The MLS allocation rule set is strange, fundamentally hard to understand and needlessly convoluted. This is not news. But every time something happens to throw that back into the collective face of the league’s fans, it gets a mite harder to stomach.

This time, it’s over a player. A very good player, in fact. His name is Jeremy Ebobisse, and according to the Washington Post, he’s already signed with MLS.

Ebobisse has been a quality, lightning fast forward prospect on the U.S. Soccer radar since at least 2010, when he attended his first U14 BNT ID camp. But his star didn’t really rise into the north sky until his mammoth final U18 season at Mid-Atlantic power club Bethesda-Olney, where he set the Development Academy alight with 29 goals from 21 games. That transitioned him into a high-flying freshman year at Duke in 2014 and a seven-goal sophomore year in 2015, the prologue for an NTC Invitational tournament this summer with the U20 MNT that might as well have been a clanging gong for pro clubs. He was maybe the best American on the field.

MLS clearly noticed, but it was hamstrung by its own mazy rulebook. And so, according to Steve Goff, Ebobisse will have to wait. Until 2017.

As a Generation Adidas signing, Ebobisse, 19, will be made available at the draft in January in Los Angeles. He is a likely top-five selection. Until then, he is expected to train with D.C. United or the third-division Richmond Kickers. Those squads were the natural options because of their proximity to his home in Bethesda, Md.

The pathway for young players to MLS who aren’t Homegrowns is notoriously narrow. There is a draft or there is death, essentially. In fact, the list of players currently listed on the MLS Allocation Ranking List, the NOC list determining who’s up for allocation, is only 30 players long and mostly features former MLS players. It’s updated once a year. Ebobisse, needless to say, is not on it.

Ebobisse won’t exactly be on the shelf for the next six months, until MLS teams open camp for the 2017 season, which is a good thing. But what happens until that time is something of an unprecedented mystery.

Generation adidas is a circumvention of the rule MLS has itself put in place that stipulates players aren’t eligible for the MLS SuperDraft until the conclusion of their senior year (and even that stipulation has stipulations, but that digression will birth rippling, spontaneous migraines so let us continue apace). Each year MLS allows itself to ink an average of around 7-8 non-senior players, signings always clustered between the end of the college season and the beginning of the MLS draft.

The primary reason for that is because MLS doesn’t have an easy way to store non-Homegrown players in that awkward time frame viscera between drafts. For one, they wouldn’t even have a parent club, meaning they’ll be uprooted from whatever USL team they’re dropped into in a few months. MLS teams can sign Homegrowns and integrate them seamlessly into the fabric of the franchise at any time. Non-Homegrowns are, essentially, screwed.

So, the thought process went, why sign a player to a GA contract in August, even if you knew you were going to tender him in December, when you had no place to put him? Let him play his three-month college season and deal with it afterward.

That will not happen here.

Ebobisse, 19, let Duke know last week he wasn’t returning, and he can’t join an MLS team until January 2017. So in the interim, he could either train with D.C. United, (which is more than a little strange considering the club does not have a claim on him and will have a natural scouting advantage for the draft), or perhaps go out on the oddest loan in MLS history to USL side Richmond Kickers.

Since Ebobisse has a deal with the league but has no team, the league office will loan him out. For the next five months, his team is essentially Don Garber FC.

This is hardly a worst-case scenario, but it isn’t exactly ideal either. Assuming it happens this way, Ebobisse will be fine in the USL, which is an up-and-coming developer league with a fair amount of teams producing good players.

But in this, you see the convolution that preempts non-Homegrown players (which is almost all of them) from going through this needless rigamarole that drives them to try their luck elsewhere. Or, as is more often the case, simply riding out a college career to its conclusion and joining the league after their 22nd birthday. The path is lined with obstructions.

It’s not even clear why MLS pulled the trigger so soon. This never happens. My guess is that Ebobisse told MLS he was going pro and the league had a now-or-never proposition on its desk. If that was indeed the case, the league was shrewd to lock him into contract. Even if it can’t actually put him in the league for months.

In lieu of ripping up the current allocation playbook related to GA-eligible players who haven’t yet reached draft eligibility, the league has to figure out a better way to allow MLS teams to identify and then sign the best college has to offer before they either wither in place or jump abroad. The proliferation of college discovery rights with an incredibly short shelf life to encourage quick turnaround signings could work. Or, if the league is wedded to the draft idea, perhaps sprinkle a series of smaller, scheduled college allocation drafts into the calendar year.

There should be a mechanism that allows Ebobisse to be distributed into MLS right now. Right. Now. That he has to wait, at a critical development age, is asinine.

The point is that the bottleneck needs to widen for players who don’t have Homegrown eligibility. You see, then, why so many clubs stand on their heads to gerrymander players into Homegrown status. It matters. Significantly.

In any case, Ebobisse’s addition is a fine thing for MLS. He’s a tremendously good player who you’ll probably see feature at the U20 World Cup next year. The younger the league gets, the more chances it has at spinning the development roulette wheel and coming up with a winner. And yet still, MLS does not make it easy to get to the table in the first place.