San Diego FC: Taking "play your kids" to the next level | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

Tyler Heaps is one of the bright young minds in North American soccer, a data wiz who helped build US Soccer’s analytics department and broke new ground as an analyst at Ligue 1 power AS Monaco, before becoming the youngest sporting director in MLS with San Diego FC.

He’s constructed a squad on course to become the most successful expansion side in league history, at least in terms of regular-season results.

“For sure, it’s even exceeded my expectations, how quickly we've been able to get it together, how quickly we've been able to find a group of players that are completely bought into what we want to do,” Heaps told MLSsoccer.com this week, as the Chrome-and-Azul prepare to visit the San Jose Earthquakes for a Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire clash at PayPal Park (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).

“And then how quickly we've been able to get the processes right to allow us to be in every game. Obviously, the results are a component of all that stuff.”

Taking MLS by storm

Los Niños lead the Western Conference with 49 points from their first 26 matches (1.88 points per game), sit second in the Supporters' Shield race and have scored an MLS-best 50 goals (tied with Miami and Orlando), all while faithfully executing the league’s most methodical possession buildouts, fielding some of its youngest lineups and drawing large, spirited crowds to Snapdragon Stadium.

“One thing that I know that I have strong convictions about,” head coach Mikey Varas said upon his hiring last September, “is you can play with young players. You can play a proactive, entertaining style of play, and you can do that and win.

"And it takes a certain amount of work and dedication and conviction, and it takes some time. But all of those things are possible."

He and his staff have been true to their word, flying in the face of conventional wisdom about what’s wise, or even feasible, in the early stages of life in MLS, where idealism so often crashes on the rocks of a ferociously athletic competition that can exploit errors with breathtaking speed.

Early life lessons

Really, though, it all starts with Heaps’ mother’s notebook back in Minnesota.

“I grew up the youngest of five, to a single mom,” Heaps explained to MLSsoccer.com as San Diego prepared for their debut season last winter. “My dad left when I was really young; I had no relationship with him. My mom was a saint.”

Money was tight, and mom took up a graveyard-shift newspaper delivery job to make ends meet. As young Tyler took a shine to soccer, eventually earning an invite to join one of the Twin Cities’ most competitive youth clubs, Bangu Tsunami FC, it was made clear to him that he’d have to chip in to cover the various costs of pay-to-play soccer, over and above his schoolwork and commitments on the pitch.

“She said, ‘you can play, but we don't have any money, so you have to work for it,’” Heaps explained. “So my mom and I went to pretty much every [Minnesota] Twins game – not as fans, but we went and worked in the concession stands.

“Mom was the money manager who would run the concession stand, and I was the one bussing the hot dogs. And all that would go tax-free to Bangu Tsunami; we set up a non-profit through them that allowed us to work there and pay that off.”

Twins baseball at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in summer, University of Minnesota basketball in the frigid winters; they’d go wherever they could sling stadium food for a few hours’ pay. Usually, they walked long distances from the car to save a few bucks on parking, occasionally fibbing about Tyler’s age – “luckily, I had a little bit of a goatee when I was 13,” he deadpanned – to get him a gig.

When a shiny new style of boots modeled by top stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Landon Donovan caught his adolescent eyes, Mom would sit him down for some no-nonsense accounting sessions.

“My mom has a notebook,” recalled Heaps. “Any time I wanted new cleats, I wanted the new [Mercurial] Vapors – she still has the notebook where it said ‘new Vapors: $200,’ and that was four games [of concessions work]. So then I had to go and work four more games, and she would add it to the notebook. And I kid you not, it's like hundreds of ‘-$45, -$45.’

“I think it gave me a really unique perspective into what that meant and how I approached training, and then also how I approached university after, because it was similar. I had to go get a bartending job at 18 years old and pay for my college tuition, because that was just what we were like growing up.”

Right to Dream network

So when presented with the opportunity to join Right to Dream, a global youth development system with branches in Ghana, Denmark, and Egypt which has produced dozens of elite footballers like Mohammed Kudus, Mikkel Damsgaard and Yaw Yeboah while also transforming thousands of lives with education and empowerment, leaving the glittering French Riviera was easier than you might think.

“The whole Right to Dream philosophy and talking to Tom Vernon, the founder, I became instantly hooked to that because of the way I was born, the way I was raised, and the way pay-to-play probably impacted me as it impacted many other people in Minnesota and on my team,” Heaps explained.

“It's about the foundations that you set and about the impact that you can make on some of these kids’ lives, and especially in a place like this, in the United States, I think it’s really important and something that I want to be a part of.”

San Diego is ‘a place like this’ thanks to SDFC’s membership in the Right to Dream network, whose curriculum and values provide the basis of the club’s identity. That alliance has led to a stunning investment in what’s projected to be the most comprehensive academy in MLS: A brand-new, $150 million facility on land belonging to the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation with full residential and educational facilities in addition to a state-of-the-art training ground shared with the first team.

It’s not only Heaps who finds the vision compelling. SDFC’s star winger Hirving “Chucky” Lozano says it helped convince him to return to North America after eight successful years in the Netherlands and Italy.

“The Right to Dream project, the club's project, the project of all of that together, it really caught my attention,” the Mexican international said during preseason. “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.

