The six levels.
ECNL, MLS NEXT, NPL, EDP, town travel. Every acronym on a club’s homepage is one of six levels. Each rung up is tougher competition and a harder roster to make, and it asks more of a family in money, nights and miles. Pick a rung below to see what a year there costs and how far you’d be going on a Saturday.
What a year at each level costs you
Levels 5 and 6 hold the bulk of our clubs, so that is where most families are. A rung up buys tougher competition, and it costs money and driving time. The level that works is the one your kid still wants to go to in November. Tap a rung for the cost, the hours and the miles.
Where most club players play
Where most kids land. You try out, you drive a bit, the fees climb. It’s a real commitment but a sane one, and most kids belong right here.
- Cost a year
- $1,500-3,000
- Time
- 4-6 hrs/wk
- Travel
- 10-30 mi
Good fit if: Most kids. More games and real coaching.
Where this ladder comes from
Nobody official ranks youth leagues, so any ladder you read online is somebody’s judgment call. Here’s what ours is built on, and where it stops being reliable.
Where a league sits is argued over, and two clubs on the same rung can be miles apart in quality. Use the ladder to get your bearings, not to win a sideline argument. The right level is the one where your kid plays real minutes and keeps getting better.
No one officially ranks youth leagues. US Soccer sanctions leagues, it doesn't rank them, and the leagues at the top (MLS NEXT, ECNL, the Girls Academy) are run by private organizations rather than the federation. The last official “top tier” was the US Soccer Development Academy, and it shut down in 2020.
So we build this ladder from what the leagues themselves publish, starting with the strongest evidence there is: operators rank their own competitions. US Club Soccer sets out a pathway with ECNL above the ECNL Regional League above the NPL, and counts the movement up it: nearly 230 clubs promoted over the past five seasons, and over the past four cycles 37 boys clubs and 21 girls clubs promoted from the Regional League into ECNL. US Youth Soccer writes promotion and relegation into its National League rules. MLS NEXT places its Homegrown Division above its Academy Division. Where an operator ranks its own competitions, we use its order and nothing else.
Underneath that we use two more things you can check: how far each league reaches (national, regional, state, local) and how a club gets in, both from the leagues' own rules. A club's level is then read from the leagues its teams actually play in, not from what the club calls itself. What nobody publishes is a ranking across operators, so where two leagues run by different organizations sit on the same rung, that placement is our reading of the evidence, and the ladder guide shows it rung by rung.
MLS NEXT, ECNL, Girls Academy
The three names that come up most in the group chat, all near the top of the ladder. What each one is in a line, then the full page: who runs it and which clubs near you actually play in it.
Which clubs near you sit on which rung?
Put in your ZIP and the finder sorts the clubs inside your drive time by the leagues their teams actually play in. Or tell us about your kid and we’ll name the one move worth making next.