Play the Kids: A Red Bull New York Tradition | OneFootball

With a bevy of teenagers not just on the roster, but contributing in major ways, Red Bull New York could be one of the most exciting clubs to watch in MLS this year. But the youth movement isn’t anything new for the club. 

When Red Bull New York opened the 2026 MLS season against Orlando City SC, precocious 17 year-old striker Julian Hall led the line while Eric Choupo-Moting, 36 years young and a veteran of Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, warmed the pine. To Hall’s right and left were, by comparison, grizzled veterans Jorge Ruvalcaba, 24, and Cade Cowell, 22.

Hall found the back of the net three times in his first two league appearances, while his fellow teenagers Adri Mehmeti, 16, and Matthew Dos Santos, 17, turned in performances wildly more professional than one might reasonably expect from players their age. 17-year-old Tanner Rosborough also made a cameo in each of Red Bull’s first two victories against Orlando City and New England.

A 3-0 loss to Montreal brought the Red Bulls back to Earth (we are all powerless at the hands of a Wiki Carmona revenge game), but it’s abundantly clear that a new generation has arrived in Harrison, New Jersey.

This youth revolution comes with the appointment of Michael Bradley as head coach, who at 38 is something of a young man himself, and is the third-youngest coach in the league.

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Bradley will know first-hand the rewards and challenges of giving young players significant minutes with the senior team, as he began his professional career with the MetroStars, precursors to the modern Red Bull organization. The son of a highly accomplished coach, Bradley has a sort of leg up on your typical new coaching hire. He took over the New York Red Bulls II midway through the 2025 season, and led the reserve team to a MLS Next Pro title. It was enough to convince the Red Bull brass that he had the juice to take over the first team.

In 2018, The Athletic published a concerning report, claiming that Major League Soccer fell well behind other top soccer leagues in terms of minutes allotted to players aged 22 and younger. It’s counterintuitive, given that relegation doesn’t exist in MLS, but North American coaches and GMs had a habit of building their rosters around a mix of reasonably-priced journeymen and lavishly compensated international superstars. This, if you believe the doom-sayers, spelled disaster the United States’ long-term prospects as a soccer nation.

But the Red Bulls were never the problem. In fact, they’ve long been an integral part of the solution. Bradley’s trust in the kiddos is nothing new for the Jersey-based club; in fact, he is another in a proud lineage of Red Bull coaches to have put their faith in untested youngsters and have a surprising amount of success in the process. It also comes at a pivotal moment in the history of MLS as a whole, at which clubs like San Diego and Philadelphia are pouring millions into state-of-the-art academy facilities and developmental programs, and in turn translating that to success on the pitch.

But who are the MLS academy pioneers, you might ask? From the outside, the inscrutable Red Bull New York organization may come across as aloof and unambitious, but peeling back the layers, we find that soccer in the United States just might owe a great deal of its recent success to the Red Bull Academy model.

The Chelsea Game

Perhaps the defining moment of the Red Bulls’ “play the kids” corporate mission statement came during a 2015 friendly match against reigning English Premier League champions Chelsea as part of the short-lived “competition” known as the International Champions Cup.

The game amounted to little more than a glorified training session for each side. The Red Bulls had been bounced from the U.S. Open Cup by the Philadelphia Union only a few days earlier, so young upstart manager Jesse Marsch elected to rest his more senior players, including a litany of names familiar to modern viewers of MLS 360, such as Bradley Wright-Phillips, Sacha Kljestan, Dax McCarty, and Mike Grella (he works for CBS, but you get the point).

Marsch, you’ll remember, was still weathering the storm of having replaced the massively popular Mike Petke as head coach, and while the 2015 side would go on to win the Supporters’ Shield, by July they’d found themselves in a bit of a slump, having lost five of their previous nine league games and bounced from the Open Cup by nearby rivals. It would have been tempting for Marsch to run out his strongest side in a game against Premier League opposition and throw down a marker on the world stage.

Instead, Marsch elected to start the game with a lineup composed mainly of New York Red Bulls II players, at the time of the USL Championship division, handing first-team debuts to 15 youngsters in the process. The Red Bulls roster on the day boasted no fewer than nine academy graduates in an era during which the pathway to MLS was either through college or international transfers.

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Chelsea, in comparison, were coming off a Premier League campaign in which they positively sauntered to the title, clinching the trophy with three games left to play. This was the culmination of the new Jose Mourinho project, as the Portuguese Special One returned to West London after six years in the wilderness in 2013.

The sky seemed to be the limit for his Blues, and Mourinho seemed determined to succeed on all fronts during the coming season. And while Marsch saw fit to rest his superstars, Mourinho attempted to get valuable game minutes into the legs of John Terry, John Obi Mikel, Cesc Fabregas, Cesar Azpilicueta, Gary Cahill, Thibaut Courtois, and Kurt Zouma (the cats of North Jersey cowered in fear that day).

