I am still on the Los Angeles Galaxy’s media list, so I get this stuff sent to me, and this item came a week ago, and I have intended to mention it ever since.

It’s about a 16-year-old forward the Galaxy has signed. And this most certainly is premature, but could this Jack McBean kid be The Next Landon Donovan? Or even a reasonable facsimile?

I think at this point we need to start collecting some names, a group of “maybes” we can keep track of. Because we stipulated earlier on this blog (go to the end of the item, and see who the five finalists for the “U.S. youth player of the year” were for 2009 and 2010) that U.S. youth soccer seems to be brimming with promising holding midfielders and stout defenders — but nearly no pure attacking players.

Who is this Jack McBean kid?

He begins to appear on the radar almost a year ago, when he scored for Corona del Mar High School in each of its first four CIF playoffs games, matching his total for the entire regular season, as noted in this Daily Pilot story.

Then the Orange County Register, which covers more schools than The Pilot, picked up on McBean, and did this blog item on him just before he signed with the Galaxy.

Here is a biographical sketch of the kid, and here is the nub of the situation:

Jack McBean is a fairly big (6-foot, 170) kid for his age. He considers himself a target forward, which is good. But which means he is not quite Landon 2.0, because Landon lives on quickness and guile; he’s just not big enough to be a holding guy in the attacking third. But we’re not looking for Landon’s clone; we want to know who might potentially score a couple of goals in the 2018 World Cup.

McBean has some advantages going for him besides good size and a great name — his father grew up in soccer-mad Scotland and didn’t come to the U.S. until he was 21, so this is a kid who presumably grew up in a “football” environment all along and didn’t sort of pick it up through AYSO when he was already 7 or 8 or 9. Nor was he tempted, I’m going to guess, to spend time playing some other sport.

The Galaxy, anyway, believes he could turn into something.

We risk putting too much pressure on a guy who was born in 1994 (!), but that’s how it works these days. We do the same with young talents in baseball, basketball and football, and most of them don’t make it. (Like a kid from Fontana whom Sports Illustrated anointed “the next LeBron” James when he was in eighth grade; the guy turned out to be the next “middling mid-major” college player.)

We get it. It’s unfair because nearly none of these guys are going to make it big. But a few do.

So let’s start our “next Landon” list with Jack McBean, and keep our ears to the ground on him.