SAN DIEGO — More than two decades before becoming a founding member of MLS expansion side San Diego FC, a young Tom Vernon was given a blunt response when discussing an idea with soccer legend and former Liberia president George Weah.
“I kind of outlined a vision for a sort of fairly typical European football academy,” Vernon told ESPN. Previously a scout in Africa for Premier League giants Manchester United, the eager Englishman shared his plans to the Ballon d’Or winner for a Ghana-based academy that mirrored the setups found across Europe.
Weah’s response: “You’re going to fail.”
“These academies are here for themselves and for something back in Europe,” Vernon remembers the iconic striker telling him. “They’re not here for Ghana.”
He recalibrated his approach, and years later, not only has he built his Right to Dream Academy in Ghana, he’s expanded to Denmark and Egypt, and is now set to take part in his most ambitious project to date through a unique opportunity in the cross-border region of San Diego-Tijuana.
When San Diego debut this month as the league’s 30th club — with Right to Dream holding prominent seats at the ownership table — they’ll do so as an uncommon venture within the league. Unlike others in MLS, they’ll be the only club that can recruit youth talent from Mexico.
Because of FIFA rules allowing teams within 50 kilometers of an international border to register U18 players that are also within 50km of the border (and living no further than 100km from the respective club), San Diego will have access to the Tijuana metropolitan area, one of the most populous Mexican cities.
A reported $150 million training facility, soon to be shared by the youth and senior team, will also be breaking away from the norms of youth development in the league.
Located on 28 acres of land 15 miles east of their Snapdragon Stadium home ground, the campus will be the first in MLS to offer a free academy that combines residency and a privately operated school. When the youth setup welcomes an estimated 20 to 22 student athletes this fall, which will include players from free tryouts in San Diego and Tijuana, it plans to have the highest operating budget of any academy in the league.
“What do we want to be,” club CEO Tom Penn rhetorically asked ESPN when discussing the binational identity of the team. “We’re excited about saying we will be the epicenter of football excellence and innovation in North America.”
The ambitions are lofty for the founding partners that includes Vernon, Penn, Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation and San Diego Padres’ Manny Machado, among others. Instead of a top-down investment as seen with Lionel Messi at Inter Miami CF, San Diego will do the exact opposite with a bottom-up strategy that will make their academy the centerpiece.
That isn’t to say there won’t be any marquee players, though. The club’s dual-national objectives quickly won over their first superstar signing, Mexico international Hirving “Chucky” Lozano.
“The Right to Dream project, the club’s project, the project of all of that together, it really caught my attention,” Lozano said to ESPN. “That was what made a really important connection and that’s why I decided to come to San Diego. Young people can grow in the Right to Dream project.”
That growth can alter the way that MLS sees player development, and potentially mold future generations of stars for the United States, Mexico and beyond.
‘A changing point in North American soccer’
Arguably San Diego’s biggest addition wasn’t Lozano, but Joaquin Escoto, an executive vice president who will oversee the academy. Few people, if any in the U.S., know more about discovering overlooked players than the former director of Alianza de Futbol, the largest amateur grassroots soccer program in the U.S. for Latinos.
“Working at an MLS team, by itself, it wasn’t something on my radar that I was pursuing or envisioning,” Escoto told ESPN. “But this was a different animal.”
For years, his specialty was unearthing hidden gems that fell through the cracks or weren’t seen by pay-to-play clubs or MLS academies.
In the Latino community, he knew that a pathway to becoming a professional couldn’t simply be determined by whether you or your team could afford to take part in a tournament. Free open tryouts across the U.S. were Alianza’s primary driving vehicle, leading to recent success stories such as Santos Laguna striker Santiago Muñoz making his debut for Mexico’s senior national team in January, and Pachuca‘s Sergio Hernandez facing off against Real Madrid in the Intercontinental Cup final last December.
Unsurprisingly, San Diego did the same last August. More than 4,000 participants, on both sides of the border, turned up. Starting in April, they’re expected to announce the first youth group for the academy, and then in August, students will begin moving in.
“I have a pretty good experience on finding players and doing different [things] outside of what’s the model of the pay-to play-system,” Escoto said. “You combine that with the Right to Dream development, the expertise that they have in identifying what a top player is compared to what an elite player is, and that’s where it gets really exciting.”
Part of that excitement stems from identifying first-team signings who buy into the methodology of guiding youth players.
It’s no wonder why Lozano, a product of the most well-renowned academy in North America, Liga MX‘s Pachuca, was enticed by San Diego. Much will be made about the pace and positioning of the clever dribbler who will be an immediate candidate for MLS MVP in 2025, but what may end up being his biggest contribution is his leadership for the next generation — which includes kids from Baja California.
Just south of the highway into Mexico, there will be an additional opportunity for a growing population that only has one show in town: Club Tijuana. If a player from Tijuana wants to go pro in LigaMX and isn’t considered by the local top-flight side, the nearest team is a 12-plus-hour drive east to the training ground of FC Juarez.
“For me, it’s something very beautiful and something that can help young people achieve their dream,” Lozano said. “Giving them that opportunity or trying to support them so that they can achieve something in their life.”
Through his Pachuca experience — where he was given the nickname “Chucky” as a child because of his love of hiding and scaring teammates — the Mexican winger with frightening agility is well versed in the prosperity that could be gained through a potent combination of high-ceiling prospects and experienced veterans. After opening their famed campus in 2001, Pachuca have gone on to win five LigaMX championships, a CONMEBOL Copa Sudamericana title and six Concacaf Champions Cup/Champions League trophies, all while investing heavily in youth.
And according to Escoto, who has worked closely with Liga MX teams in the past, San Diego’s Right to Dream facility is on another level compared to what’s happening south of the border.
“It’s never been done in the U.S., I would say North America,” he said. “You see cases like this in Mexico, I think with Pachuca and Santos and Atlas, but this is just a different scale. I think this will be a changing point in North American soccer.”
Play the kids
In order to find out what San Diego might be able to eventually accomplish for American soccer or Mexican fútbol, we have to first go back to the 1990s, when Vernon was back at the drawing board in Ghana after Weah’s candid advice.
As opposed to the usual pattern of European academies that could drop players after one bad season, Right to Dream made long-term promises through five-year guarantees, covering all expenses for those who were accepted. Commitments to education were also provided, leading to pathways for boys and girls to American universities.
The program has since seen more than 150 graduates play professional soccer. Ninety-five have gone on to college. More than 20 have represented their national teams at the senior level. Seven were called up for the men’s World Cup in 2022.
Through the process that led to the second academy opening in Denmark, one tool they’ve been able to capitalize on is FC Nordsjælland, a Danish top-flight club that was acquired by Right to Dream in 2015. Hinting at how things could take shape in San Diego, Nordsjælland have made a name for themselves as a side that trusts up-and-coming players.
“It will surprise a lot of [MLS] teams, a lot of people,” said former Liverpool and Seattle Sounders defender Djimi Traoré, now the head coach of Right to Dream’s international academy. “We are not shy to start [players that are] 17 or 18 … When we feel like the player is ready, we play him.”
Nordsjælland have given nine teenagers minutes in the first 17 games of the 2024-25 Danish Superliga season. According to data from FBref.com, Nordsjælland had an average player age of 23.9 in the 2023-24 campaign — a tally that would have made them the youngest in MLS in 2024.
They’ve not only qualified for European competitions and finished as runners-up in 2022-23, they’ve also catapulted academy graduates onto the world stage.
There’s West Ham United standout and Ghana international Mohammed Kudus, who, after debuting with Nordsjælland at 18, quickly went to Ajax and then the Premier League. Southampton‘s Kamaldeen Sulemana is worth noting due to his own rapid development through Nordsjælland, Stade Rennais and then England’s South Coast, all before turning 21.
Four players representing Denmark at the 2022 World Cup got their start at Nordsjælland, including the youngest player in that Danish team, now-24-year-old Mikkel Damsgaard. The club produced last year’s winner of the best young player award at the Africa Cup of Nations, Ivory Coast‘s Simon Adingra, who signed for Brighton & Hove Albion in 2022.
But what happens when you throw an additional first team into the Right to Dream mix? Will players from San Diego and Tijuana be funneled into Nordsjælland? Will academy players from Ghana, Denmark and Egypt funnel into MLS? Will San Diego serve as a stepping stone, as is the case for other U.S. clubs within multi-club ownership models like the New York Red Bulls or New York City FC?
“We don’t see it that way,” Vernon said about whether there is a hierarchy of Right to Dream clubs. “I’m very sure that some kids in America will say, ‘I just want to play in Europe when I’m 18,’ and there will be kids in Ghana who will say, ‘I’d love to go and play in the U.S.,’ so every kid will visit all of the academies from a young age and build connections.”
Part of that philosophy also means the ability to chase academic aspirations. Each tailored pathway is a unique case, which provides the chance to put energy into a more academic track, or in some cases, getting the best of both worlds.
After joining Right to Dream in 2012, academy graduate Ousseni Bouda was connected in 2015 to a private boarding school in New York, and by 2019, the student athlete then made the leap to Stanford University. With a degree in international relations, the forward has since debuted in MLS with the San Jose Earthquakes and represented Burkina Faso‘s national team.
“My main dream was always to become a professional soccer player, but with all the opportunities that were around me, I just tried to make the most out of it,” Bouda said. “It was massive.”
‘We believe there’s a huge potential’
MLS has always had an eye on San Diego. All the way back in 1996, former commissioner Doug Logan noted that the city was a “prime candidate” for expansion.
The reasons are obvious.
Aside from the talent pool and the proximity to Mexico, the city and tourist destination is also the eighth-most populous in the country. Coupled with a Chargers-size hole in its sporting heart after the NFL team moved north, and only two other major teams left through MLB’s Padres and the NWSL’s Wave, there is an intriguing opportunity to tap into the market’s sports scene ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
The is Club Tijuana to contend with, but consistently middling results and a waning Mexican-American identity (on and off the field) have left many craving an alternative.
“We believe there’s a huge potential audience among San Diegans and people south of the border in Mexico, where of course soccer is virtually a religion,” club chairman Mansour said to ESPN. “This is genuinely a unique proposition, the likes of which no other region can match in the MLS.”
When players step onto the training ground, they’ll be doing so on tribal land that was reacquired by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation in the early 2000s. That fertile ground housed some of the very first San Diegans, and it’s there that the city’s next sporting icons could soon flourish.
“You can’t get more original San Diego than the indigenous people of the region,” said Sycuan chairman Cody Martinez.
All these pieces coming together makes for a wholesome story, but whether fans from San Diego buy into the team and the project is another matter. While there’s plenty in this endeavor to applaud, tensions in town have simmered ahead of the debut season.
For many members of the community, there’s a hesitation to embrace an MLS club whose introduction cemented the death of the USL Championship’s San Diego Loyal. On the women’s side, Wave fans have felt justifiably frustrated by their attendance-record-breaking club being moved behind San Diego FC for priority scheduling at Snapdragon Stadium. Making things even more distasteful with NWSL supporters, Penn was criticized after stating San Diego FC were “bringing the top level of football in America” to the city, thereby seeming to omit Wave’s presence.
On the field, the team itself will also need time.
What San Diego FC accomplishes this season, or even during the next two to three seasons, has very little relevance to what they hope to achieve. Projects like these are long term in nature, meaning that the first answers to the question of whether they can become the epicenter of North American soccer won’t emerge for at least a decade.
Although what this club is setting out to do is unique in MLS, there is no shortage of other highly ambitious academies across the sport that have faced countless setbacks and obstacles. Looking within the league, there are a handful of other academy-dependent clubs that have wrestled with the either-or dilemma of chasing trophies or transferring their most promising players to continue funding their academy program.
All the while, they’ve watched Miami win the inaugural Leagues Cup, lift the Supporters’ Shield and record an MLS-record 74 points in 2024.
For Vernon and Right to Dream, there’s no doubt that San Diego FC will be their biggest gamble to date as they seek the trophies and triumphs to further validate their bottom-up game plan. It’s not a top-down Messi strategy, but if everything goes according to plan in the San Diego-Tijuana region, it could maybe create the next one.
This post was originally published on this site