Anyone Can Call It an Academy

My last two essays explained the different systems, or the lack of one in the United States, for keeping a unique player record that stays with an individual from youth to pro. That universal record is the foundation for tracking a player across her whole career, and it is the piece U.S. Soccer is now working to align with the rest of the world. With that foundation established, we can move up the pathway to the clubs themselves.

In most of the world "academy" is a defined, inspected standard. In the United States it is a marketing tool with no intrinsic value tied to any standard, let alone a license. The word is doing the work the standard should.

Walk through any youth soccer complex in the country and you will see the word everywhere. It is on the banners, the jerseys, the club names, the tournament brackets. "Academy" sells. It signals seriousness to a parent choosing where to spend thousands of dollars a year. What it does not signal, here, is any particular standard, because no governing body enforces one.

That is the gap worth understanding. In most of the soccer world, an academy is a license a club has to earn and keep. In the United States, it is a marketing tool any club is free to use. Same word, very different meaning behind it.

In England, an academy is licensed

England put its academies on a formal footing in 2011, when the Premier League introduced the Elite Player Performance Plan, the EPPP. It applies across the academies of the Premier League and the English Football League, which together make up the top four divisions of the men's professional game. Every professional club academy is graded into one of four categories, Category 1 at the top down to Category 4. The grade is not self-declared. It is the result of an independent audit, and clubs are reviewed and re-graded on a regular cycle rather than certified once and left alone.

The categories are built on hard requirements, not intentions. A Category 1 academy has to carry the full apparatus of professional development: a minimum staffing level (reported at around eighteen full-time staff) and an operating budget on the order of £2.5 million, along with coaching qualifications, contact hours by age group, medical and sports-science provision, education, and defined facilities. Meet the standard and you hold the category. Fall short and the academy is relegated. The category label tracks the standards.

And the standard is tied to money. Under the EPPP, when a young player moves between academies, the club that developed her is paid on a published per-year scale keyed to the developing academy's category. These tariffs run from a few thousand pounds a year for the youngest age groups up into the tens of thousands per year at the older ages. The exact figures are not the point. It is that the standard and the payment are the same system: develop a player to an audited level, and the system routes money back to the club that did the work. Because the club is compensated based on the category of their academy, there is a real financial incentive to keep meeting the standard. And it is their player development, not their team's ranking, that is rewarded as a result.

Here is the part that matters most for this publication. England now runs that same audited model for the women's game. The Football Association's Professional Game Academy license, launched in 2023, covers the clubs of England's top two divisions of women's football, the Women's Super League and WSL 2, with twenty-one academies operating in the 2024/25 season across two category levels. And they are held to real standards, audited by the same independent body, the Professional Game Audit Company, that assesses the men's academies.

Those girls' academies are required to meet a weekly minimum of development hours, eleven for the under-16s and fourteen for the under-21s. And when a player moves between these clubs' academies, a payment flows back to the developing club. This "recognition fee," introduced in 2023 and paid most often at under-17 level, does not need FIFA or a national governing body to trigger it. It is a closed system within the top two women's professional leagues in the country.

The FA, the national governing body of English football, publishes an annual report on the whole program, naming the gaps it still has to close, from uneven regional coverage to the variation in quality between academies. Women's football in England is not waiting for a standard to be invented. It has one, it is licensed, it is inspected, and it is publicly reported.

What makes it hold together is that it all sits under one house. The Premier League, the English Football League, the Women's Super League, and WSL 2 all operate under the Football Association, and every player, coach, and club is tracked through one connected system of records. The standard has a single point of attachment. Spain reaches the same place from a different direction.

In Spain, an academy is a philosophy

Spain, the reigning men's and women's World Cup champion, arrives at the same standard by a different route. Its youth system sits entirely under one federation, so the player record is singular. There are no rival youth leagues competing for the same players, so there is one structure to belong to and one ladder to climb.

The clubs run what Spanish football calls the cantera, the quarry: a club's own pipeline of youth teams feeding its senior side, with professional clubs fielding B teams and reserve sides in the lower divisions so that the route from a first youth team to the first team is a visible, connected line. Barcelona's La Masia is the famous example, but the model is the norm, not the exception. A defined playing philosophy runs through the whole system, technique and game intelligence over physical maturity, small-sided games in the early years. And the development is carried largely by the clubs and the federation rather than passed on to families each season.

Two countries, two different designs. One built on audited categories, the other on a unified structure and a shared philosophy. Both make an academy something a club has to be, whether by audited standard or shared philosophy, not just something it can call itself.

In the United States, an academy carries no authority

There is no enforced national standard for what a youth "academy" must provide, and on the girls' side there is not even a professional academy designation. The closest thing to a required technical standard belongs to MLS NEXT, the boys' development platform, which sets and enforces criteria for its clubs.

There is no assigned category grade in the men's professional equivalent, Major League Soccer, but the single-entity league does organize its own youth landscape into two official competition tiers. Both are open to independent amateur clubs alongside the academies owned and operated by MLS clubs. The top tier, the MLS NEXT Homegrown Division, brings together all thirty MLS academies and a set of selected non-MLS "Elite Academies," around 150 clubs in all. The academies the MLS clubs own and run are low- or no-cost for the prospects they select. The second tier, the MLS NEXT Academy Division, widens the field to the rest of the ecosystem. Combined, MLS NEXT now spans more than 270 clubs.

