Garbowski,
You bring up a good point about the academy, and when that is established, we can turn up some good young quality cheap players, like Bardes, and Miazga but winning in MLS is not about having 3-5 good young academy players in your roster. Its about a system in place, and its about playing as a team. What will change even starting next year is that this team will get rid of most of the subpar players such as these (Jacobsen, Grabavoy, Brovsky, Saunders, Wingert, Ballouchy, Nemec, etc) basically all of the left over trash from the Expansion draft.
People have to realize that it is very tough to put a competitive team during the expansion year when ONLY ONE Expansion team is coming into the league, let alone TWO. So you had Orlando City and NYCFC picking the best players from all of the shitty players other MLS didn't really need/want, for the most part.
Now you have a real offseason and two to get the PLAYER THAT YOU SEEK OUT AND WANT, and that are available, to come and be a part of your system from DAY 1. If you think about this year, our team from preseason until now are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TEAMS. Night and Day. So what I expect moving forward is this....
Villa up top, and Kreis and Reyna to go get another striker to pair with Villa. They tried it with Nemec and it failed. Nemec sucks.
I expect Pirlo to play one more year MAYBE. I don't expect Lampard honestly to be back. So in the midfield you have Mix, TMac (maybe, although once we get better players, he may be coming off the bench) and Pirlo next year in the mid. In the back we will return Iraola, Facey, and that leaves another CB and fullback spot open with Angelino not coming back, and I think we have seen the last of Hernandez. But also important, I fully expect NYCFC to go get themselves a true number 1 GK. Saunders lacks in so many areas but one of the most important is the lack of communication and setting his backline up to succeed especially in transition.
So we have 1 Forward, 2 midfield spots, 1 CB, 1 fullback spot open and a GK. I fully expect them to get some real good quality for these positions. We have a very good striker, we have Mix who I think will show much better next year, and we can build from there. Believe me a true offseason or two will make the world of a difference.