“For me, it's something very beautiful,” he added, “giving them that opportunity or trying to support them so that they can achieve something in their life.”

Work in progress

The homegrown process will take years to reach fruition, though. The academy’s inaugural class just reported to campus on Sunday, 18 kids from across the region, which includes both U.S. and Mexican territory, thanks to SDFC’s location within 50 kilometers of the border, thus falling in line with FIFA regulations about the movement of under-18 players – in the 2012 and 2013 birth years.

They’ll spend their formative years immersed in RTD’s proactive, attack-minded game model and, eventually, provide the backbone of SDFC’s roster and developmental pipeline. In the meantime, Heaps, Varas & Co. needed to field a competitive team that also reflected that overarching philosophy. So they found their first crop of kids in other clubs’ fields.

“There's a couple of ways that you can go acquire talent, right? You can go and try to get U-22 [initiative signings] and spend a lot of money, or you can try to go find people that aren't getting opportunities,” explained Heaps. “Our whole philosophy of Right to Dream is, everybody has the right to dream, and part of that's opportunity, how they can come into that fold. And so we went and found a guy like Luca Bombino.”

Fountain of youth

San Diego’s current starter at left back was acquired on loan from LAFC, where he rose through the academy and signed a homegrown contract, but found first-team chances limited. At age 19, he’s already started 19 matches for Los Niños, scoring two goals and four assists, and is one of a whopping six SDFC players on the United States’ preliminary squad list for the FIFA U-20 World Cup later this year.

Heaps and Varas, who coached the US U-20s from 2021-23 before joining the senior national team as an assistant under Gregg Berhalter, were already familiar with all of them, thanks to their time at the federation. San Diego’s list of current or former US youth internationals also includes Duran Ferree, Anisse Saidi, Alejandro Alvarado Jr., Oscar Verhoeven, Aiden Harangi and Pedro Soma.

When the Vancouver Whitecaps visited Snapdragon for a top-of-the-table showdown last month, Bombino was part of a back four that made MLS history with an average age of just 20, amid eight injury absences in the squad. And despite an unlucky early own goal from rookie Manu Duah, the first pick in this season’s MLS SuperDraft, they would get the job done, earning a 1-1 draw with the Concacaf Champions Cup runners-up to stay first in the West.

“Our coaches talked with us and they told us that this is the youngest back line, so that we had it in our mind like, OK, then we have something to prove today,” Duah, a recent convert from midfielder to center back, told 'Behind the Flow,’ SDFC’s official podcast. “Because they were a pretty good team, and they saw us like, ‘oh, these are kids,’ you know?

“But there's no kids when you're wearing the cleats on the field. You actually have to go in hard with the mindset like, OK, we have to show the world that this is different. Anlld for San Diego FC, it's just a chance of giving the young kids opportunity every single time to be on the field. They have strong confidence in the young kids, and they know we can do it. They believe in us every single time.”

A few weeks later it was David Vazquez’s time to shine.

Long one of the nation’s most eagerly anticipated youth prospects, the playmaker turned heads when he crossed the continent to join the Philadelphia Union at age 16 rather than one of his local clubs in Los Angeles. Yet with scant MLS minutes available in Philly, San Diego swooped in to secure another loan deal this summer. He soon made himself known with an impressive display in the Chrome-and-Azul’s Leagues Cup consolation win over Mazatlan last week, notching an assist and a game-high three key passes.

“I went from not really playing as much at my old club to finally getting a chance,” said Vazquez, 19, afterwards. “So I think the assist meant a lot to me, to contribute and help the team any way possible.”

Model of success

SDFC sound likely to take up the purchase options in the loan deals for these USYNTers. Heaps describes the terms as generally favorable, though he jokes that such transactions may get more complicated as other teams take note of their success.

Sooner or later, one of them will quite possibly reap a substantial transfer fee with a move abroad; Heaps points to rising Denmark international Lucas Høgsberg, 19, a member of SDFC’s sibling club FC Nordsjaelland since age 3 who just made a reported $17.5 million transfer to French club Strasbourg, a record price for a center back from the Danish Superliga.

San Diego emphasize that it’s not so much about the work of the club itself or the talent of the individual prospect, so much as the thoughtful union of both.

“We've proven that these guys are ready to play,” said Heaps. “Are they ready to play anywhere? I don't think so. Because Mikey and I ask this, and I won't name MLS clubs, but we named three or four MLS clubs, and we said, if Luca Bombino was at this club, would he be this successful? And I think the answer is no.

“We have such an alignment to principles and style of play, and such a clear message to what we're asking the players to do, that they're able to thrive in this environment. It's why the style of play of Right to Dream is what it is. It's to simplify their jobs on the field, so they know very clearly what they're being asked to do, and they can go out and perform at the highest level and operate on instincts.”

SDFC are only in the early steps of their project. Still, it’s a long way from the popcorn stands of Heaps’ youth. Peek into his office at the club’s headquarters, and you’ll spot a pair of those Mercurial Vapors displayed on a shelf, a daily reminder of the journey so far.

Los Niños’ early success has built belief and strengthened their collective resolve that much further.

“We want to be a club that challenges narratives,” said Heaps. “Let's try to really do things differently and see if we can have success at the same time.”