Who we are, and where the levels come from.
No club, league or academy pays to be listed here or can edit what we say about them. Soccer Untangled is a field guide to US youth soccer, written by parents who worked it out the slow way. A club's level comes from the leagues its teams actually play in, not from what the club calls itself.
There's no list of who plays where.
US youth soccer has no single league and no single rulebook. Competing organizations, leagues, clubs and school programs overlap, and the map redraws itself every season.
The sites that do exist are either national, with no idea what's twenty minutes from your house, or local and covering eight clubs. A parent trying to answer one plain question, what is this club, what level is it, and what comes next, is mostly on their own.
So we built the list: the clubs we can find, the league each one really plays in, and what a year there costs.
Four jobs, in this order
- 01
Put every league on one ladder
ECNL, MLS NEXT, GA, NPL, EDP and town travel, sorted into six levels, so the word "elite" on a homepage stops deciding anything.
- 02
Show you what's actually near you
Type a ZIP and get the clubs inside your drive time, each one sitting on the level its teams really compete at.
- 03
Define the acronyms
Every term you hit in a club email, defined in a sentence, with a link to the page that says when it matters.
- 04
Turn all of it into one plan
A roadmap built from your kid's age, town and current club: the level they're at, the clubs worth a look, and the next thing to do.
What we will and will not claim
Families book tryouts and sign four-figure contracts off pages like this one. So here's where the lines are.
We are independent. Not affiliated with US Soccer, MLS, ECNL, or any club or league.
The six levels are our own read of public league play. No governing body ranks clubs this way, so what you see is our judgment about which leagues sit above which, not an official ranking.
Everything comes from public sources: club sites, league standings, published rosters. Clubs change leagues most seasons, so pages go stale and we re-read them.
When the real answer is "it depends," we say so, and then we tell you what it depends on.
Spot something we got wrong? Send a correction. We'd rather fix it than defend it.
Four things you can check
No club, league or academy pays to be listed, ranked, or moved up a level, and none of them can edit what we say about them.
A club sits where its teams actually compete. We’ve read 120,159 pages off 4,745 club sites, and the leagues named on those pages are what set the level.
We pull tryout dates off club sites, then check each one back against the page it came from. Anything we can’t confirm stays out of your results instead of going up with a shrug.
Cost figures are ranges, and we print them as ranges. Sample data is labeled sample. When we couldn’t confirm something, the page leaves it out instead of guessing.
Start with your own situation.
Same sources, one kid. The roadmap reads your kid's age, town and current club against the catalog, then names the level they're playing at, the nearby clubs worth a look, and the reasoning behind every pick.