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U.S. U-17 winger Zyen Jones set to join Schalke

Another young American is heading to Schalke.

Schalke announced on Monday that the club has signed U.S. Under-17 Men’s National Team winger Zyen Jones. The Atlanta United product, who turns 18 in August, will join the club’s U-19s for the 2018-19 campaign.

Jones previously trialed with the club in January alongside New York Red Bulls prospect Chris Gloster. Jones scored twice for the U.S. at the CONCACAF U-17 Championship last year.

With the move now finalized, Jones joins a Schalke program that features Weston McKennie, Nick Taitague and Haji Wright.

Comments

  1. If mls could sell these young players and become a selling league it would make sense. This age is where a lot of American players lose ground to other players across the globe at the same age. They show quality or potential at youth tournaments and then get stuck in college or an academy system that isn’t proven to develop them yet. I know a lot of these academies are still relatively new but he choice of Schalke’s proven development path or an MLS one should be a no brained. Eventually MLS will have to change rules and try to capitalize on the potential of some of these players.

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    • The development of USL and USL II is crucial. The step that we are missing is the equivalent to Schalke’s U19s or a third or fourth tier league — a place where young players can take a year or two to learn what it means to be a professional without playing against seasoned vets and with the pressure that comes with the first division.

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  2. Jones is supposed to be lightning fast but raw talent wise. I hope Schalke can make him a complete player. We surely can use winger on our national team.

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  3. Paging Mr. Cordeiro… Mr. Cordeiro on the white courtesy phone…

    One step to getting rid of pay to play…paying the youth clubs that develop the players would cause a precipitous drop in the the fees passed down the chain to families with kids aspiring to pay for the club.

    Hypothetically: If my club receives our 50K cut of a transfer fee … we’re probably gonna do OK with our annual budget of 11K. We could probably affect the bottom line of each family who is “paying” for their kid to play… we could likely extend our scouting network to include more than a few families who are currently shut out of the system and get their kids playing at a high level.

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    • I assume you are talking about a budget of 11K per player, right? I believe most MLS Academies do not charge their players anything starting at U13 or U14 level but of course there are a lot of clubs around the country that have to in order to pay for coaches, fields, referees, tournaments, equipment, etc. $50,000 doesn’t cover that for a club with several teams for each age group. And of course, girls soccer is excluded from this discussion as well.

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    • 50k annually MIGHT pay for refs. At the stage we are currently, compensation for selling players gets us nowhere close to ending pay for play, even for the handful of clubs who are actually in the place with players of the caliber to sell.

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  4. This is a problem of MLS/USSF’s own making. MLS and USSF have never payed training/compensation/solidarity payments to youth clubs in the US, and have actively prevented such payments from foreign clubs to US youth clubs. The short term greed of the idiots STILL running US Soccer came back to bite them in the ass. And I hope it continues to do so.

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  5. Not begrudging the kid his opportunity, but what kind of compensation does Atlanta United get out of seeing one of their premium Academy kids – who, yes, I am aware was formerly Georgia United for most of his youth career – just plucked away to Germany?

    I do understand the frustration of the domestic Academies that Europe seems to be able to cherry-pick with impunity…while on the other hand I will freely acknowledge that MLS teams do not seem particularly good at developing and integrating their own Academy products even when they do retain them. And Atlanta, being an expansion franchise, has no track record of development yet whatsoever.

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    • This is an illustration of the weakness of the MLS approach regarding salaries. Instead of increasing the salary cap substantially, they have DP money, then TAM money and all this wheeling and dealing. The result is that teams generally use their DP and TAM to bring good foreign players here and then dole their regular salary among their other players. A few experienced starters will then get a decent salary, but non starters and roster players often have to get the remainder divided into small chunks. A youth player like this might be getting $70,000 from Atlanta. A big club like Schalke can come along and offer $100 k or more and for them it’s chump change. Then, say Schalke pays 4 youth players at a $100 k per and one of them pans out as good enough for the Bundesliga. Then they have a good player for $400 k and if they sell him can probably recoup all that money or more. The other players they can maybe sell to a lower division club and hardly lose anything.

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