By Jason Davis - WASHINGTON, DC (Jan 12, 2012) US Soccer Players -- After a grueling invitation-only three-day combine in Florida, young players with professional dreams will be chosen by needy teams anxious to find the next Taylor Twellman, Steve Zakuani, or Geoff Cameron. It's Major League Soccer's SuperDraft, a reprieve for those that can't abide a couple of months without MLS soccer.
This year’s SuperDraft is the thirteenth edition of the annual winter event that disperses the best college talent across member MLS franchises. From worst (or expansion) to first, clubs choose amateur players they hope might one day become stars, or, at the very least, good enough to stick around for awhile. The SuperDraft has long filled the holes present in the American development system. If you consider that until recently there was no professional development system to speak of, there were many holes.
Years on from the first edition of the SuperDraft, MLS is entering a new era. There is a development system in place, many of them in fact, run by the MLS teams themselves. By virtue of that relatively new development, the value of the SuperDraft should be waning. A debate is already growing on the long-term importance and necessity of the SuperDraft, and for good reason.
For all that college soccer has meant to the growth and success of the sport in the United States over the last few decades, the end of its prominence as the primary provide of new talent can only be a good thing. Less reliance on the draft means better prepared new players diving into the MLS talent pool.
There’s a problem with the discussion as it has been framed. Inherent in it are assumptions about the nature of the draft in the future. If the SuperDraft remains a static mechanism, following the same general set of rules it has for the last thirteen years, it must be on the downside of its usefulness.
MLS teams surely prefer to bring each successive generation up through their own academies, with all of the obvious advantages that implies. Academy-bred players are ahead of their college counterparts in terms of training time and familiarity with the professional game, are able to contribute at an early age in most cases, and aren’t thrust into completely alien environments with high expectations they more than likely can’t meet quickly.
Yet the draft is evolving, moving beyond the amateur-only proposition it has been for nearly fifteen years. MLS has invested time and energy into find new sources of draftable players, going so far as to engineer loan agreements in order to expand the options.
Toronto’s Joao Plata arrived that way, loaned by Ecuadorian club LDU Quito to MLS to aid in the young player’s development. Plata was neither a college player nor an amateur in the strictest sense of the word, yet there he was, all 5’3’’ of him, standing on the podium in Baltimore after being selected by Toronto with the 49th selection of the 2010 MLS SuperDraft. That he appeared to have little understanding of the proceedings and spoke no English didn’t matter. By bringing him in on loan and making him available for selection in the SuperDraft, MLS added depth to a talent pool already impacted by the new academy initiative.
Players like Plata appear to be the future of the draft. Don Garber didn’t quite say as much when he commented on the future of the event recently, but it’s an easy supposition to make.
"I hope to expand it in the years to come," he said, "as opposed to any alternative.”
Expansion of the SuperDraft, down to an all-time low two rounds in 2012, requires more quality players available to be drafted. A greater emphasis on League-orchestrated loans and attracting young, unattached players who are anxious for a new challenge (see John Rooney and Jason Banton) fills that requirement in light of the slow thinning of the college soccer ranks.
That's a reasonable response to an obvious issue. However, is creating a new pool of draftable players a function of League need, or is it a means to ensuring the draft’s viability?
A January SuperDraft means chatter about MLS during the dormant winter period. A January SuperDraft means keep fans engaged who would otherwise drift away from MLS to foreign leagues or other sports, something that can't just be quickly dismissed out of hand. A January SuperDraft means publicity, an appearance on an ESPN network seven weeks after the MLS Cup Final and ample fodder for writers, fans, and analysts.
The National Football League, not coincidentally Don Garber’s former employer, is the reigning king of remaining in the news year-round. American football’s season only lasts half the year, and yet, NFL topics stay on the lips of fans from the final whistle of the Super Bowl through the opening of a new season. Why wouldn't Garber attempt to replicate that effect with his soccer league?
The SuperDraft isn’t going anywhere because the dispersal of new talent is only one of its benefits. A ready-made way to keep the discussion going already exists, and MLS is not going to let it go quietly.
By connecting the various dots - Garber’s pedigree, Garber’s comments, and the new initiative of bringing in international players and then making them available for the draft - it’s obvious that the SuperDraft is being tweaked to extend its usefulness. It's already existing beyond what the natural progression of academy development would allow.
There’s now a chance that MLS teams could head to the SuperDraft looking for the next Taylor Twellman, Steve Zakuani, or Geoff Cameron and instead come away with a player that never kicked a ball on an American or Canadian field, much less in college, before. That’s new, and it’s interesting.
But is it necessary?
That depends on how you look at it. Is the SuperDraft about picking players, or is it about driving the conversation?
Jason Davis is the founder of MatchFitUSA.com. Contact him: matchfitusa@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davisjsn.
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