The men's side has recently begun to pay for development. On international transfers, MLS clubs can now claim the FIFA payments the rest of the world uses when a player they developed is sold abroad. Training compensation and the solidarity mechanism now apply, reversing the United States' long-standing position that these were not collected here. And since 2024, MLS has run a domestic version of the same idea. The MLS NEXT Development Grant pays a non-MLS academy when a player it helped develop signs with an MLS club as a Homegrown. The sums are still small, a little over $100,000 shared among eight clubs in the first round, but the principle is the one the rest of the world runs on: develop a player who turns professional, and the club that developed him is owed something.

The women's game has no equivalent, in structure or in payment. There is no NWSL-affiliated youth competition, no standardized academy structure beneath it, and no development grant that pays a club for producing a professional. The two leading girls' platforms, ECNL and the Girls Academy, are considered the highest level of league competition, but they answer to the two different governing bodies this series has already introduced. ECNL registers its players through US Club Soccer; the Girls Academy registers players directly with U.S. Soccer and partners with US Youth Soccer for league sanctioning and administrative support. So a girl's record is kept and managed by separate organizations, segmenting the player record. The talent, and the player passes that track it, are split across separate systems from the start.

The North Carolina Courage, Portland Thorns, and Racing Louisville run academies in ECNL; the Seattle Reign field theirs in the Girls Academy. Two national leagues also mean the strongest programs are scattered across the country rather than concentrated in any one region, which requires more travel, and the cost passes to families. ECNL does assess its clubs each year, on performance, administration, and local talent structures, to decide who stays in, but it does so internally, not through the kind of independent audit an outside body would run. And a system where a club buys and holds its place through pay-to-play carries a built-in bias.

Outside these leagues, the word has no fixed meaning at all. A parent has no reliable way to tell one "academy" from another, because nothing independent is auditing them.

It runs the other way from the models abroad. In England and Spain the development is funded through the club and the federation. Here it runs on pay-to-play: the family funds the development directly, and almost none of it comes back, because the mechanisms that would return it are new, small, and so far only for boys. The club that develops a girl collects nothing when she turns professional. Recall the thread from the first two essays: the fragmented record makes it impossible to say which clubs developed a player. The missing standard is the same problem with academies. You cannot reliably certify what a club provides, so you cannot rank it, reward it, or hold it to anything.

And even if the record were unified and the money did flow back, nothing would guarantee that a club spent it to lower the fees families pay. The reward for a youth club here is to win games, and the dominant youth team-ranking system, GotSoccer, reinforces exactly that. It measures how teams place, not how players develop. Which raises the question this series keeps circling toward: what would it take to reward how well a club develops a player, and not just how often its teams win?

Why the standard is the next layer of the foundation

The record is the foundation: who keeps track that a player exists and where she has played. The standard is what gets built on that foundation: what a club actually has to provide to develop her. Abroad, the two lock together. An audited academy holds a category, the category sets what the club must deliver, and the record and the payment scale reward the development that results. The pieces align.

Here, each piece sits on its own. The record is fragmented. No single independent standard sits above the clubs, and the standards that do exist reward how teams place, not how players develop. And the money runs one way, from families in, with almost nothing flowing back to the clubs that develop the players. The term "academy" carries the weight that an inspected standard carries everywhere else.

It is a bit like the way eggs are labeled at the grocery store. "Organic" is a strict, audited certification, and that is England. "Cage-free" describes a way of doing things more than a certificate, which is closer to Spain. "Natural" is the word that sounds like a promise but is barely regulated and can sit on almost any carton, and that is the United States, where any program can call itself an academy.

None of this is an argument that the clubs doing serious work are not serious. Many are excellent, and they are excellent by choice, not because a standard requires it. That is the whole point. When no single independent standard sits above the club, quality depends on who happens to run it, and a family's ability to find the good one depends on information the system does not give them. Everywhere the game is most developed, an academy is a promise a club has to keep. The question worth sitting with before the next essay is a simple one: what would it take for the word to mean that here.

Sources

• Premier League — Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP): introduced 2011; applies across Premier League + EFL academies (top four divisions of the men's game); four categories by independent audit; Cat 1 minimums (~18 full-time staff, ~£2.5m).

• EPPP academy compensation — per-year training tariffs by category (ages 9–11, 12–16). (Illustrative.)

• The FA — Women's PGA: 21 academies, two categories; audited by the Professional Game Audit Company; 11 hrs/wk (U16), 14 hrs/wk (U21); recognition fees introduced 2023, most often at U17.

• League rebrand (2025): Women's Championship → WSL 2; top flight remains WSL.

• MLS NEXT (2025-26): Homegrown Division (30 MLS + selected non-MLS "Elite Academies," ~150) + Academy Division; more than 270 clubs total.

• MLS academy compensation — International: FIFA training compensation + solidarity on transfers abroad. Domestic: MLS NEXT Development Grant (2024) pays non-MLS academies on Homegrown signings; over $100K to eight clubs in round one.

• ECNL — registered through US Club Soccer. Girls Academy — registered through U.S. Soccer, with US Youth Soccer for league sanctioning. NWSL academies: NC Courage, Portland Thorns, Racing Louisville in ECNL; Seattle Reign in the Girls Academy.

• Spain — unified federation youth structure; cantera / B-team model.

• GotSoccer / GotSport — youth team-ranking system.