Articles

No governing body sets a tryout rubric and clubs do not print theirs. US Soccer does publish the six qualities its own scouts assess. Here is that list, what it was built for, and what a coach can actually see in two sessions.

Nobody has measured whether club soccer develops a player more than rec does. What is measured is the price, the college rates, and what children say they play for. Those cover most of what the decision turns on.

No governing body or survey measures practices, games or miles for travel teams. What the leagues do publish is their season, their event count and their playoff dates, which is the more useful document anyway.

Most recruiting-film advice comes with a number attached and no source behind it. Here is what the colleges themselves publish about video, plus the NCAA rules that decide who can reply to it and when.

US Soccer puts MLS in Division I, the USL Championship in Division II, and MLS NEXT Pro alongside USL League One in Division III. MLS NEXT Pro is a third-division league, not a second, it publishes no minimum salary, and 11 of its 35 roster places can go to amateurs.

FIFA bars international transfers of under-18s with five narrow exceptions, and it regulates trials too: no minor may trial abroad before the season of their 16th birthday, and no payment of any kind may be attached to a trial. Those rules will tell you in ten minutes whether an invitation could lead anywhere.

US Soccer has mandated smaller formats through U12 since August 2017. Here is the published chart, what changes at each step, which parts are rules rather than suggestions, and why the standards stop before 11v11.

No governing body sets a starting age. AYSO's youngest program takes three-year-olds, real age groups begin at U6, and nobody publishes an entry age for travel. Here is what the evidence says about starting early, and about what actually ends a soccer childhood.

Nobody measures how youth soccer clubs behave, so this is a list we would act on rather than a finding about how common any of it is. Where a rule or a number exists, it is named.

Rosters are capped by rule and age groups span a full year of birthdays, so a cut is a narrower decision than it feels. The thing to watch is what a child concludes from it, because "not good enough" is the most common reason children give for quitting.

ECNL and the ECNL Regional League are run by the same organization and are not the same competition. US Club Soccer publishes the order between them, clubs get promoted from one to the other every spring, and a club can hold places in both. Here is what each one is and the questions that settle which your kid is being offered.

A college ID camp has to be open to any and all entrants, so an invitation is not interest. At Division I a coach may not hold a recruiting conversation with a camper before August 1 of junior year. Here is what the rules, the published prices and the leagues' own attendance claims add up to.

No governing body names an age to start travel soccer. What we can measure is where the teams are: 987 at U9 across the leagues we index, 3,901 at U13. Here is what that means for your family's timing.

Only one of the four words describes a level of play. The other three describe who is allowed in, who runs the organization, and what a program decided to call itself. Here is what each one actually means.

Almost nothing you can change the week of a tryout is technical. What the research does cover is parent behaviour, and the gap between children who keep playing and children who quit is large.

No national rule says when a club holds tryouts. Some state associations set a date and they all set different ones. Here is who decides in your state, and the four steps that find your own club's date.

ODP is US Youth Soccer's identification program, run separately by 54 state associations with their own dates, age groups and prices. It runs alongside your kid's club season rather than replacing it. Here is how the selection chain works, what a full season costs in the states that publish it, and what US Soccer says about how it actually finds youth national team players.

A team, B team, pre-academy, academy. None of those labels is standardised, and US Youth Soccer says so in its own rulebook. What is written down is the roster cap, the league, and who has to play.

US Club Soccer lets a player play up within their club at any time, and US Youth Soccer leaves it to your state association. Whether it helps a player is not established anywhere.

The American Academy of Pediatrics puts specialization after puberty, around 15 or 16. It also publishes two training-load thresholds, and says plainly what nobody has established.

US Youth Soccer leaves multiple rostering to your state association. US Club Soccer starts from no with named exceptions. Then your league can rule on top of both. Here is what each one publishes.

682 clubs sit within 50 miles of Manhattan, spread across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and the bodies that register them do not line up with where families actually drive. Here is what the metro holds at each level, who sanctions which league, and what crossing a state line changes.

Almost nobody has to choose. ECNL, the Girls Academy and the National 1 League publish no high school restriction, and MLS NEXT's rule depends on which division and which kind of roster spot. The rule that catches more families is their own state's, and it runs from a flat ban to no bar at all.

MLS NEXT holds 318 clubs across two divisions, and only 29 of them are MLS-run academies. The rulebook caps an age group at 28 players and requires every top-tier club to fund one scholarship, which tells you a place normally has a price. Here is what MLS publishes about who gets in.

One sentence in the MLS rulebook does the work: a club may sign a player without putting him in the SuperDraft if he has been in that club's academy for at least a year. There is no cap on how many, the league puts up to $200,000 behind each first contract, and nothing published says leaving an academy costs a player his eligibility.

The NCAA leaves soccer out of its professional-probability table on purpose, and no other governing body fills the gap. So count the jobs instead: 30 MLS clubs with a 30-player roster cap, 90 SuperDraft picks last December, and a first division where a quarter of the places are reserved for international players.