Orlando City and U.S. men’s national team forward Duncan McGuire is officially headed to the English Football League Championship on loan.
Blackburn Rovers have acquired McGuire on loan from Orlando City for the remainder of the current season. The loan also includes a club option to make McGuire’s move permanent this summer.
“We are really pleased to have secured the signing of Duncan McGuire,” said Rovers’ Director of Football Gregg Broughton. “A Nebraska boy, whose rise to the MLS is a great story and now we hope to continue that trajectory with Blackburn Rovers.
“Quick, with good movement and a great finisher, Duncan has all of the attributes needed to follow in the footsteps of the many great strikers who have worn our famous colors,” he added. “I have to give our recruitment team great credit for identifying him, tracking his progress and convincing him that this was the perfect next move for him in his career.”
McGuire, 22, is coming off his USMNT debut in January’s 1-0 friendly loss to Slovenia on home soil. A former Mac Hermann award winner, McGuire enjoyed an impressive debut campaign in MLS last year.
McGuire scored 13 goals and registered three assists in 32 league appearances for the Lions, helping them return to the MLS Cup Playoffs.
Blackburn Rovers are 18th in the Championship table, eight points clear of the relegation zone.
As for the college soccer debate, we are a ways away from being ready to disband it or ignore it. As IV points out the issue is limits to practice time and limited matches. However, it’s still a realistic path for guys like Dike and MacGuire who didn’t live in MLS cities and didn’t have parents either willing or able to take them on long commutes on a regular basis to participate in MLS Academies. Although I don’t think IVs opinion that Houston is the norm (in fact I think outside Minnesota it’s probably the worst academy) USL academies just don’t have the same funding and staff. If a kid in my hometown wanted to follow the academy path it’s a 4 or 5 hr drive to STL or KC. Des Moines only has a USL League 2 and their “academy” is just a local youth club at this point. Supposedly there will be a bigger investment once the USL team gets here in 2025. USL teams cover a much bigger portion of the map so until they get at least consistent enough we will still see some players come thru college. The size of the US is just too large to catch everyone. I do think Bradenton had reached its end though it was casting such a narrow net and certainly played a role in the lost generation of the late 2010s. I would say perhaps the Development League could have used a few more years but loss of revenue during Covid pushed that out more quickly than maybe it should have. MLS Next Pro is likely to keep some kids out of college since 18-20 yrs can get consistent games. Aidan Morris and Sebastian Berhalter both played college ball 2019 because there wasn’t any MLS option, both came back to Columbus a year later and contributed to the 2020 MLS Cup run.
Blackburn apparently made an error on the paperwork and deal may be nullified. According to Tom Bogart.
my understand is it’s been appealed which means the FA denied it.
It was denied because they didn’t fill out the forms correctly. From Blackburn fans on socials it’s not the first time they’ve messed up on transfer paperwork. The manager post match over the weekend lit into management over their mistakes with the deal. The fans think he’s trying to get sacked. So if he wins the appeal he’s likely playing for a manager who didn’t pick him and an ownership group that didn’t want him. Might be best to lose this one. Of course their leading goal scorer went off with an injury so…
The Olympics are a U23 tournament and not that highly rated by scouts.
My guess is Duncan believes another season and a possible(it’s not guaranteed) Olympic slot is not going to help him that much. He already has his foot in the door and if he has the talent, he’s better off going now and impressing those bigger clubs while at Blackburn.
If that sounds impatient, pro athletes have small windows of time to do their thing and maximize their revenue.
V: Brian Sciaretta at American Soccer Now reported that Orlando had been trying to find a new #10 because they weren’t confident McGuire would be able to continue his success. So his people went on the offensive trying to find a landing point because he was going to be pushed to the bench in Orlando. Once on the bench they saw his window of making it to Europe shrinking so he had to go now. I’d be interested to see what It’s Ok thinks about the likelihood of this scenario.
JR
?? If you think about it , one way to read that is they unloaded Duncan on Blackburn. Hah! So much for scouting MLS.
Now I have reason to follow Duncan. It would be quite a hoot if he can replace Ben Brereton and his 14 goals.
Well V, not really because it’s only a loan, but that was kind of the thought from Sciaretta. From Tom Bogarts reporting the Blackburn board blocked the sale but were ok with taking him on loan to see how he does.
As the only resident Orlando City fan, in this community, I want to remind everyone that this is a former college player. He’s born in the same year as Hoppe & Konrad. Orlando City has drafted Cyle Larin, Daryl Dike & Duncan. If Duncan stays in the MLS and scores double digit goals, or is loaned for half a season that would make 3 CFs, draft, develop, loan/sell model. What does OCSC know that us as Americans, who talk crap about college soccer, don’t know? 2 anti- college soccer people have commented on this article. Duncan isn’t better than Larin after 1 season.
