It's funny how much things can change in a year.
Last year, our list of the best under-21 prospects for the U.S. men's national team was filled with a lot of guys who aren't really prospects. No, it included plenty of first-choice, or first-off-the-bench types, for the senior national team. Giovanni Reyna, Yunus Musah, Ricardo Pepi, Joe Scally, Malik Tillman, Gianluca Busio? They were all there.
And now they're all gone -- most recently Pepi, who turned 22 on Jan. 9. He would be No. 1 on this list were he born just a week or two later. Heck, Busio ranked 10th on this list last time -- had he been just a year younger, with the same track record he had a year ago, he probably would have been first this time, too. Unfortunately, he was born in May 2022.
This is why people talk about "Golden Generations" with national teams. Even when the broader trend of youth talent is broadly positive, as it is with the USMNT, things can get pretty volatile from one year to the next. Sometimes you just get a concentration of excellent players all born in the same year and sometimes, well, you don't -- like this year.
Now that your expectations are sufficiently lowered, let's do it all again. Ahead of the USMNT's friendlies with Venezuela and Costa Rica, who are the program's 15 best under-21 prospects?