permit the club to carry an extra player. Those players who aren't ready to compete in MLS are assigned to the Project-40 team that plays in the A-League, which is the second-division tier of American pro soccer. Rongen predicts that another D.C. investment, 18 year old Sergio Salas, "will probably get some games with the Project-40 team this season. He is going to take a lot longer than Bobby to develop." The league took the additional step this year of creating non-roster designations to encourage clubs to recruit young foreign players. The Revolution signed William Sunsing, a 22-year-old Olympian who scored a goal for Costa Rica in the recent Gold Cup. Select foreign players age 22 or yonger will be counted as "youth internationals," meaning that they -- like Convey -- do not count against the roster. Other players ages 23 and 24 will be counted as "transitional internationals," who count against the roster but not against a team's limit of four international players. MLS rules allow for no more than 12 youth or transitional internationals in the league. Don't think that the league is acting out of charity. Unlike the old NASL, which spent itself into oblivion, MLS is hoping to sign and develop young players because it can't afford the proven stars. The hope is that these players mature to improve the level of play in America -- or that they become commodities to be sold to major clubs overseas at immense profit. "Ten years down the line, what changes hopefully is the risk-reward scenarios for the players," Gulati says. "By then you hope that the player coming out of college is making the decision to turn pro because we can offer him Kobe Bryant's contract -- not the $24,000 contract he's getting now." In the meantime, only the results will reveal whether these steps are enough to provide sufficient talent to MLS and the U.S. national team -- compared with countries around the world such as England, the Netherlands and countless others -- where professional clubs maintain their own youth programs, developing players from an even younger age.
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