DeAndre Yedlin and the Future of Major League Soccer

Brek Shea isn't having the best year. After his transfer in January 2013 from Dallas FC to the English Premier League's Stoke City (one of the most expensive in Major League Soccer history at $4 million) the winger made just a few brief, and mostly unremarkable, appearances on the pitch. Tony Pulis, who was then the Stoke manager, kept calling him "one for the future," or something like that, but in practice, this meant Shea watched Charlie Adam from a safe, icy distance. And Stoke-on-Trent gets pretty cold during the winter.

So Shea got loaned to Barnsley, and found a few clocks, a few appearances, a few chances, and a faint hope that he'd sneak onto Jurgen Klinsmann's squad as the only viable left-winger with American blood in his veins. Then he "gestured with a finger" at a fan, as the press say, and Julian Green emerged as an option for the US team. Once the most promising player in MLS, Shea is now a 24-year-old winger looking for a home.

But there's always more to hope for, and so we come to the Seattle Sounders' DeAndre Yedlin, whose future is even rosier than Shea's was. He's faster, younger, a better crosser and dribbler, and capable of some great goals of his own. Though Shea had a few good games during his two-year flirtation with the national team, he never played a three-match span as good as Yedlin did against the world's best, never danced by Jan Vertonghen or matched strides with Eden Hazard as Yedlin did against Belgium. It's cool to be a young winger with a promising left foot. It's cooler to be one of the fastest players in the world, and perhaps America's most exciting fullback prospect ever.

It wasn't supposed to happen this quickly. Thanks to some injuries the Sounders suffered in early 2013, Yedlin had to take over at right back, 19 years old and a budding star who was playing in his hometown on top of everything else. Thanks to his performance in the World Cup, fans across the country love him nearly as much as Seattle does—but he's also getting love from some deep-pocketed teams overseas, which leaves him, and his league, with some decisions to make.

MLS hasn't yet achieved mainstream status—and it's unclear whether it ever will—but two decades after its founding, the league is no longer plagued with constant questions about monetary health and viability. The somewhat grim childhood of MLS has ended, and adolescence is sweatily here, leaving the league curious about what to do with the league-owned Chivas USA and DC United's struggles to build a stadium. Put simply, MLS needs to figure out what it wants to do with itself.

If current reports are to be believed, one-named stars like Villa, Kaka, Robinho, and Xavi will be coming to MLS next season, but the next question is what happens to the league's homegrown talent? MLS has sold some of its best young players (Jozy Altidore, Tim Ream, Shea) to suitors from abroad, but its most high-profile moves consisted of bringing over slightly-beyond-their-prime stars from other leagues. (It's worth mentioning that this new generation of imports is better and larger than the last).

As MLS's academy program improves, that'll change, and we'll see more made-in-the-USA stars like Wil Trapp and Luis Gil. The league will also attract more fans who want to see those American players—no offense to Ream, who had a good season at Bolton, in England, last year, but he was never the draw that Yedlin is. MLS also has a rare decision-making process in which the league as a whole—along with the individual player and team—approve transfers. MLS literally has a mind of its own.

If this were a Richard Linklater movie, a wiser older character would advise MLS on its future, as it enters into a life-changing series of decisions that can only be examined as a single confluent stream of reconstructed experience. But Linklater movies rarely feature massive TV deals as plot points, so I guess MLS will need to make its own way. The league will have to consider Matt Besler and Graham Zusi, who, like Yedlin, are facing uncertain futures and foreign demand. But the Sounders player is the looming prize, one that clubs from all over Europe are captivated by, and things are—much like Yedlin—moving quicker than you might expect.

The important thing to know about Yedlin is he's shockingly fun to watch. He covers more ground than the Mariners' field crew, and hasn't yet learned to play with any sense of fear. He's technically a defensive player, but often acts as one of the Sounders' most far-reaching attackers. It's characteristic to see him race 70 yards back from an opposing box for the sake of picking up temporarily abandoned defensive responsibilities—a distance he traverses with the casual ease of a young world-class athlete. This kind of tendency can lead to problems and counter-attacking goals for the competition—even the league's fastest player can only be in one place at a time—but it's how coach Sigi Schmid has elected to deploy him. For the most part, it works, and the league-leading Sounders certainly aren't complaining.

The teams reportedly interested in Yedlin—Roma, Inter Milan, Liverpool, and Anderlecht, to name a few—are some of the best of the world, and everyone who's ever brushed his foot against a ball would leap at the chance to join them. That said, some of his most exciting tendencies might be excised by teams like Roma, teams with no patience for freelancing defenders. He probably isn't going to be one of the most important attackers on most Champions League competitors, at least not upon arrival.

But the things Yedlin has improved in the last year—his defensive awareness, one-on-one defending, and haircut variance—might very well be magnified by a stint at a European football club. He could refine his copious technical ability with a stay at Roma (a move now in doubt), especially if he defies the team's depth chart and finds considerable time soon after his transfer (a rare occurrence for young American transfers).

It's tempting to cast this as MLS and Yedlin's big moment, and it's true that these kinds of sell-or-not-sell decisions might very well impact the external view of MLS as a league that farms players out to the big boys of Europe (a status akin to that of the Dutch Eredivisie) or as a league that builds itself up with a foundation of aging stars and rising younger talent. The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, and it's possible MLS could become a hybrid of both, given enough time—though how long that would take, like so many things, is unclear.

As you read this sentence, Yedlin may have already left MLS for greener—in the sense of more moneyed—pastures. If he does, American fans will hope he remains uncorrupted by European soccer culture while acquiring skills for the 2018 World Cup, when he'll still be the coursing surge of winging genius we knew, but perhaps a little more strategic and canny. If he stays, on the other hand, he'll become (maybe) an exemplary figure for the new soccer century, a young MLS star here for the long haul. Deciding what comes next isn't easy.

What's more compelling than the negotiation of this hazy binary, though, is Yedlin himself, in the way that games are always more exciting than the description of games. Yedlin's not an aesthetic, or an idea, or a charming personality, or a commodity whose price and destination indicates some fluctuation in the future of a league—at least, he's not only these things.

When all is determined, Yedlin won't be MLS's last great young player, nor will the league be his first showcase. We're at an important time in the life of MLS, but if it turns out the league is fated to make some mistakes in its adolescence, as any twenty-something knows, there's always plenty of time to correct them.

Connor Huchton is on Twitter, writes for the Classical, and hopes this bio has been interesting enough.