Minnesota United FC announced Saturday it has launched a development academy, beginning with the under-13 and under-14 age groups, which will start play in September.

You can see a full list of U.S. Soccer Development Academy expansion teams here. There are now 165 academies in the system.

Now, instead of reiterating what United's press release states, I'd rather take the time to go into what a development academy is and why one can be important to a Major League Soccer team. This is like an unofficial addition to my "frequently asked soccer questions" series.

So, a development academy, essentially, is a club team. If anyone has kids or is familiar with the youth sports scene at all, you know for many sports there's the high school team and then a club or traveling team. Sometimes the seasons alternate. Other times, like in soccer, the seasons overlap, which causes many elite players to focus solely on the club team that is generally more competitive.

That was probably more than you needed to know, but the takeover of club sports is kind of fascinating. Anyway.

A development academy is usually associated with a professional team. And it provides the opportunity pro teams to, in a way, groom players under their culture or style of play while they're young. Then, once the player "graduates" from the academy, the first team can sign that player as a "homegrown player," as long as the player has been in the academy for at least a year. This means the player isn't subject to the SuperDraft, and the team doesn't have to worry about losing out on a carefully developed prospect.

Development academies for soccer are huge outside the U.S. For instance, La Masia at FC Barcelona. La Masia is super intense because the kids can start at age, like, 6, and they live there and just train to be soccer players. I mean, it works. Just a glance at Barcelona's major stars from the past few years, and the majority of them came through La Masia. Messi, Iniesta, Xavi.

However, U.S. development academies are probably not going to ever be that universally high-key, simply for the fact that soccer still competes with other sports for attention here, and the existing sports/education system in the U.S. has made college soccer an important developmental part.

But there have been a few very successful development academies. FC Dallas, for one. Not only are FCD's academy teams competitive on the youth circuit (the club has girls' academy, too), but the academy has turned out more than a dozen homegrown players in its less than 10-year existence. And with many of those homegrown players on its first team roster, Dallas won the U.S. Open Cup last season and made the Western conference finals in 2015.

It will obviously take some time for United to build its academy, especially since it is starting with a young age group and building up from there. So time will just have to tell on this one.

Let me know if you have any other questions about the academy system. Tweet, email, comment. You know the drill.