We are defined by that which surrounds us, whether we would have that be the fishbowl of our reality or not. In Stendhal’s 19th century French classic The Red and the Black, the author depicts Julien Sorel’s feverish attempt to transcend his lowly social strata and climb into the bourgeoisie. Sorel, though, is aware of the roleplay inherent in such a climb, and he will never not be the humble son of a carpenter from Franche-Comté.

In that sense, what we view as “sporting young” in America is defined by our national sports of record. In the NFL, young is anything inside a player’s first few seasons. 22. 23. 24. MLB funnels players through a minor league system that spits out players viewed as young in their mid-20’s.

But a college system that works so well as a developmental vacuum in other sports breaks down as we seek to define youth in soccer terminology. Is 24 young? Is 23? 22?

It is American to say so, but globally? No. None of those are, in the truest terms we have.

MLS is getting better at creating systems that not only aspire toward youth, but inspire others to do the same. The Whitecaps and FC Dallas are ground zero, shrinking the paradigm with which we view true playing youth in MLS. FCD’s average age was around 24 in the playoffs this year, which is a tremendous thing when the soccer is good.

But it is equally true that in soccer’s true halls of power on other shores, ever younger players are given substantive playing time in pinnacle prestige competitions to sharpen the axe. Teenagers. We are talking teenagers.

This is a list of WhoScored’s top 10 rated teenagers playing in Europe through the first three-plus months of the 2015-16 season. You will note there is a 16-year-old on this list.

The most ubiquitous refrain you are likely to hear from those defending MLS’s lack of similar tack is that the teenagers are not good enough to play. And to that I say that you are scared to really find out. There is a chicken-egg thing here, where the coach will not give his 19-year-old playing time because he is 19, and so he does not get better because he is 19 and not playing. This is a sort of negative feedback loop, where the stimulus is never jolted into life and the thing breaks down before beginning, truly.

What if we did this same project with MLS players? What would we find.

Something like this. The numbers on the left are their overall player ratings inside MLS as a whole.

If you wish to know the most fundamental difference between MLS and the leagues it chases, it is right here. Not in Messi and Ronaldo and Rooney and Goetze of today but in the systems that created pathways for them at an early age. This is not to suggest that there is a Rooney in an MLS academy, but that if there was anything close he is fighting upstream.

There is a problem in our MLS top 10 you will notice immediately. Almost all of these players are 1995s, which means they are all now 20 years old. There were so few teenagers who played at all in the league in 2015, let alone teenagers who made enough of an impact to rise above a 6.50 rating, that I essentially had to leave the criteria with players who were teenagers at some point during the season. In Facey’s and Agdebuke’s cases at least, they turned 20 in January.

In fact, you will not find a 1996 (or anything younger) inside the top rated 277 players in MLS this season as charted by WhoScored. RSL’s Justen Glad, who earned just north of 500 minutes, is the 278th, the highest rated current teenager in MLS in 2015. Angelino is the only other teen inside the top 300. WhoScored ratings are hardly sacrosanct, but they are an adequate guide-rail for our purposes today.

There is not some magic transformation that happens when a player leaves his teenage years, but it is a litmus to use when we talk about what it is to be a young soccer player. The argument is not whether young academy signees should be regular starters, but whether they should be regular enough that signing them to the first team is more than merely a token gesture. It is the latter reality that makes MLS far older and creakier than it should be.

MLS is so perfectly placed to do this, to hand real minutes to young players in lieu of lobbing more minutes at broken 32-year-olds who were never good. It is baffling so many of its coaches have not yet picked up the baton. The league is positioned in the critical shade. There is no Marca here and very few critical columnists in very few national markets who would pillory a coach for pulling aside some used veteran for a young player who will make a mistake in search of the knowledge that only comes from experience.

And USL is fine, too. Good, beneficial, forward-thinking, even. But it’s a placeholder now. It’s not to the point where players can expect to replicate first team minutes necessary to blossom into players ready to leap across borders to bigger paychecks. Eventually? Possibly. Probably, maybe. But not now. MLS needs to carry that torch in the interim.

MLS is a league where coaches are given the leeway and the tactical grace to play with academies and use young players. This is not an arms race league, no matter what the modern expansion of the DP rule would have you believe. The league is not so good and not nearly top-heavy enough that it will not bear the weight of a talented 18-year-old on occasion. And it does not happen enough.

The country at large mostly shouts down the college system, which is admittedly a bloated and imperfect avenue that has not entirely adapted with the times. But based on MLS’s league-wide unwillingness to play promising teenage players bounding out of U18 academies, can you truly find blame in, say, Adam Najem’s decision to choose Akron at 18? Najem was good enough to pick up 500-700 minutes for the Red Bulls in 2014, but he would not have regardless. Ageism, maybe. Who knows.

If Oscar Pareja proved anything by starting a recently turned 20-year-old goalkeeper named Jesse Gonzalez in a Western Conference Semifinal shootout that Gonzalez ultimately won for FCD, it is that age is nothing if you are willing to defy it. At this very moment in Florida there is the Development Academy showcase, where hundreds of top U18 and U16 and U14 players are stating a case. Perhaps these are better places to start.

This is not a clarion call for the league to be suddenly flooded with 19-year-old starters, but it is perhaps a nudge in that general direction. Matt Miazga was given the first team space to fail and get back up and now he is courting Europe. There are players who are not receiving the same chances with more tools than Miazga in the system right now. Where is their chance?

The only way to know is to give them the nourishing minutes that would make them heirs to a league that should have always been theirs.