The pro path.
Fewer than 1 in 1,000 youth players ever sign a professional contract. Here are the four routes that exist, and what each one asks of a family. College runs alongside all of them.
of youth players turn pro
Chase it, and keep the college route open the whole time.
That means grades good enough to be recruited academically, and a season budget you’d still be fine with if the pro part never happens. Nothing a 12-year-old does at their club settles this either way.
Where the pro path begins
The youth stages a pro career runs through, with the ages each one covers.
MLS academies run U13 to U19 inside MLS NEXT, which spans 318 clubs and more than 53,000 players. Places are few and selection is heavy, though nobody publishes what share of players get one. Several MLS clubs state on their own fee pages that an academy place costs the family nothing, which is a club decision rather than a league rule.
- Full-time, professionally coached training environments
- Competition in MLS NEXT against the nation’s best
- Identification for youth national teams
The final step is rare. Most professional players in the US emerge through the MLS Homegrown pathway, academy to MLS NEXT Pro to a first-team contract, while a small number sign abroad. College soccer also remains a legitimate route into the pro game.
- Homegrown Player signings out of MLS academies
- MLS NEXT Pro as a development and proving ground
- A small number of moves to overseas clubs
Four ways players turn pro
Three of them run through a club academy. The fourth runs through college.
MLS NEXT, the academy competition, runs 318 clubs and more than 53,000 players in 2026-27, and its top division plays U13 through U19. No league publishes how many academy players ever sign a professional contract, so treat any club that quotes you a rate as selling something.
An MLS club can sign a player straight out of its own academy, with no draft, once he has spent a year there. In between sits MLS NEXT Pro: 30 clubs, 27 of them MLS second teams, and the league says more than 230 players have signed MLS first-team contracts after time in it since 2022.
FIFA bars international transfers of players under 18 apart from a few narrow exceptions, so a move before 18 is a legal question before it is a football one. FIFA also caps a minor at two club trials a year, and no trial may start before the season of the player’s 16th birthday.
On the men’s side the SuperDraft still runs each December: 90 players were picked in 2026, out of the 436 MLS itself listed as eligible, and clubs sign college players outside the draft too. On the women’s side the NWSL scrapped its draft in the 2024 CBA, so players negotiate with clubs directly. It’s the only one of the four routes that leaves your kid with a degree if the soccer stops.
What’s the realistic next step from here?
Tell us your kid’s age, level and where you live, and you’ll get the clubs that fit them, with what each one costs and where the college route sits.