However Orlando City is doing what it’s doing, its academy structure is certainly making one heck of a dent on the American soccer landscape.

Orlando City is a relative newcomer in a multitude of ways, and it only recently joined the Development Academy in concert with its addition to MLS two years ago. It quickly sent up a flare to the rest of the country when the club added Pierre da Silva to its U18 DA team and then promptly signed him to a Orlando City B contract. Da Silva, who’s firmly in the USYNT pool and has played at most every age level, clocked more than 1,600 USL minutes in 2016 and provided Jason Kreis likes what he sees, should make his debut at some point in 2017.

In the meantime, Orlando City might’ve recently secured the services of another da Silva. Because fellow USYNT attacker Joe Gallardo recently surfaced with the club’s U18 side.

Gallardo, you’ll recall, spent much of the 2013-15 U17 MNT cycle as the team’s best forward. At the time, Gallardo was ensconced in Monterrey’s prodigious youth system, and on the national team scene he was Christian Pulisic’s favorite attacking outlet. He broke out at the 2013 Nike Friendlies, where he registered a hat trick against England in front of the same scouts who eventually pulled Pulisic to Borussia Dortmund and Haji Wright to Schalke. At the time, there were few – if any – forwards in the entire USYNT pool with as much palpable buzz about them.

Gallardo’s train soon slowed. He suffered a broken leg in at a youth international tournament in 2014, and he struggled to regain his form over the back end of the cycle. He made the 2015 U17 World Cup roster, but by then his grip on the No. 9 role was tenuous. He started the opener at the World Cup in Chile but lost his job to Brandon Vazquez and spent the U.S.’s remaining two games coming off the bench.

Gallardo was quiet for much of 2016. There were a few meekly fueled rumors swirling that he was nearing a deal with a club in the Netherlands, but those never came to fruition. And so Gallardo fell onto the backburner, and aside from a U19 camp roster at the Slovakia Cup in the spring, there was not much to note about his year.

And then Gallardo slyly joined Orlando City’s academy.

To date, Gallardo’s reportedly played seven matches and scored three goals for Orlando City’s U18 DA team, which is in second in the Southeast Division behind only Atlanta United. He’s updated his Instagram profile (I know, I know) with mention to his status as a player for Orlando City and a tidy photo of a bike in an Orlando City uni. So things seem to be motoring along at pace for Gallardo in Florida. Considering Gallardo was considered unattached by U.S. Soccer at a U19 camp Gallardo was invited to in late August, he clearly joined recently for the 2016-17 season.

At his peak, Gallardo is a Serious Talent. He came of age in a Monterrey academy with a high technical level, and he’s played with the best the U.S. has to offer in the national team system. But it’s clear his youth career veered softly off the tracks in the last year or so, and the opportunity to snag armfuls of minutes at Orlando City is a positive development. Given the fact that the club has a ready conduit between the academy and the first team (and a history of using it), Gallardo is, it would seem, in a good place.

In early 2016, Orlando City hired former St. Mirren academy head David Longwell to become its academy director. This was Longwell to the Orlando Sentinel late last year.

“I look for players who have very high technical skills, high intelligence,” said academy director David Longwell, who was hired at the beginning of the year and formerly was head of development for Scottish club St. Mirren. “We’ve then got a very comprehensive and detailed curriculum, we’re looking at long-term player development and developing players to a higher level who can then go in and subsidize the MLS team.”

Longwell went on to say that Orlando City’s goal is to have a 25 percent share of academy grads on the senior team. On an average roster of about 25 players, that’s around six academy alums at any given time. That’s not unheard of in MLS, but it’d certainly be in the upper echelon.

The club still has yet to sign one to its first team, so the road ahead is long, but it would seem Orlando City is at the very least taking steps to get there. And Gallardo is almost certainly a sizable stepping stone along the way.