It’s now an annual ritual around this point in the calendar: Broach the topic of the MLS SuperDraft presented by adidas in almost any MLS setting, and prepare to be regaled with takes about its role and importance.
It’s certainly true the SuperDraft’s centrality for roster-building has faded compared to past decades thanks to the rise of youth academies, spending on the international transfer market and other factors. With the league’s increased size and diversity, there’s now a wide variety of approaches to the draft among technical staffs.
“It’s a fair observation, where at one end of the spectrum you have the Philly Unions of the league who probably don’t value the draft as much. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have clubs like Orlando that are trading up into the top five and consistently picking impact players for their teams from the draft,” Houston Dynamo FC technical director Asher Mendelsohn told MLSsoccer.com this week.
“I don’t think there’s a right way to do it – no one would argue with Philly’s success over the last five, six years; they clearly have a model that works for them. And no one would argue with Orlando’s success of picking these players and developing them into players and selling them overseas.”
Different strokes for different folks
Exhibit A for the latter approach is Daryl Dike, the strapping Oklahoman Orlando City selected with the fifth overall pick of the 2020 SuperDraft and helped nurture into a formidable target man, eventually reaping a reported transfer fee of around $10 million, plus a chunk of future sales, from West Bromwich Albion. The Lions appear to have another such gem on their hands today in rookie sensation Duncan McGuire, the sixth pick in last winter’s draft, who displaced Designated Player Ercan Kara as OCSC’s starting striker and finished second in the MLS Young Player of the Year vote behind Thiago Almada.
Exhibit A for the former approach was uttered by Ernst Tanner ahead of the 2019 SuperDraft, when Philadelphia’s sporting director traded all five of his team’s draft picks to expansion side FC Cincinnati in one fell swoop for a package of General Allocation Money (GAM) worth up to $200,000.
“Out of what I’ve seen last year when I’d see the draft picks, there are a lot of players who are quite OK for the USL level,” Tanner said at the time. “But it doesn’t necessarily make us better on the MLS level.”
Philly had the luxury of both a competitive first team and a respected academy at the time, quite a different situation from Cincy, a fledgling newcomer needing to build out a roster as they climbed from the second tier into the top flight. Even at that, the Union to this day rely on two draft picks in their usual lineup: goalkeeper Andre Blake, the first overall pick in 2014, and center back Jack Elliott, one of the all-time sleepers as a fourth-round (77th overall) selection in 2017.
McGuire, Gressel and more
It remains the case that clubs’ differing circumstances inform their differing outlooks on the draft, with varying levels of investment in terms of scouting, roster slot allocation and the like. An established side with ongoing, realistic title aspirations will usually have much more specific needs that are harder to meet in the draft than a weaker team working to ascend to respectability.
The Dynamo’s current technical regime, led by general manager Pat Onstad, had a No. 4 selection and only a matter of weeks to prepare for their first draft, the 2022 edition, leading them to pick Icelandic attacker Thor Ulfarsson, who they considered a pro-caliber talent with a budget-friendly Generation adidas contract that made up for the international roster slot he required. For 2023, they instead elected to trade down, and did so repeatedly from their original No. 5 pick, racking up $375,000 in General Allocation Money (GAM) in the process.
“Where we were in our club and our club’s rebuild,” said Mendelsohn, “it made sense for us to trade our pick, and we ended up doing it three times last year, so that we could accumulate cap space that we could go out and get a veteran player with. That was more valuable for us last year.”
La Naranja went on to win this year’s US Open Cup and mount a deep playoff run to the Western Conference Final, proof of concept for Ben Olsen’s game model and a natural segue to the trickier task of getting more productivity out of their Designated Player slots.
“We have a clear structure,” added Mendelsohn, “and now it’s about finding pieces that help improve that.”
Yet he and many others around the league would challenge anyone arguing the SuperDraft’s uselessness to explain how their local or favorite team could afford to turn a nose up at:
- The 15 goals, three assists and extensive No. 9 hold-up play contributed across all competitions by McGuire this season.
- The 68 assists, 27 goals and two MLS Cup championships racked up across 228 career regular-season and Audi MLS Cup Playoffs appearances by 2017 SuperDraft pick Julian Gressel, who is now a United States international and highly sought-after free agent.
- Or even the less glitzy, but still important contributions of a player like Paul Marie, an unheralded 2018 draft pick who grew into a dependable defender for the San Jose Earthquakes with more than 6,000 career minutes played and counting, or Max Arfsten, who chipped in 2g/2a in 12 league appearances, as well as a playoff goal, as a rookie with the MLS Cup-winning Columbus Crew this year.
Late bloomers
Mendelsohn points to examples like Matt Turner and Tajon Buchanan, late bloomers who went on to become international-caliber players now competing at an elite European level, to underline how massive, and messy, the task of youth player identification and development really is in nations the size of Canada and the United States.
“None of us have it figured out well enough that the best players are all going through MLS academies and are identified at 16. There are all sorts of exceptions out there,” said Mendelsohn, who previously worked at Columbus and U.S. Soccer. “The college game does a really, really good job for late developers or players who weren’t on peoples’ radars for whatever the reason might have been, to be a catchment for those players to continue their development.”
Consider the case of the Seattle Sounders, 2016 and 2019 MLS Cup champs and the 2022 Concacaf Champions League winners – arguably MLS’s most consistent trophy contender over the past decade.
The Rave Green regularly splash out on big transfer signings and operate an increasingly productive academy. Yet they also have multiple draft alumni in their first-choice XI, having picked Cristian and Alex Roldan themselves, acquired Seattle native and former Sounders academy prospect Jackson Ragen from Chicago after the Fire selected him in 2021 and made Stefan Frei into a club icon after he began his MLS career as a SuperDraft pick of Toronto FC’s back in 2009.
