Ranking the USMNT's top 15 prospects age 21 or younger, from Europe to MLS

Last year, it wasn’t great.

Now, when I first started trying to rank the prospects of America’s top, um, prospects a couple years back, it was great. Two years ago, Joe Scally, Gio Reyna, Malik Tillman, Ricardo Pepi, and Yunus Musah all made the list.

Then, time passed, they all got older, and nobody rose up to take their places. With those guys in the mix, my top tier of this 21-and-under ranking was labeled “USMNT stars — and potentially European stars, too.” By last year, that tier was empty. My second tier was “Fringe USMNT starters, midtier European pros” and that one: also empty! The first name on the list, kicking off the third tier, was Kevin Paredes, and he’s barely played any professional soccer since the piece was published.

A lot can change in a year — in either direction. So, has it? Have any new top prospects emerged? Or will the top two tiers be empty for the second year in a row? Although the U.S. men’s national team has ceased its January camps — which was typically a chance for fringe players to try to break through and the inspiration for this January list — it’s time to rerank the best players aged 21 or younger in the current player pool.

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Tier 1: USMNT stars — and potentially European stars, too

1. Noahkai Banks, 19, center back, Augsburg

Most prospect evaluators are concerned with tools — what skills do you have that project to the next level? I’m not going to tell you that “tools” aren’t important, but rather that I think actually identifying “tools” is quite difficult at the youth level, where the competition and the athleticism is so different than what it becomes in one of Europe’s Big Five top leagues. And then, even when you establish what a player’s “tools” are, it’s really difficult to understand how those tools will carry into the highest level.

No one has really figured out how to confidently project senior players changing leagues — or even teams within the same league — and the youth-to-pro jump is way, way bigger than that.

I will not be giving you a list of 16-year-old players who might be the next USMNT star, because until a player starts actually playing professional soccer games, the range of outcomes are way too wide for it to even be worth trying to figure it out. There are Americans in the youth systems of pretty much every big club in the world, and that is likely going to pay off with a couple players who eventually become USMNT regulars, but the likelihood of any one of those individual players becoming a USMNT or European star is low.

Instead, I’m focused mainly on players who do the thing that predicts future success: play professional soccer minutes at a high level, at a young age. And there is one American currently doing that: Augsburg’s Noahkai Banks. The 19-year-old center back has already played 1257 Bundesliga minutes, while no other 21-and-under American has featured in even 300 minutes in a Big Five league. Among all players across the Big Five leagues, not just Americans, only eight players who were 18-or-younger at the start of this season have played more minutes than Banks.

Oh, and these are the only American players who had played more minutes in a Big Five league by the end of their age-18 season than Banks currently has:

• Christian Pulisic
• Yunus Musah
• Gio Reyna
• Joe Scally
• Weston McKennie

If he keeps up his current pace, Banks will end the year with more minutes than all but Pulisic, Musah, and Reyna. And he’s doing it at a position where players tend to peak at a more advanced age.

Augsburg are just two points clear of the relegation zone in the Bundesliga, but they’ve played way better when Banks has been on the field. It wouldn’t shock me if he made the World Cup roster, and it wouldn’t shock me if he actually played at the World Cup.

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Tier 2: Fringe USMNT starters, mid-tier European pros

2. Alex Freeman, 21, fullback, Orlando City

At American Soccer Analysis, they have their own, more advanced version of Stats Perform’s expected possession value. It credits players for what they do with the ball and how that increases their team’s chances of scoring, but it also credits players for receiving passes and for doing things that decrease their team’s chances of conceding.

Based on this model, called Goals Added (G+), Alex Freeman just had the best season for a fullback in MLS since 2012, which is as far back as the G+ dataset goes.

Put a different way: you could argue that Freeman is the best fullback MLS has ever seen, and he doesn’t turn 22 until after the World Cup. There’s a very good chance he’s playing in one of Europe’s Big Five leagues at this time next year.

So why wasn’t he even on the list last year? He’d played 11 total professional minutes before this past season. Projecting development: it’s really hard.

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Tier 3: Can they make it in Europe?

3. Caleb Wiley, fullback, 21, Chelsea

4. Damion Downs, forward, 21, Hamburg

5. Cole Campbell, winger, 19, Hoffenheim

6. Benjamin Cremaschi, midfielder, 20, Parma

These players all feel less exciting than some of the players we’ll get to in the next tier. But for all the improvements MLS has made, it’s still a massive leap to go from playing Real Salt Lake to Real Sociedad, Real Betis, and Real Madrid. So, I’m giving the edge to the players who have made the leap to Europe even if they’ve since mostly stalled out.

