FRISCO - The eyes of the youth soccer world are once again on Dallas as Tournament Week is in full swing.
While the week is a chance to add more prestigious hardware to the youth trophy cases at Toyota Stadium, the trophies themselves are no longer the main priority for FC Dallas - individual player development is.
That’s not to say that titles aren’t coveted at every level, but more a picture of where the FC Dallas Academy is at in its own development. The highest-producing Homegrown factory in MLS is now approaching Tournament Week with an eye on who is next in the lineage.
“I think we’ve evolved over the last two years. We’ve take steps to go younger, to play younger, to give young players more challenging experiences and know they can rise up to that challenge,” Academy Director Luchi Gonzalez said this week. “[We want to] have more of an individual focus on certain players that can have that experience and competition and be that part of the plan so that they can reach their maximum.”
Look no further for proof than the rosters of the top two teams in the Dallas Cup Super Group and Generation adidas Cup.
On Sunday, the opening match for the U-19s had three players starting and a fourth on the bench that could’ve been playing just hours later with the U-17s. Two of them, Thomas Roberts and Gibran Rayo, were arguably two of Dallas’ best players on the field.
Similarly, with the U-17 roster for GA Cup, there are five players rostered playing up an age group. Regular starters Dante Sealy and Ricardo Pepi are playing up two years beyond their birth year.
It’s a pattern that is replicated throughout the club. The new norm in roster building is all in the name of placing kids at a level that will challenge them outside their comfort zone in development, but not before they’re ready.
“It’s something that we have evolved to doing - and doing it at the right moment and doing it for the right reasons and at the right time,” said Gonzalez, who added that when FCD brings online its own USL team - a move hinted at recently by club President Dan Hunt - it will only expand on this process of playing kids where they can reach their maximum potential.
“We are going to be able to do it even more aggressively and its going to increase our ability to put players from the Academy to the first team. It’s going to bridge that gap with that age of 18 to 22 or 23 year olds. It’s going to better prepare our young players to deal with the stress and the speed of the game and the quick decisions and the quick transitions of the first team level and make them first team ready earlier and more effectively.”
It’s a similar mindset to why the club has placed more and more emphasis on getting Academy teams exposure to international tournaments like Liga MX Internacional in Mexico, the Iscar Cup in Spain and the Aspire Academy Tri-Series tournament in Qatar, taking levels of competition beyond that of what’s offered domestically. Even the recent partnership with FC Bayern Munich follows this philosophy, offering the ability to expose players to different environments and challenges.
“We want to do well against local competition, that’s our first objective, but we belong to a global soccer market,” VP of FC Dallas Youth Chris Hayden said of the international philosophy on FC Dallas Live this week. “We’ve got players playing [for their countries] internationally in Europe, South America and Mexico. We don’t look at any team as competitors, we look at them as peers and a way we can measure ourselves, so when we can interact with these teams it’s better for us.”
As other Academies domestically begin to imitate replicate Dallas’ recipe for success in recent years, the club is continuing to evolve how it sets the standard for developing young talent in America.