To understand the ethos of Major League Soccer’s expansion franchise in San Diego, which will be formally announced Thursday morning amid the elegance and opulence of $310 million Snapdragon Stadium, you need to start in Old Akrade, an impoverished village in eastern Ghana on the banks of the Volta River. It is the site of the Right to Dream youth soccer academy, housing and training and educating hundreds of African players for the past two decades.
There, above an archway leading to a courtyard, is a rectangular wooden sign.
“Do not expect to accomplish your dreams,” it says in red lettering, “if you are not willing to help others accomplish theirs.”
The connection to San Diego is Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour, the MLS team’s lead investor along with the Sycuan tribe. Two years ago, his Mansour Group poured $120 million into Tom Vernon’s Right to Dream vision — “an investment that brings us purpose,” Mohamed calls it — and began building a similar academy in Egypt to go with existing facilities in Ghana and Denmark.
Southern California is the next stop.
It is the distinguishing, defining characteristic of the 30th team in an increasingly homogenous league, with a novel approach to youth development that will pull players as young as 12 from both sides of the border and, if all goes well, fully populate its MLS roster within a decade.
Will it work? We’re about to find out.
MLS is generally a rough and tumble, physically demanding league, with some of its biggest names being European stars in the twilight of their careers. Teams have their own development systems, but only one, Real Salt Lake, currently includes a on-site dormitory complex.
Mansour and Sycuan are not just investing in an MLS franchise, which commands what sources say is a $500 million expansion fee. They will spend an estimated $150 million constructing a Right to Dream residential academy for 120 to 160 players — dorms, classrooms, facilities, five fields — in San Diego County, plus another $10 million to $12 million per year to operate it.
The program is fully scholarshipped and invitation-only after scouts scour the region for the best pre-teen prospects through a series of tryout camps.
You start at age 12 and live there, practice there, learn there in a system that prioritizes player development over youth trophies (match reports don’t include scores, and kids who hit puberty early play with older age groups instead of dominating those who haven’t yet). You rotate to training camps at the overseas academies. You sign a pro contract at 14 or 15, meaning Right to Dream controls your player rights.
At 16 or 17, you hit a fork in the road. The top prospects embark on a professional career, in this case with the MLS club. Others can opt for an “educational pathway,” where they attend boarding schools on the East Coast with an eye toward college soccer.
The irony is that Right to Dream views the college game, long considered detrimental to U.S. player development because of its abbreviated fall season and NCAA restrictions on practice hours, as an asset. The European sports model isn’t directly linked to education, adopting a bottom-line approach to development outcomes.
“The history of academy soccer has been that as long as you think a guy can make it to your (professional) first team, he’s in your academy,” says Vernon, Right to Dream’s founder and CEO. “But as soon as you figure out he can’t, you get him out and get another guy. That’s the European way.
“The attitude is: If he scores on Saturday, great. If he doesn’t, we’ll move onto the next kid.”
Vernon was an African scout for English superclub Manchester United when he left to create Right to Dream in 1999, cramming 16 players in his house in Accra, Ghana. A visit to the United States enlightened him on the college system — as well as Title IX, which led to the growth of their girls’ academies — and he fostered links with boarding schools in upstate New York for their educational pathway.
A world map at the Old Akrade facility features photos of players affixed to the countries where they went. More than 70 came to the United States, attending Stanford, Ivy League universities, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and dozens of other schools.
Developing pro players is profitable through lucrative transfer fees from top European clubs; Right to Dream product Mohammed Kudus, one of Ghana’s breakout stars at the 2022 World Cup, was bought by Dutch club Ajax in 2020 for $10 million. Sending them to college in the United States can garner scholarships, but there’s no financial return to the academy that developed them.
It was the morally right approach, though. It also, Vernon found, was good for business.
“In our academies, all of our boys and girls trust us that we’re trying to create the best opportunities for them, not just the best opportunities for our first team,” Vernon says. “Loads of European clubs have invested in Africa, and their models failed because they had that European view on how to do it.
“I think if you do the right thing by every kid, then the commercial opportunity that creates is the best players naturally want to come to you, because you don’t get judged by the outcome of the best player. You’re judged by the outcome of the weakest player. The next players are looking at what happened to the weakest players in the system, and they’re all doing phenomenal things with their lives.”
In 2016, Right to Dream purchased Danish club FC Nordsjaelland, wanting a landing spot for its most promising players while shedding the image of an exclusively African operation. It opened a youth academy there as well that serves Scandinavia and now is responsible for about 85 percent of an FCN roster in second place in Denmark’s top division.
It makes FCN among the youngest first-division rosters in Europe. Other clubs have gone young — Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, Benfica in Portugal, Borussia Dortmund in — with similar success, and the academy curriculum aims to make players tactically proficient in a modern style of playing out of the back, applying high pressure and maintaining ball possession.
Right to Dream alums ed for seven players in the last World Cup. More than 20 have received call-ups to Ghana’s senior national team. A dozen have played in MLS, including Ousseni Bouda, a Stanford alum now with the San Jose Earthquakes.
“We expect to be the youngest team in MLS,” Vernon says. “We want to be part of the next chapter of the U.S. men’s national team. We’ve done that in Ghana. We’ve done it in Denmark. We want to do that here. One of the key factors for that is the ability to get minutes really young. That won’t be at the expense of us building a competitive team, but we believe we will identify and develop enough players to do that.
“As a result, we’ll give the fan base here the ability to see some of the absolute most talented teenagers in the world playing in the MLS. That’s not something that is a commonly offered in the league.”
They arrive in a region full of development options, however, from San Diego County’s pay-to-play legacy youth clubs to the Tijuana Xolos’ residential academy just across the border to a pair of MLS teams in Los Angeles with their own youth pipelines. One advantage for a San Diego MLS team: FIFA rules allow youth recruitment in a neighboring country as long as you’re located within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of the border.
Vernon makes it clear. He is European, but he’s not bringing a traditional European model with him.
“When we partnered with the Mansours, we were talking about where we should invest,” Vernon says. “They said, ‘Go to America. Americans just get what you do.’ Rather than us being a European model trying to come in and bring European thinking and European methodology into American soccer — which I think is an old story and I don’t think has been a huge success — we’re bringing the essence of American sports culture into San Diego with a model that we’ve been refining in Europe and Africa for 20 years.
“We know it pretty well already. We’re just trying to bring a slightly different slant and interpretation on the best of what American sport has to offer the world. America’s issue isn’t a lack of players. America’s issue is a lack of performance environments that get the best out of the players and have the best training with the best. If you include Mexico as well, there are enough players for everyone to grow and be successful.”