Caleb Wiley played a ton of minutes as a teenager in MLS, but he never really came close to playing at the same level that Freeman just showed. And it’s not a great sign that Chelsea had him loaned out to Watford rather than their de facto farm team, Strasbourg. It’s also not a great sign that they decided to cut his loan short and bring him back to Stamford Bridge this month. It’s unlikely that he plays much, or at all, for the rest of this season.

Damion Downs signed with Southampton over the summer, rarely got on the field in the Championship, and is now back on loan in the Bundesliga, with Hamburg. Wiley and Banks are the only 21-and-under Americans who have played more Big Five career minutes than Downs — although that number is only 251. But he started his first game back with Hamburg last week, so that number should keep increasing.

Cole Campbell is fourth on that Big Five minutes list with … 36 minutes. Granted, he’s only 19 and he plays for a much better parent club than any of these other guys. We’ll see if his loan move to Hoffenheim for the rest of this season leads to more minutes.

Benjamin Cremaschi won the Golden Boot at the Under-20 World Cup last fall, and he’s played 19 total minutes and completed three total passes since signing with Parma over the summer.

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Tier 4: OK fine, this 16-year-old makes the list

7. Cavan Sullivan, attacking midfielder, 16, Philadelphia Union

Last year, I refused to put Cavan Sullivan on the list because there’s very little correlation between being the best 15-year-old soccer player and the best 24-year-old soccer player. The research on youth development, in fact, seems pretty clear on this specific point: the athletes that specialize later in life tend to have the highest ceilings, while the kids who peak in their teens at one specific activity tend to plateau.

This isn’t to say that Sullivan can’t or will not become a star, but rather that a lot is going to change over the next five years, let alone the next 10 years.

Since we last did this exercise, though, Sullivan made 11 appearances for one of the better teams in MLS. Across every league in the Stats Perform database, just one player who is 16 or younger, Leicester City’s Jeremy Monga, has played more professional minutes than Sullivan’s 449.

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Tier 5: Young goalkeepers at big clubs who never play

8. Gaga Slonina, goalkeeper, 21, Chelsea

9. Diego Kochen, goalkeeper, 19, Barcelona

Gaga Slonina‘s last appearance in a league match was on Oct. 22 … of 2024. And Diego Kochen‘s last appearance in a league match was — just kidding, he’s still yet to play a single minute as a professional.

At the same time, goalkeepers are trickier to judge across the same timeline as outfield players since only one plays in a given match.

Slonina did play a lot in MLS before joining Chelsea at 18, and then he got a bunch of minutes while on loan for a season-and-a-half at Belgian side Eupen and later Barnsley in England’s second division. He’s still only 21, and most starting keepers in the Big Five leagues and beyond are way older than that.

Kochen, meanwhile, was getting lots of call-ups to Barcelona‘s matchday squads, which is worth something, but that hasn’t happened once this season. Still, he’s 19 — a long way away from when most keepers become starters in a major European league.

There’s a world where they both become starters in the Champions League; there’s also a world where neither one makes any impact on the USMNT at any point. So, I’m plopping them both directly in the middle of the rankings.

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Tier 6: Can they make the leap?

10. Rokas Pukstas, midfielder, 21, Hadjuk Split

11. Quinn Sullivan, winger, 21, Philadelphia Union

12. Luca Bombino, fullback, 19, San Diego FC

13. Peyton Miller, fullback, 18, New England Revolution

14. Zavier Gozo, winger, 18, Real Salt Lake

15. Joshua Wynder, center back, 20, Benfica

Rokas Pukstas feels like he’s on the verge — of something. He’s been getting good minutes for a good team with a nice youth-production track record for a couple years now. He could make the jump to a Big Five league, he could land in the Eredivisie or the Belgian Pro League, or he could end up in MLS. Nothing would surprise me.

Quinn Sullivan has the most career goals and career assists of any player eligible for this list. Unfortunately, he tore his ACL back in September.

And then Luca Bombino, Peyton Miller, Zavier Gozo, and Joshua Wynder were all members of the under-20 World Cup team.

I have Bombino highest because young players who progress the ball up the field tend to become good pros, and he ranked in the 93rd percentile for progressive passes among MLS fullbacks last season. Miller is younger, more athletic, and has played more career minutes than Bombino. Gozo played a lot as an attacker in his age-17 season in MLS, and Wynder never plays with Benfica, but would almost definitely have racked up a ton of minutes at center back in MLS had he not moved to Portugal two years ago. He played nearly 3,000 minutes in the USL before turning 19.

As always, this tier ends with a much more arbitrary cut-off than the others. There are a lot of other players who would easily fit into this group but don’t because I cut the list off at 15 every year. In fact, this tier (if we expanded it out) is more likely to produce a USMNT starter than our third tier or fourth tier, but most of the players in this tier also won’t even get as far as any of the players in the third or fourth tier have.

Such are the vagaries of youth development: Nothing fundamental changes about the world, but the makeup of the list still changes every year.