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# RANKING 29 MLS ACADEMIES • 2025-26 SEASON INSIGHTS • 070
- URL: https://www.socceranalytix.com/ranking-29-mls-academies-2025-26-season-insights-070/
- Published: 2026-05-29T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-29T18:19:43.000Z
- Description: Some ranking approaches are surprisingly well-aligned to actual 2025-26 Regular Season results inside the MLS NEXT Homegrown Division.
- Author: Richard - From SoccerAnalytix

There are many stakeholders "out there" with an approach that ranks the 29 MLS academies. In the context of US youth soccer, this matters because these academies are often-considered to be the ultimate destination inside the 140+ club MLS NEXT Homegrown Division.

Let's consider this recent ranking effort from Harrison Szep, and the team at StudentAthlete.ai :

In under 12 minutes, they deliver a thoughtful - and balanced - perspective on ranking the development qualities of a youth soccer academy. The above approach leverages the now-ubiquitous S-Tier framework to rank the 29 academies as follows:

During the 2025-26 Regular Season (includes FLEX, League and Pro games; no tournaments), these 29 academies produced 1,348 game results against each other (note: our focus is the oldest 3 age groups: U16-2010, U17-2009 and U19-2008/7). Here's the bigger-picture for the MLS NEXT Homegrown HG Division:

## MLS Academy -vs- MLS Academy

Let's leverage the S-Tier framework, and assess its ranking insights in-relation to the 1,348 academy-vs-academy game results. How did each tier perform when playing against other academies?

It's clear: Harrison Szep's S-Tier ranking approach is strongly-correlated to actual win-rate, as well as goal-production on a per-game basis. From top-to-bottom, win-rate declines across tiers. However - yes - B-Tier appears to somewhat "break" the observed pattern. Why? For various reasons - including geography - B-Tier has been under-exposed to playing against the Top 2 Tiers (S+A combined):

As a consequence - we opine - B-Tier's results are somewhat "inflated" because they've been significantly less-exposed to the stronger Top 2 tiers teams. Said differently - as a parent - you might prefer to have your player within Tier C academies because of their increased-exposure to the *better* academies (ie: exposure to stronger opponents = development that requires more resilience). Using this point-of-view on the D Tier, we hypothesize that, had they been more-exposed to the stronger teams, their win-rate would have worsened.

## MLS Academy -vs- Other HG Division Teams

Beyond the S-Tier ranking itself, let's compare academy results vs Other HG Division Teams. Do academies yield stronger-performance?

It's clear - they do.

## Summary

The 29 MLS academies unleash their season inside the 140+ club MLS NEXT Homegrown Division. We aligned their 2025-26 Regular Season game results to an S-Tier ranking framework designed by Harrison Szep's StudentAthlete.ai organization. Compared to the bottom tiers, the Top 2 tiers (S+A Combined):

- Win more... a lot more
- Produce more goals per game (GF-G)

Harrison Szep's S-Tier framework never *needed* to be validated - in any way - by actual full-season regular game results... Their youth development analysis includes many more quantitative/qualitative elements. Nonetheless, isn't it interesting to observe the strong tier alignment with recent results?

We also compared in-season game results between MLS academies vs Other HG Division teams. Academy win-rate was 60.8%, whereas non-academy win-rate was 25.2%. This is not as-brutal a variance as one might initially suspect... and by carving-out the bottom 33% least-performing non-academy teams, the win-rate variance narrows in a meaningful way.

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By Richard - From SoccerAnalytix