North Texas SC exists to answer one simple question: at one point will a player be ready for MLS play with FC Dallas?
I’ll admit, there are probably several more questions that the club is supposed to answer, but for me, that is the big one. When will a player with the team be ready for a first-team look, and more importantly, first-team playing time.
For the first few years of NTSC, the honest answer most of the time has been a bit of a shrug and a “we’ll see.” A player can dominate MLS Next Pro and melt in MLS, or look ordinary against second-teamers and thrive the moment the competition sharpens. Projection most of the time, especially with teenagers, is guesswork.
This week, American Soccer Analysis’ Kieran Doyle-Davis published a model that takes a real swing at actually project things. Four seasons of real MLSNP data, run through a system that attempts to translate reserve-level production into a projection for a player’s first 1,000 MLS minutes. Doyle-Davis profiled prospects from all around the league and left a tool at the bottom so you can run your own team’s guys.
Kieran Doyle-Davis
So we did. We took a solid chunk of NTSC’s regular players from 2026 and put it to the test. Let’s dive into what we found.
How to read this (and why some players like Kimbrough aren’t here)
Two things you need before diving into the numbers.
First, everything below is goals added above average per 96 minutes. Yeah, I know some of you hate this model. I get it. Let’s humor it though for this purpose. The projected version of this, what the model thinks a player would produce across his first 1,000 MLS minutes, measured against the average MLS player at his position. And because the sample-sizes aren’t the biggest, the model drags almost everyone toward zero. That’s a feature, not a bug. It is the model admitting it doesn’t have enough data to make massive claims like who is the next Jesus Ferreira or something along those lines.
Second, and this one matters: the projection covers a player’s first 1,000 MLS minutes. For a lot of young players, those can typically be the least productive minutes of a career. A middling projection is a floor, not a ceiling. Plenty of good MLS players have started out slow as they find their footing as professionals.
One hard cutoff to flag: the model only includes players with 450+ MLS Next Pro minutes this season. That’s the price of admission for a stable read here. It means we won’t have newcomers like Benji Flowers or Da’vian Kimbrough to examine here. Neither one of them has enough NTSC minutes so far to project anything.
With that out of the way, there is one NTSC player who broke from the pack. And if you’re watching NTSC even remotely close this season, you already know who we’re going to highlight first.
The headliner: Edouard Nys
Doyle-Davis profiled a dozen prospects from around the league, but there was no mention of Edu Nys. The omission of Nys is pretty wild considering what he’s been doing in MLSNP this season.
The 21-year old not only leads NTSC in goals (nine) and assists (five), he has posted a solid +0.17 g+ in MLSNP this season. That is the kind of number that lands him way out on the right edge of the swarm. The model, doing what it does, hauls that back toward the pack, but it still lands him at a projected +0.06 g+, comfortably above average for a MLS central midfielder. He’s the only NTSC player on this list that has a clear projection to do well in MLS right now.
If you take one name away from this exercise, it is probably his.
Nys is the one who broke from the pack. But we ran each North Texas regular through the model — and the full breakdown sorts all players into who's knocking on the door, who's worth watching, and who the numbers quietly gave up on.
Unlock the full pipeline breakdownHere’s the rest of the pipeline that we ran.
