Earlier this month, U.S. Soccer confirmed that the Development Academy would be disbanded due to the financial pressures amid the present coronavirus crisis. In truth, there might be an ulterior motive at play, including the ineffectiveness of a system that had become watered down and stopped feeding the best players into Major League Soccer and beyond, but the DA was now no more.
Very quickly, MLS announced that they would form a replacement league to fill the space the DA left behind. While the specifics of the project have not been discussed in detail, they are keen to address the issues that the DA struggled from, especially the poor level of competition that routinely saw MLS academies playing their teams at older age groups.