Comparing ECNL vs MLS NEXT (MLSN) "competitiveness" is a perennial favorite among US youth soccer stakeholders. The following summarizes Boys' results from a January 2025 East Coast tournament:
26.1% of tournament results are driven by head-to-head match-ups between ECNL and MLSN teams competing against each other. Let's go deeper into that data:
- ECNL has a better winning record that MLSN - almost 44% wins against MLSN.
- We get it, that "... a win is a win" - but let's also recognize that ECNL's higher win rate is associated to a negative GD-G. This infers narrow close-call wins, and more-decisive losses.
- Let's de-average Goal Differential (GD-G) results - ECNL's (0.11) looks like this:
If we further de-averaged on a club basis, we'd discover stories like VDA Virginia Development Academy, which delivered the highest ECNL win rate against MLSN (80%, 4 wins out of 5 games, across multiple age groups). Instead, let's visualize insights per age group:
Many readers won't be surprised to observe that MLSN dominated ECNL teams inside the oldest age group.
Summary
In late January 2025, a single East Coast tournament produced 218 games across 4 age groups. 57 games were head-to-head ECNL vs MLSN games. Against each other, ECNL won more games, but MLSN wins were more-decisive.
As the ECNL vs MLS NEXT conversation moves along, consider:
- Team-specifics matters most, as it relates to youth development
- These leagues yield competitiveness variances across geography and age groups... and this evolves over time.
- The top 1/3 teams of both leagues (ie: Top 33%) should face each-other more often, but - the above analysis doesn't contain data on the % of tournament teams that align into that top box.
Richard - from SoccerAnalytix