In MLS NEXT, Video Is Not an Option. It’s a Need.

At twenty-nine, Luis Robles was the starting goalkeeper for the Red Bull New York. He would walk into the club’s meeting room and find a row of PCs loaded with game film. Some days, he clicked on the highlights. Most days, he clicked on the clips he did not want to see. The saves he did not make. The moments that cost his team points.

“It takes courage to click on the clip where you mess up,” he recalls. “And as a goalkeeper, sometimes messing up meant that you lost the game.”

That short walk across the room turned out to be the most important distance in his career. Robles went from a good goalkeeper to one of the best in the league, and he will tell you plainly that video was a huge factor in his rise. He would go on to set the MLS record for most consecutive regular-season starts, 183 of them, stretching from September 2012 to May 2018. Today, as Sporting GM for MLS NEXT, he is trying to shorten that walk for a new generation of players.

The Scale of the Task

MLS NEXT is not a small operation. The league spans across North America with almost 53,000 players. Next season, fifty new clubs will join the program, which will increase the number of players to 55,000. Clubs are distributed across the United States, from the Northwest through California and Texas, and onward including three MLS clubs in Canada.

For a program of this scale, video is no longer optional. “It’s now a must. It’s a need,” Robles says. Which is why MLS NEXT has named Veo its Official League Exchange Partner. For the 2026/27 season, every match across these 318 member clubs will be recorded by a Veo camera and delivered to a shared platform accessible by every club in the league. There is no camera operator chasing the ball. There is no coach scrambling to a laptop after the final whistle, hoping someone got the full ninety minutes. The footage arrives. The exchange between clubs becomes something that actually exists. Games will be captured, uploaded and most importantly, games will be watched.

The Lesson He Did Not Expect

When Robles describes his own video education, the word he keeps returning to is courage. A surprising word to hear from a goalkeeper recalling game film, but the one he uses again and again.

“What I experienced was developing the courage to watch myself make mistakes,” he says. “What I didn’t anticipate was the amount of growth that I would experience.”

He explains what happens in a player’s mind when a mistake goes cold. The play ends, the game moves on, and the memory of what happened starts to drift. By the following week, the version in your head might not match what actually took place. “When you’re in the game, and the play happens, and you play it back in your mind, you see it a certain way,” Robles explains. “But then you watch the video, and you see a different viewpoint, and you realize what was playing in your mind might not have been accurate.”

That gap between memory and reality is where development could get lost. Closing it is what makes video so powerful. Robles wants every player in MLS NEXT to feel that for themselves. With Veo now embedded across the league, the experience he stumbled into at twenty-nine is no longer reserved for a professional with access to a back-office PC. It sits in the pocket of any fifteen-year-old with a phone, a few hours after a game is completed.

The Coach and the Player, Finally Speaking the Same Language

There is a second shift coming with this partnership, and it might be the one that matters most. For years, a coach could walk a player through a concept on a whiteboard, explain a principle on the training pitch, and trust the player to connect those ideas to the game on the weekend. The connection was often theoretical. Sometimes it never arrived at all.

“When coaches talk about a concept, when coaches discuss a moment in the game, that player who previously might not have had that sort of access would have to try to remember,” Robles says. “But even as a goalkeeper, as a professional, until I watched the video, I might not have accurately remembered what happened.”

That gap closes the moment a coach says, ‘Open the Veo and watch the minute we conceded the second goal.’ Or ‘Pull up our next opponent in the Veo’s League Exchange and see how they press from a goal kick.’ The conversation moves from abstract to concrete. Training becomes an answer to a question the player has already seen for themselves.

For Robles, opponent analysis is where the shift becomes most concrete. What was once reserved for first-team staff with scouting budgets is now part of the weekly routine for every U14 coach in the league.

“Maybe you attended a game, and you only got a piece of it,” he says. “But now the coaches can go to the video exchange. They can see their future opponent. They can prepare their team, whether it’s set plays, key players, important moments of the game, or tendencies of the opponent.”

He is quick to point out that the access reaches beyond the coaching staff.

“The players can do it now, too,” he says. “The coach can talk about it in practice and can say to the players, ‘Hey, go to the video exchange, watch our opponent, watch this minute of the game that they played,’ and they’re going to see it. That connection is important. Now, coaches aren’t just talking about something that is theoretical or just an idea. It will actually become reality.”

Robles believes that this shift can change the culture of youth soccer in North America. Players and coaches start sharing a visual vocabulary. Scouting opens up to anyone with access. A fourteen-year-old can study an opponent the way a first-team analyst does.

