Elite Academy Is Now Part of the MLS NEXT Pyramid. Most Parents Missed It.

Quietly, over the past year, the top of American youth soccer reorganized, and it changes how you should hear certain tryout pitches in SoCal.

The split

MLS NEXT is now two tiers. The top tier is the Homegrown Division: all 30 MLS club academies plus a set of invited elite independent clubs. The second tier is the Academy Division: a broader-access competition where high school soccer is allowed, run region by region through operating partners.

Here is the part most parents missed: in Southern California, the Elite Academy League is an operator of the MLS NEXT Academy Division. The league your EA team plays in is now formally connected to the MLS NEXT pyramid.

What this means when a club says "we play MLS NEXT"

That sentence now needs a follow-up question: which division? Homegrown is the old MLS NEXT, the pro-pathway tier where the MLS academies live. Academy Division is real and competitive, but it is a different level with different rules, including high school soccer eligibility. Both are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and a tryout pitch that blurs them is telling you something about the club.

Confusingly, the names run backwards from instinct: "Homegrown" is the elite tier, "Academy" is the broader one. Do not feel bad for having to read that twice.

What it means for EA families

If your player is in EA, the pathway story genuinely improved. The step from EA toward the MLS NEXT structure is now an internal connection rather than a leap between unrelated worlds. It also means EA results increasingly happen inside a national structure, which is exactly the kind of connective tissue our True Level ratings use to compare teams across leagues.

On our rankings, MLS NEXT Homegrown and Academy Division are tracked as separate tiers of one family, because that is what they are. When you compare teams, you are comparing like with like.