About 10 minutes into Wednesday night’s match vs. Nashville SC, a sequence unfolded that perfectly encapsulated both the promise and pitfalls of Red Bull New York’s current youth-oriented project under Michael Bradley, which will meet its next big test with a Walmart Saturday Showdown visit from Robert Lewandowski and the red-hot Chicago Fire on Matchday 22 (7:30 pm ET | Apple TV).
Turning inside the center circle, Ronald Donkor (age 21) spotted a gap between gold jerseys and dribbled forward, then played a short vertical pass to the feet of Adri Mehmeti (age 17) in a pocket of space. With two tidy touches, Mehmeti turned and laid a perfectly weighted through ball into the path of Julian Hall (age 18), whose clever movement had created a one-on-one with Nashville goalkeeper Brian Schwake.
In seven seconds, with just three touches, the "Baby Bulls" – who have fielded eight of the 10 youngest starting lineups in MLS this season, with three teenagers in their usual XI – had slashed right through the rugged spine of MLS’s top team, the odds-on favorite to win the Supporters’ Shield. It involved one of Mehmeti's game-high three key passes.
Alas, Hall scuffed his finish wide of the target, letting Nashville off the hook. Thus, despite doubling the league leaders’ expected-goals total (2.1-0.9), the Red Bulls allowed their visitors to escape Sports Illustrated Stadium with all three points via Maxwell Woledzi’s injury-time header, RBNY’s fourth loss in five matches since MLS’s resumption of play following the FIFA World Cup break.
“I choose to believe that if you are watching this team closely, that you see a lot of growth, a lot of improvement, a lot of things that are going in a really good direction,” Bradley told reporters postgame, urging his side to “take the next step” after showing so much promise and inconsistency over the season’s first half.
“It's frustrating when you feel like it's not quite coming, it's not going the exact way that you want. But this is the work. This is the journey.”
Unique identity
Situated amid one of North America’s largest youth talent pools, having earlier this year opened a new 80-acre, $100-million training facility for both the first team and academy, RBNY have indeed invested a great deal in youth – both ideologically and financially.
Hall and Mehmeti are the most prominent prospects of the moment, tracked by top European clubs and widely slated as future US men’s national team call-ups, perhaps as soon as next month. The plan is for them to be just two of many talents moving along a pipeline that’s already produced Euro-based USMNTers Tyler Adams and John Tolkin and a raft of other standouts scattered across MLS.
“We feel strongly that we can be a club that is unique, and different,” explained Bradley during an in-depth conversation with MLSsoccer.com last week. “We want to be a club that develops young players. We want to be a club that plays young players. We want to be a club that wins with young players. And then ultimately, part of the process with young players is when opportunities come, bigger clubs come calling, then the opportunity for them to take the next step in their career and move on.
“We feel like the identity that we have as a club certainly fits with what Red Bull is as a brand, and the identity of Red Bull in terms of giving young people opportunities and not being afraid, and doing things that other people are hesitant to do.”
Right man for the job
It is both striking and fitting that Red Bull has entrusted so much of its leadership to Bradley, himself a teenage phenom at the dawn of an illustrious playing career that included two World Cups, 151 USMNT caps (44 of them as captain), stints in four of Europe’s top leagues, a historic treble with Toronto FC and myriad other team and individual honors across 20 years as a professional – even though this is his first stint as a first-team head coach.
As a child in the 1990s, he had the rare opportunity to tag along with his father Bob to the training sessions of dynasty-era D.C. United, where Bradley senior worked as an assistant under Bruce Arena before starting his own distinguished managerial career with the Fire upon their 1998 expansion launch. Whether practicing free kicks with the legendary Marco Etcheverry or picking up tips from future head coaches like Jesse Marsch or Chris Armas, young Michael got a priceless soccer education.
Now he and the rest of the RBNY brain trust endeavor to provide something comparable, albeit much more systematic, for every kid who moves through their academy.
“I was fortunate that I was exposed to certain environments and certain things at such a young age,” Bradley noted. “In a world before any MLS teams had academies, in a world before so many MLS teams even had training facilities of their own, I was able to be in a locker room and be on the training field and be in a professional environment up close every single day.
“We are able now to do that in more formal ways. On a day like today, our second team starts training 45 minutes after us. Our Under-18s are finishing up as we go on the field, our Under-16s are getting ready to go to Salzburg [RBNY’s Austrian sibling club] next week, and so they're also in this morning. So there's football going on everywhere around this facility. We go out for lunch, and the Under-16s are finishing up their meal. There's just the ability for everybody to be connected.”
Youth-first mentality
In designing the RWJBarnabas Health Red Bulls Performance Center, Red Bull made extensive efforts to facilitate this feeling at every turn. As Bradley delves into those details with gusto, it’s easy to see how sporting director Julian de Guzman was convinced he was the right person for the No. 1 job only six months into his stint as head coach of RBNY’s second team, which he led to an MLS NEXT Pro championship last autumn.
“One of the things inside our club that we feel really strongly about is making sure that pathway, literally from our Under-10s all the way on up to our first team, that every single player feels like that path is real,” explained Bradley.
“You have the responsibility, when you're first-team coach, to make sure that you are around and watching games and making sure that you know everything that's going on inside the academy and that you know all the players. So we have created inside this club a real sense of football, of connection, of pride in the way that we do things, of pride in the way that we play.”
Setting up for success
No one who watched much of Bradley the player – an intense, relentless, cerebral central midfielder – will be overly surprised to see that he’s a meticulous, process-oriented coach.
He knows the likes of Mehmeti, Hall and Donkor will sooner or later move across the Atlantic to test themselves in one of the world’s top leagues. In fact, he reveals Hall very nearly did so last winter, adding that he made clear his eagerness to work firsthand with the clever young striker before he made such a move, and that only a huge transfer offer would have prevented it.
Preparing players for those next steps is a central part of Bradley’s job. Yet he says that’s in no way separate from the work of making RBNY the most successful team they can be.
“The day-to-day is about improving every player, trying to take the football that we play as a team and make it that much better,” he said, “so that when we get our chance every weekend and the lights come on, we are ready to play and we are ready to go after every single game, go after three points, and be ready to do it again and again. That part is actually easy – there is no balance.”
He sees himself as one cog in a larger machine, with the wider mission of elevating soccer in the United States and Canada so MLS and its domestic national teams can push past the limitations that again cut short their World Cup runs on home soil this summer.
“The quality of Major League Soccer has to continue to get better. Individual players for our national team have to continue to push themselves to higher levels,” Bradley said. “There's no magic pill, there's no golden answer that's going to solve everything.
“Also we're talking about tight margins, and we're talking about trying to move ourselves into the absolute top level of world football, and just as we're trying to get better, everybody else is trying to get better too.”
Having dwelled under that hot spotlight for many years himself, he’s equal parts wry, optimistic and realistic about the path ahead. There’s work to be done, but he’s seen the enormous progress of the past few decades. He’s lived it.
“The part where every four years, depending on how we go out of a World Cup, then it's the level of the discourse and the conversation,” Bradley noted. “It's always a little bit amusing that ultimately people are ready to come to such absolute conclusions based on what happens over the span of a few weeks. Certainly it's a gauge, and it's certainly a measure of where we are. But it's not everything.
“I've said a lot lately: The game is here in this country. Nobody needs to feel like we're a bad World Cup away from all of a sudden, like, soccer disappearing from relevance in the United States. The game is going to continue to grow. The game is going to continue to get better. Our teams, our players are going to continue to move themselves forward. And sure, now everybody involved in that, we’ve got to continue to find ways to be even better, so we can make that all go faster.”