Do you always have to be a drama queen ok 2 think smh geez dude grow up 🤦♂️
Do you do more than play video games & dress up like Spider-Man? Get the Euro nuts out ur mouth and maybe we can have a discussion.
it’s probably about half-and half for the most recent NT. gold cup last year had 9 college players, including turner, yedlin, morris, and miles. NL last year had 5 college players, including turner and miles.
one position that remains heavily college is GK (turner, steffen, seanjohn, callender). this may reflect a mix of how hard it is to get a first team pro starting keeper job — just one slot to play per team — longer development times, and longer careers. the vibe for U20s is they seem to end up pro backup keepers.
to me this reflects imperfect scouting and limited and uneven academy productivity. dallas does its job, who else? also, a lot of the first choice pro/college ratio is passport players many of whom wouldn’t have ever been thinking college (eg musah, dest, robinson). the ratio will head towards 100% when MLS does development better. to me the academy turnover/fetish here was a bit premature.
that being said, “college” in this context has changed in 20-30 years from “graduated” to “attended.”
i’m betting if i ran the numbers the place that has dramatically shifted is U20 which used to be mostly college and now probably has little or no college players, as we seem with few exceptions (morris) to make the snob assumption that players that age signed to pro teams are better. U23 similar. probably because the full adult team is more performance driven than pedigree, successful college-to-pro kids come back in. would be my guess.
Your reading comprehension is below average imperative. Nothing in your long winded post, addressed anything I said. Striker91 aka Mysterious at least knows he’s a college soccer hater.
Thanks for answering V’s question that was my gut but wasn’t certain since I only saw Orlando the two times they played Columbus and I watched the Japan U23 friendly. Feels like the league has changed so much in 8 years since Larin’s 17g rookie season. With his up and down Europe career and playing third fiddle to Davies and David it’s easy to forget how dominant Cyle was in Orlando 43g in 87 appearances.
JR,
I followed Cyle in college. I’ll say he’s far exceeded my wildest expectations for him.
Being the third Amigo behind Davies and David is nothing to be ashamed of.
Did the same scout find all three guys, or has the department turned over in that time? If it’s the same guy, you’ve definitely got somebody who can spot strikers whose game translates upwards. If it’s different folks, it would seem it’s likely luck. Be curious to know.
In regards to college ball, you’ll never catch me being “anti” college ball – I know Doug Allison very well, coached his son Callum for years, and his players (including Walker Zimmerman) worked with a lot of mine. (He also had Clint Dempsey, Ricardo Clark, and Shea Salinas, but that was before I knew him, Doug’s huge on supporting youth development, and his annual camp is one of the biggest in the South) I also had several of my guys wind up with Mike Noonan at Clemson.
So college soccer definitely serves as a very useful net because true pro academies are still so thin on the ground, and I’m incredibly grateful it exists. But consider that there’s 94 professional (and about as many semi-professional) teams in England, all with their own attendant academies, serving a nation of 67 million people. The US in comparison has 29 teams in MLS plus another 36 in the USL Championship and USL League One (almost all making under $100K apiece), so that’s 66 pro teams (and another pyramid of semi-pro squads under that)…serving a nation of 336 million.
That’s immense progress for such a short period of time – MLS didn’t even start until 1996 – but it still means soccer infrastructure and youth development is literally 7.5 times thicker on the ground in England than it is here. Which means an immense number of players are still falling through the cracks, and college soccer is filling that gap. (For other countries as well as the US.)
And being so close to college soccer, I can tell you what it can do – and what it can’t. It is a viable (if not optimal) backup path to MLS. Players do develop in college soccer. But owing to overall competition level and practice-time limitations, that development is probably around only a half to a third as fast as a dedicated professional academy would be. Which is why you see a lot of them emerging after age 25, which severely caps their European ambitions. Dempsey skated in by the skin of his teeth at age 24 and was still back in the US by the time he was 30.