What changes now is the speed and accessibility of the footage itself. Every MLS NEXT match recorded with Veo is automatically processed and only a couple of clicks away from being shared to the League Exchange, a central hub where coaches, players, and scouts across all clubs can access footage from any device at any time.

The economics of the partnership are built around that same principle of access for all MLS NEXT member clubs receiving a standing discount on Veo hardware, and a few times a year, the league’s clubs are offered exclusive promotions reserved for the MLS NEXT community. The intent is straightforward. Make the technology affordable enough that no club, regardless of size or budget, gets left out of the development conversation.

Quality of Play and Delayed Gratification

One of the less obvious changes coming out of Robles’ office concerns the scoreboard. MLS NEXT has introduced what it calls quality-of-play scoring at the U13 and U14 levels, replacing traditional standings for those age groups. Teams are ranked by how they played rather than by what the scoreboard said.

The principle aligns with what leagues in Europe have been moving toward for years. England removed standings at younger ages for a stretch before settling back at U16. Across the globe, the pattern of reintroducing rankings around U16 holds. Robles says the reasoning is the same everywhere. Younger players need room to develop intentions before they are judged on outcomes.

“In America, we’re obsessed with winning, which is fine. It’s a huge part of our culture,” he says. “Competition is a part of development. Winning is a part of development. We think it’s really important that we prioritize the appropriate aspect based on the stage of development.”

At U13 and U14, every MLS NEXT Homegrown match is broken down by a trained analyst who watches for moments of significance, both positive and negative, and for intention. A pass that reflects a player trying to solve the game in the right way is rewarded, even if the ball falls short, because the player may still be growing into their body. Traditional statistics would log that as an incomplete pass. Quality of play logs it as the right idea in motion. In the upcoming season, this feature will be available for both Homegrown and Academy divisions. Plus, every single match in MLS NEXT will be analyzed and shared with players to further their individual development and Veo is a big part of that process.

“We’re not advocating for a specific style of play. We’re not advocating for a certain formation,” Robles explains. “We want to see players try to apply what they’ve learned throughout the week during training into the match on the weekend, and then we’ll score it.”

Quality of Play rankings still lead to playoffs, and playoffs still crown a champion. Winning still has its moment.

Scouting, Rebuilt

Ask Robles where all of this leads, and he walks you through what he calls the four pillars of player development. Environment. Coaching. Competition. Recruitment. The first three are jobs his team works on every day. The fourth is the one that is about to be transformed by video.

Historically, an American player growing up in the wrong state or league could be missed entirely. Scouts could only be in so many places. A fourteen-year-old might be producing performances that no one sees.

Video collapses that problem. With every MLS NEXT match now captured and uploaded through Veo, a single game is only one click away from a recruiter, an MLS academy, or a national team staff member, whenever they choose to watch. “Scouts, whether it’s Major League Soccer or any club that’s in MLS NEXT, have 24/7 access to seeing players,” Robles says. A player seen once in person can now be studied across ten games, against different opponents and at different moments.

The eye test still matters. It just gets a far larger sample size to work with.

The Ballon d’Or Question

The numbers Robles quotes most proudly are not about standings. Seventeen MLS NEXT alum made their first-team MLS debut in the first five matchdays of the 2026 MLS season. One hundred and sixty MLS NEXT alumni are currently on first-team rosters. Those, he says, are the numbers that matter. Those validate MLS NEXT as a player development platform with a direct line to the professional game that also sends thousands of prospects on to the collegiate game.

He wants those numbers to keep climbing. He wants the league to rise with them. And he is willing to say out loud what many in American soccer still whisper.

“The goal is to elevate MLS as a top league in the world, have one of our players win the Ballon d’Or and help the US Men’s National Team win the World Cup. To us, that’s clear,” he says. 

He reaches for Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. The moment someone proves that something can be done, others follow quickly behind. Robles believes American men’s soccer is waiting for its Bannister. A player who came through the grassroots, graduated through MLS NEXT, stepped into MLS NEXT Pro, broke into the first team, earned a place on the national team, and then one day stood on a stage in Paris holding a golden ball.

“Can an American male player win the Ballon d’Or?” he asks. “That to me is a pretty significant statement.”

It is a long walk to that stage. For Robles, it starts the way his own career did, with a young player coming off the field, working up the courage to click on the clip they do not want to see, and discovering that the growth on the other side of that moment is larger than anything they imagined.

Learn more about the Veo and MLS NEXT partnership here.