Surrey teen makes MLS Next All-Star Game, joining older Badwal bro on Whitecaps list of 6<\/p>\n
Published 10:30 am Wednesday, June 24, 2026<\/p>\n
Surrey teen Manav Badwal has been selected to play in the MLS Next All-Star Game on July 27.<\/p>\n
The match will showcase the future soccer stars of North America in an East-West showdown at Mecklenburg County Sportsplex in Matthews, North Carolina.<\/p>\n
A midfielder with Whitecaps FC BMO MLS Academy, Badwal is the younger brother of Whitecaps FC midfielder Jeevan Badwal.<\/p>\n
The younger Badwal joins five previous Whitecaps FC BMO Academy players selected to the MLS NEXT All-Star Game including brother Jeevan (in 2023), Tyler Brown and Sahil Deo (2025), Liam Mackenzie (2024) and Mihail Gherasimencov (2022).<\/p>\n
Manav recently became the youngest player in Whitecaps history to play in an MLS NEXT Pro match at 15 years, 10 months and 11 days.<\/p>\n
Since then, he\u2019s started twice and made three appearances. In June, Manav was named 2025-26 Whitecaps FC BMO Academy U-16 Player of the Year, as well as to the Academy XI at the annual Whitecaps FC Academy Awards.<\/p>\n
Last December, Manav joined Badwal family members for a Now-Leader interview and photo at their home in <\/a>Newton<\/a>, where Manav said he would love to play on the Whitecaps first team one day, hopefully with his older brother.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be a dream come true to have them play on the same pitch together,\u201d said proud mother Gurinder.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t imagine the stress that would be,\u201d dad Kam added with a laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Surrey teen makes MLS Next All-Star Game, joining older Badwal bro on Whitecaps list of 6 Published 10:30…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":758578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-758577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/758578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}