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.
By Richard - From SoccerAnalytix