It’s difficult to judge any draft right away.
In some respects, a team’s prospects have yet to perform, and some may never get the opportunity to do so for the team that drafted them (see also: certain MLB draftees not getting higher than Double-A or even Single-A ball, late-round NFL draftees not going further than the practice squad, certain NBA draftees stashed in the G League, etc.).
In Major League Soccer, some players do not have the luxury of extended time in the minors, especially if their club doesn’t have an affiliation with a USL Championship club, or own their own USL club. With the way some clubs operate, they’ll give their first-round choices an extra year or two to perform, while others are jettisoned, their positions in the club made redundant after one year in the league.
In other sports — the NFL, for instance — there’s a general three-year waiting period before digging into a team’s draft class and seeing how the team did.
With the added hoops associated with MLS, five years seems fair. So let’s go into the wayback machine to 2014 to see just how the Revolution did.
In January 2014, the Revolution added to what was a 24-man squad and made four selections:
First round, 4, Steve Neumann, F, Georgetown
First round, 11, Patrick Mullins, F, Maryland
Second round, 31, Alec Sundly, M, California
Third round, 50, Pierre Omanga, F, Southern New Hampshire
New England, which did not make a fourth-round selection, made two picks in the first round. Both had differing trajectories in American soccer.
Selected with the fourth overall pick, Steve Neumann was an attacking midfielder out of Georgetown who potted 41 goals and had 34 assists for the Hoyas, earning two separate Second-Team All-American nods. During his first season with New England, Neumann made 23 appearances in the league and would also play in all three of the Revs’ US Open Cup matches, scoring once. He would play 538 minutes in the league in 2014.
Patrick Mullins was the 11th overall pick that year, and he was a two-time MAC Hermann Trophy-winning forward out of Maryland. He scored four goals in the league and one in the US Open Cup; he would also pick up an assist in the Revs’ 2-1 extra-time defeat at the hands of LA Galaxy in the MLS Cup Final.
Yet after the season, both found themselves unprotected by the Revolution during the expansion draft — the same expansion draft which saw current Revs center back Jalil Anibaba go from Seattle to Orlando City. The rules at the time said that if a player on your unprotected list is picked, you get to protect an additional player.
New York City FC picked Mullins with its second pick. The Revs subsequently pulled Neumann off the board.
Mullins has since made three additional stops in MLS. He spent two years in the Bronx, scoring six goals before he went to DC United. At RFK, Mullins scored 13 goals in 44 first-team appearances.
He’s now with Columbus, making 10 appearances in 2018, scoring once.
Neumann, however, found his playing time decrease over the 2015 (144 minutes) and 2016 (62 minutes) seasons. He would make nine appearances in 2015 and four more in 2016, before he announced his retirement in Dec. 2016.
Alec Sundly also found himself left unprotected in the 2014 expansion draft after the Revolution drafted him 31st overall, the 11th pick in the second round of SuperDraft. Sundly found himself sent out on loan to Rochester in the USL.
In New York, Sundly made 26 appearances for the Rhinos, scoring twice out of the midfield. He would make one appearance in a New England shirt during that year’s US Open Cup.
The Revolution would not re-up him following the expansion draft, and he would eventually sign with Real Salt Lake’s reserve side, Real Monarchs, for the next two seasons. He would then go overseas, playing in 2017 for Horvikens in Sweden before going to a seventh-tier German side later that same year.
New England then picked Pierre Omanga with the 50th overall selection, but was not signed by the club. He did, however, sign with Rochester. He did not make an impact for the Rhinos, and was out of football by the start of 2016.
Breaking it all down
Before we continue, we have to remember that this particular year represented a couple of different things: despite the loss in the MLS Cup Final only a few days beforehand, many thought the Revs were set up, personnel-wise, for another solid run in 2015 and beyond.
It also marked the start of the most recent wave of expansion in Major League Soccer (New York City FC and Orlando City SC in 2015, Atlanta United FC and Minnesota United FC entered in 2017, LAFC in 2018, FC Cincinnati starts play in March; Nashville SC, Inter Miami CF, and Austin FC are the next clubs to enter over the next few years).
Other factors that came into play:
- The players the Revolution chose to protect in that 2014 expansion draft: Kevin Alston, Teal Bunbury, Charlie Davies, Andrew Farrell, Jose Goncalves, Jermaine Jones, Daigo Kobayashi, Lee Nguyen, Kelyn Rowe, Bobby Shuttleworth, and Chris Tierney;
- Diego Fagundez was an on-budget Homegrown who was left unprotected for half an hour before Revs president Brian Bilello tweeted the club had offered allocation money to both NYCFC and Orlando City not to select him;
- Scott Caldwell was off-budget and automatically protected.