“When you look at a draft, yes, the majority of players don't make it. But overall, if you look at the percentages of players that make it to a professional career, it’s extremely small to begin with,” Sounders general manager & chief soccer officer Craig Waibel told MLSsoccer.com. “Maybe someone doesn't have the time to invest to find that player they love or find that player that fits their system. Maybe they prefer finding it somewhere else.
“The college game consistently produces players,” Waibel added. “Seattle's one of the teams in the league that has taken advantage of that over time. And I think we'll continue to look at it as a valuable potential asset in a player.”
"An important acquisition mechanism"
The growth of the data analysis field has extended to NCAA soccer just like the pros, although Waibel cautions styles and quality levels vary significantly across regions and conferences, complicating comparisons. Seattle rely on a web of scouts and other contacts across the college game and also try to get their own eyes on rising prospects, as in the cases of the Roldan brothers, both of whom played college ball in the city.
“We've got guys around the college game and throughout the college game, men and women that help us, that know what we're looking for in terms of personality, in terms of the type of player that can play here,” said Waibel.
“Our network is very specifically built on people that understand what works and what doesn't work in our environment, specifically with coach [Brian] Schmetzer, because he's been here a long time and he is unique in a lot of ways, and a lot of good ways. The people that know him best give us the best advice on players.”
The Colorado Rapids have already been one of the busiest teams around next week’s 2024 SuperDraft, acquiring first-round picks from the LA Galaxy, Charlotte FC and St. Louis CITY in various transactions over the past year in addition to their own No. 2, No. 31 and No. 60 overall selections. As one of the league’s ‘Moneyball’-minded clubs, that’s a hint they detect undervalued assets at play.
“Every year you see players come out of the draft and have significant impacts in this league,” Rapids president Padraig Smith told MLSsoccer.com. “I think it's an important acquisition mechanism for teams.”
Brand-new wrinkle
Smith points to the case of Moïse Bombito, a No. 3 overall pick this year who worked his way into a handful of starts for Colorado and from there earned several caps with the Canadian national team.
“It's very, very important that the young players who maybe don't get into academies early, go on, get really incredibly positive education and life experiences, and then still have the opportunity as late developers to achieve their goals of becoming professional soccer players,” said Smith. “If I walked into the locker room and asked Moïse Bombito what he thought of it or what Duncan McGuire thought of it, I think they'd be very clear as the importance of this draft in the American soccer landscape. It's certainly not one that can be overlooked.”
After a nightmare season that left them at the foot of the Western Conference table, Colorado have to be aggressive and resourceful as they improve their roster. That includes looking for hidden gems at the college level as well as an openness to trading away picks to gather other assets like allocation money.
“We've already had a number of calls from teams that are looking to move up in the draft or add picks in the draft,” said Smith. “So we're evaluating those proposals and looking at what values we assign to each pick. But we also know there's a number of interesting profiles in the draft as well, players that could come in and help a roster immediately, but also a number of players that you could look at as long-term projects. So it's a very interesting mix this year.”
There’s widespread agreement the draft’s most pro-ready talent tends to be clustered in the top 10 or so selections every year, with the latter rounds more of a long-range gamble on diamonds in the rough. That said, this year’s SuperDraft carries a brand-new wrinkle in that college sophomores and juniors can be selected in addition to seniors and Generation adidas signings – even if they intend to remain in school for another year or two.
That opens up new avenues for development that don’t require the player to forfeit their NCAA eligibility. An MLS club might draft an intriguing prospect and try to recruit them to turn pro by presenting an individualized road map for growth, or craft an ongoing relationship with them and their coaches as they finish out one or two more NCAA seasons.
“There's about three different lists that we have going,” explained Waibel. “The five, six, seven guys that we think can come in and impact our team immediately. And then there's the next batch, which is guys that we think in six months to a year, with good work with our reserve team, might have the potential.
“Now with the underclassmen being in it, there's a third list of underclassmen that we think, if they continue to develop the way they've been developing, could be ready in a year or two years. So there's new elements to this year's draft in the sense of, you're not just drafting for today, but you're also drafting a little bit of potential and how much you believe in the environments they’re in.”
Character and culture matters
With any draft pick, just like any other sort of player acquisition, character and culture matters a great deal, which is why most teams prioritize the interviews held at club and league combines. Under Gregg Berhalter, the Crew called on the ‘psych team’ of their Major League Baseball counterparts in Cleveland to help them hone their techniques.
“We had them sit in on an interview with Lalas Abubakar [Columbus’ first-round pick in 2017], and when he told his story of perseverance of making it even as far as to the Combine, and what he had to go through, their jaws dropped to the floor,” recalled Mendelsohn of Abubakar, now with the Rapids, who rose out of humble circumstances in his native Ghana. “They couldn’t believe what type of mindset this kid had. They officially couldn’t tell us who to pick, who not to pick. That really wasn’t their job there, but they certainly were left impressed by it.
“So there are certain traits we look for in the interviews. Some of them are really positive ones like the one Lalas had in terms of telling his story. But some of them, we meet with some players and from the interview we decide not to pick them, because we’re concerned that they may not be mentally ready for the challenges that they’re going to face in trying to make that leap again from being a really, really successful college player to having to fight for minutes on an MLS team.”
The whole process can be said to be just as much art as science. It may take years to discover which of this year’s SuperDraft crop have what it takes to carve out an MLS career, or perhaps even go beyond. But history shows us there is such a player, or players, on next week’s list. Now the question is who’ll spot them.
