22 Under 22 Tiers: Sorting the best crop of young players in MLS history

Soccer doesn't let you buy your way out of development. Not fully. So that means every club in this sport, whether it's in Barcelona or Boston or Buenos Aires, is running the same experiment. There are only so many finished products in the world at any given moment, and an endless amount of money chasing them, and thus every club eventually has to make its own or go broke. Some have to make more than others, but everybody needs that inflow of young, molded/moldable talent.

MLS seems to have finally arrived at that realization. It is now understood that player development is connected to how good this league actually is, and just as importantly, to how good everyone else thinks it is. MLS needs, more than anything, to close that perception gap. Building the next Robert Lewandowski, rather than buying him, is how.

Which is maybe why I've always thought about the league's eras differently. Less pre-DP and post-DP, more pre-academy and post-academy, which marks the shift from finding players to making them. Once you start making those players, and trusting them – big minutes in high-leverage situations – you're for real.

That's where we are now. As a result (or maybe as a cause; there's a chicken/egg thing going on here), 2026 is the best 22 Under 22 class the league's ever had. Full stop.

A brief reminder: to be eligible a player has to be under 22 at the end of the regular-season. So a guy like Atlanta's Elías Báez, who turns 22 in mid-October, is two weeks too old. (Nonetheless, I guarantee there will be angry Timbers fans asking why Finn Surman, who turns 23 next month, is not on this list for consideration).

Before we dive in I want to highlight this tool that Kieran Doyle (no relation!) built for American Soccer Analysis:

Replication Project-ish: Projecting MLS Performance based on MLS Next Pro Data — American Soccer Analysis

By Kieran Doyle In 2022, Daniel Dinsdale and Joe Gallagher of Stats Perform (the artist formerly known as Opta) released an arXiv of a paper titled “ Transfer Portal: Accurately Forecasting the Impact of a Player Transfer in Soccer”. The paper is a worthwhile read, but the idea can sort

American Soccer AnalysisKieran Doyle-Davis

Part of the reason we're seeing such a spike in valuable minutes for young players is because teams have 1) invested in the player pathway, and 2) understood that the pathway works. Click through and you'll be able to see just how likely your favorite prospect is t0 make an immediate dent at the MLS level.

Ok, you're not here for a lede, you're here for a list. MLS will drop its official list in a couple of weeks, but here's how I'm thinking of the eligibles in terms of tiers, starting with two world class prospects at the very top: