Inter Miami’s academy players are stepping up, just as David Beckham hoped they would

Felipe Valencia remembers when the pathway to his dream of becoming a professional soccer player became clearer.

It came on Jan. 29, 2018, when it was announced that Major League Soccer was returning to South Florida, led by an ownership group consisting of David Beckham, Marcelo Claure and Jorge and Jose Mas.

Valencia was 12 years old and attending Everglades Preparatory Academy while playing for the Kendall Soccer Coalition (currently Miami Rush Kendall SC) academy at the time.

Before the announcement was made, he said his family was contemplating moving to Atlanta in the hopes of setting up Valencia for better soccer opportunities.

But when it became known MLS was coming back to South Florida, Valencia and many other youth soccer players in the area saw it as an opportunity to push for their dreams while staying home.

“It changed the way we saw soccer,” Valencia said. “It gave so much hope for everyone in South Florida.”

And that’s exactly what Beckham has hoped for.

“There’s no more greater satisfaction than for homegrown talent to be brought into the system and to play at the highest level,” he said last year before Inter Miami’s inaugural season. “That’s always been of utmost importance for me personally.”

The Inter Miami academy system

Valencia, a 15-year-old winger who grew up in Homestead after moving from Colombia, was the first of three Inter Miami academy products to sign homegrown contracts during the offseason.

The other two were 17-year-old winger Edison Azcona, who was born in the Dominican Republic and resides in Deerfield Beach, and 18-year-old center back Ian Fray, who lives in Coconut Creek.

Azcona, Fray and Valencia played for Inter Miami’s USL League One team — Fort Lauderdale CF — during the 2020 season, which allowed them to gain professional soccer experience under the tutelage of Jason Kreis, Fort Lauderdale CF’s coach and Inter Miami’s senior academy director.

The teenage trio’s signings to the organization’s MLS team came as Inter Miami are looking to put a greater emphasis on youth development in all levels of the club going forward after feeling it fell short from that standpoint in 2020.

“The development system is vitally important for the club,” Chris Henderson, Inter Miami sporting director and chief soccer officer, said during his introductory press conference in January. “We want to have players who come into our club and are able to play at the highest level they can and using that pathway from the USL into the first team. If the player is good enough, he’s going to play. That’s the way the club wants to go.”

And that development starts with the club’s academy.

Inter Miami’s academy, which goes from U-12 to U-19, trains at the same state-of-the-art practice facility in Fort Lauderdale as the club’s MLS team.

The academy is fully funded by ownership, which means participation doesn’t come at the financial expense of the players’ families., though kids have to try out for the academy team in their respective age groups.

“You’d get to practice in Kendall,” Valencia recalled, “and the first thing everyone would ask, “did you get that email? Did you get invited to the tryout?’ It was a fever everyone had.”

The U-12 team practices three times a week while the older academy teams train four days a week with games on the weekends.

“You see the first team practicing every day,” Fray said, “so you always have something to motivate you.”

Fray also trained with Inter Miami during the latter part of their regular season.

“That integration is very important,” said Darren Powell, Inter Miami’s director of player development. “We want to make sure the whole club is aligned from the first team all the way down to the U-12.”

Azcona, who previously played for Boca United and Orlando City SC’s academy before moving to South Florida, described academy life as “school and soccer”.

Fray, who previously played at Weston FC and Miramar United Elite Football Club, said the facilities and professionalism throughout Inter Miami’s academy separate it from most.

“Nothing even compares,” he said. “Everything’s obviously way more professional. Everything here is top class.”

Valencia echoed Fray’s sentiments.

“They just have everything it takes,” Valencia said, “[for you] to be the best player you can be.”

Through the academy system, Inter Miami are hoping to accomplish two things: help those who enter the system become better soccer players and people that can give back to the community and instill the kind of “DNA” into the youth ranks that’s reflective of the club’s ambitions and South Florida’s culture in the long term.

“An academy can certainly provide a culture and DNA — something where the fans can relate to the players who come through the academy who are able to play on the first team,” Powell said. “They can see that young player grow in the same school system, area, know the same restaurants — all those types of things are important because the fans then can relate to that homegrown player because they feel like he’s one of their own and there are going to be connections there.”

“Everyone takes immense pride when you can see players progress through and share in their successes. It really is motivating for staff and players who are within the academy.”

And as the first Inter Miami academy players to sign MLS deals, Valencia’s hoping they can be an inspiration for those coming through the youth ranks.

“I want them to understand there’s a path in our city to get to professional soccer,” he said. “I would love to be an example for the [young] kids.”

Importance of homegrown players

There’s been a greater emphasis on MLS homegrown players in recent years.

Homegrown players — such as Azcona, Fray and Valencia — are those who joined a team in the league after progressing through a club’s academy. There isn’t a limit to the number of homegrown players a club may sign in a year.

They don’t have to be included in the MLS SuperDraft and typically don’t count against a team’s salary cap.

This allows clubs such as Inter Miami to fill out their roster with budget-friendly prospects they already know, which can be less risky than spending hundreds of thousands (or millions, in some instances) on an international player or domestic prospect with whom the team doesn’t have the same familiarity.

“It’s always difficult to go out and be thinking about buying all of your players from international teams,” Kreis previously said to the Sun Sentinel. “There’s always a high level of risk involved there if you haven’t actually worked with a player for an extended period of time. You’ll see many, many hits and many, many misses when you’re trying to scout and acquire international players.

“If you can develop your own players and you know everything about that player because you worked with them, now I think you really minimize that risk.”

While it hasn’t been explicitly stated by Inter Miami management in recent months, the potential long-term financial benefits of homegrown players can’t be ignored.

Teams have demonstrated an interest in trading local players to other MLS teams for allocation money, which helps salary-cap flexibility.

And on a grander scale, with MLS becoming more of a “selling league” over the last couple of years and the U.S. emerging as a market for young talent, clubs in the league have sent homegrown players to European clubs for multi-million dollar transfer fees.

Think of the Philadelphia Union recently sending former academy players Brenden Aaronson and Mark McKenzie to Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg and Belgian club KRC Genk, respectively, for a reported $6 million each. Or when Bryan Reynolds transferred from FC Dallas to Italian club AS Roma earlier this week for a franchise-record fee.

While these kinds of deals are outliers, they can create another stream of revenue for the clubs that invest in their academies and have an interest in transferring their homegrown talent.

And for the players, it’s a potential pathway to playing for some of the top teams in Europe, which is a dream for many.

“That’s my dream to one day, eventually go to Europe,” Fray said. “So seeing kids playing with their teams and after a couple years they’re going to Europe, it’s important to see that.”

Beckham knows

Beckham has firsthand knowledge of the importance of a strong academy system, both in what it can do for a club’s senior team and helping cultivate a passionate local fan base.

He rose through the ranks of Manchester United’s academy before starring with the club’s first team for over a decade.

Phil Neville, Inter Miami’s coach, also spent his youth career at Manchester United.

“I don’t think anything compared to the young players being brought through the Academy system that were going into our first team,” Beckham said. “If you talk to any Manchester United fan, they’ll tell you that moment where a young kid comes through our academy system, competes at the highest level and goes onto play for their national teams, that’s what makes a club proud and that’s what gives a club its DNA.”

And the two Englishmen are hoping to instill the characteristics they’ve adopted from their Manchester United days into Inter Miami, but in a way that’s true to South Florida.

“It’s not just a Manchester United DNA,” Neville said. “There are great parallels in terms of the way we want to promote our young players, give opportunities to our younger players and make sure we have a style and behavior about us that is absolutely top, but ultimately I think those qualities are the same qualities that probably Chris had in his career and those qualities are one we want to instill in this football club.”

Neville added: “Me and Chris have spoken about that connection with the supporters to make sure when they turn up to this unbelievable facility, they see a team they’re proud of. And when Jorge and David are watching upstairs, they see something they love and want to invest even more in.”

And Beckham sees Inter Miami’s academy as one of their most important investments.

“We don’t want to put too much expectations on these players, but if they’re good enough, it doesn’t matter what age they are, they’ll be given a chance,” Beckham said. “We want to be known as one of these great academies that has produced some great players that have come through as homegrown talents so our fans can sit in that stadium, their parents can sit in that stadium and see these young players come through and play at the highest level.

“That’ll be the proudest moment for us, that’s what was so important for us and that was my dream from Day One — that the academy system is so strong and better than anyone else’s.”