Q: i think they jumped the gun a little dismantling bradenton and handing it to the teams. my MLS team can barely manage to develop a kid worthy of first team rostering, much less get them minutes. and it’s not that we don’t have talent here, cappis and servania were on the academy briefly, richards was in town but on ordinary select, we’ve had a few U17s. it’s someplace between there and U20 and the bridge over to first team it completely blows up. if you can’t competently handle that, and there are probably many teams like us, mandated to go academy but no good at it, are we really ready to hand it to the academies? to get rid of centralized development of the best in residency? it works for france. but it doesn’t make the clubs with dibs rights money when they sign or transfer….which is the english model. which, when’s the last time england was awesome? if we’re picking models.
dallas does its job, salt lake, a few others. they are propping up the whole NT pipeline right now. we then have a fair amount of college kids, still, because at this point academies still have regional rights, and some stink at their job, and the kids know it. or, the YNT and academy scouts miss people. as long as i can draft kids from UConn who can outplay my academy kids, it has its place. when the academies actually function such that their kids are uniformly better than what UConn manages, then college becomes for the rest of us. until then, my sense is the development is scattershot and uneven, and you have a lot of 18 year olds brought in who sign a first team deal, never play a minute, and get loaned down to a reserve team or USL chasing playing time. in which case why didn’t i do college. i jump in the draft later, having scored 15 goals a season, a bidding war starts with small european teams, and i look physically like a 20 year old adult and not a kid. there is no one answer until the academies are so genuinely good at identifying talent and teaching kids you do worse by it. the continued success of first round MLS picks says otherwise. the continued existence of about 20-30% of NT players being former college, same.
also, setting aside the fanboy mantra of “xerox europe,” in other US sports, baseball, hoops, there are plentiful examples of people successfully making either choice. of elite players who did college. of elite players who entered the draft at age 18 or 19. and also of high flying sign-from-HS prospects who amounted to nothing, fwiw.
i think it’s a fanboy thing to want to assume a kid like larin must be better than a kid who takes the path of mcguire and that’s just how the world is.
my sense is US college soccer is roughly the level of english league 2 or some weaker countries’ first or second divisions. i have seen people off the bench in lower division FA Trophy or FA Cup who might not start NCAA. i think it’s some fanboys want certain things to be true because xerox europe. i doubt they played college.
it’s telling it’s usually a structural critique of NCAA and not a talent one. eg that we don’t play in winter. but does MLS? i do wish it got reconfigured where it wasn’t just a 2-3 month season plus a set amount of spring ball. cross country, volleyball, they play deeper into the year, football plays outdoors into january. but that whole discussion isn’t actually talking about relative talent. it’s beefing about how much they get to practice or play to improve the talent. which, if MLS is inherently better and has more time, then do your job. a fraction of the teams take the academies seriously or can competently handle the gig. they have the gig not because they are inherently amazing but because USSF decided to save a budget line getting rid of bradenton’s expense. which handed them the pipeline.
Its OK2 T,
All I have to say to that is that Clint Dempsey, the best USMNT outfield player to ever make his living in the EPL, is a former college soccer player.
So was Stu Holden.
Those two proved a long time ago, that it can be done.
That doesn’t prove that college is a great or desirable pathway
Looks like Blackburn won the race. In England doing a medical
Tom Bogart reported Duncan got call over the Atlantic that Blackburn was pulling out. The board denied management’s request. Deal is off.
Now it’s going to be a loan apparently. Deal back on.
Would rather see him stay with Orlando this season. One more season and Olympic tournament could boost him even more and better teams from bigger leagues could come calling.
The Olympics are a U23 tournament and not that highly rated by scouts.
My guess is Duncan believes another season and a possible(it’s not guaranteed) Olympic slot is not going to help him that much. He already has his foot in the door and if he has the talent, he’s better off going now and impressing those bigger clubs while at Blackburn.
If that sounds impatient, pro athletes have small windows of time to do their thing and maximize their revenue.
Both bids were rejected I thought. Sheffield Wed is dead last he will get playing time cause they need goals, but them being relegated is likely.
Sounds like both teams are upping their bids. If it’s true that Duncan flew to England it’s probably close.
JR,
How do you think he’ll do?
Is he as good or as ready as Cyle Larin was?
Blackburn’s wage bill for this season is £8.7 million, which translates to right at $11 million dollars US. That would put them at the low end of both MLS and Championship payrolls, with only two Championship teams and four MLS teams below them…the caveat there is one of them is Orlando, which had MLS’s smallest payroll last year at $8.5 million.
Championship sides don’t have the elaborate salary rules MLS plays by, so those salaries are spread out more evenly at Blackburn and there’s really no DP-level players though their top big striker, Sam Gallagher, was making right at a million bucks a year but has been hurt a ton and only has one goal this year. They were trying to deal Gallagher to Ipswich Town.
Not sure what the deal is. I saw some tweets that Blackburn literally backed out in mid-flight but I haven’t heard anything since.
Follow-up…the reason they backed out was apparently because Crystal Palace was looking to buy Adam Wharton but they were worried the deal would fall apart…but it apparently did go through and was worth £22 million. So they have plenty of money now for McGuire.
The irony is, Wharton’s a 6…which means this could well put Chris Richards back on the bench.