The game began predictably, with the Premier League champions dominating possession and registering the better chances. A baby-faced Sean Davis signaled the Red Bulls’ intent on the day by putting a scare into Courtois when he dragged a shot just wide in the 13th minute, but Chelsea struck first through Loic Remy on an assist from Oscar in the 26th minute. Mourinho looked passingly pleased as he assumed, much as everyone else, that his side would romp to victory.

As first half gave way to second, the Baby Bulls looked as though they were merely holding onto the honor of only just barely losing to superior opposition, opponents who exceeded them in experience, market value, popularity, and capacity for growing facial hair. Then, seemingly clear out of the great blue yonder, Chelsea captain and purported wife-stealer Terry left a backpass for backup keeper Asmir Begovic. Red Bull debutant Franklin Castellanos nipped in and buried a shot to level the match. Mourinho glowered on the sidelines and implored his team to weather this punch in the kisser.

As a card-carrying Chelsea Hater, I can enthusiastically admit that the scenes of implosion the television cameras managed to capture from this theoretically meaningless friendly are simply *chef’s kiss.*

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The goals kept flying in. The young Red Bulls possessed an endless font of pressing energy, and they harried and harassed each and every Chelsea player who got on the ball. An almost unrecognizable young Tyler Adams headed in from a free kick, and Davis added two classy finishes about three minutes apart. Mourinho sat back in his padded chair, a sourpuss plastered on his bronzed visage, looking, as Dan Ripley of the Daily Mail described, “like a child who’s been told Christmas is cancelled.”

The Red Bulls claimed a famous victory on the day. A handful of the players involved in the historic win have gone on to have productive careers in myriad top flights of worldwide soccer, but the real curiosity of this match comes not from the New York side but from its outsized impact on the Blues of West London.

Chelsea entered the summer as clear favorites to repeat as Premier League winners. Mourinho was back where he belonged, it would seem, and the Pensioners had a good case for being considered contenders for the Champions League as well. But the loss to the Red Bulls kicked off a downward spiral of results, and by August Mourinho was subbing off Terry at halftime of a humiliating 3-0 loss to Manchester City. By the end of November, Chelsea had collected a paltry 11 points from 11 games, and languished in 15th place.

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Mourinho would be fired on December 17, after losing nine of 16 league matches. He was replaced by Dutch manager Guus Hiddink on an interim basis, and finished the season in an embarrassing 10th place. In true Chelsea “if you can’t beat them” fashion, they went out and signed New York Red Bulls defender Matt Miazga during the following summer’s transfer window. He’d only make two appearances for the West London club.

Davis must have sat at the training facility in Whippany with a virgin margarita, whispering “Tell Jose. I want him to know it was me.”

Academy Structure and Pathways

The Red Bull organization was an early opponent of the then-ubiquitous “pay-to-play” system, in which talented youngsters were required to shell out money hand over fist in order to join up with the nation’s premier soccer academies. This created an imbalanced system in which kids whose parents had deep pockets were preferred to kids who were, you know, actually talented. The RBNY Academy has been free for families since 2008, which starkly contrasts with competitors such as the Portland Timbers, a club that didn’t eliminate pay-to-play until 2015.

In 2010, the club unveiled the “Regional Developmental School,” a satellite-based supplementary training program for talented youth players who might not be quite ready to live and learn away from their families in a full-time academy environment. According to Red Bull, 95% of eventual academy participants begin their playing careers in these satellite programs.

While the United States has some of the highest youth soccer participation in the world, bridging the gap between talented amateur and full professional has been a sticky wicket for most clubs. But the Red Bulls, as part of a global soccer syndicate that’s essentially a side hustle for an energy drink company, were privy to the best-practices established by their sister clubs operated in a continent with decades more knowledge on how to run a successful academy.

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RB Salzburg was particularly helpful in providing a model for the RBNY academy setup. Jurgen Klopp recently took the helm of Red Bull GmbH and waxed lyrical about the academy setup in New Jersey, stating that he was “massively, massively impressed” with the facilities and the players the academy has produced. The smiley German cuts an affable and unifying figure in the world of the Red Bull group, and he’s got this Red Bulls fan convinced that we are not just a redheaded stepchild after all.

A selling point of the academy in its early days was the concept of a player pathway, which delineates in black and white the path a youth player would take up through the youth teams to eventually, hopefully, fingers-crossedly arrive at the first team. Apart from being a motivational factor for ambitious young players, it takes the guesswork out of a frequently convoluted and confusing morass of youth teams, reserve teams, academy teams, tournaments, and training camps. Transparency allows parents to make grounded decisions to give their children the best possible chance to succeed without being sucked in by false promises or unrealistic expectations.

Most importantly, Red Bull Academy players are imbued with the club philosophy. Energy Drink Soccer is a real thing, and the German gegenpress system requires of players active motors, tactical awareness, and the ability to recognize and execute lightning-quick transitions to capitalize on mistakes. When players grow up in the environment of high-energy pressing, moving up the age levels and confronting bigger and faster opposition is more intuitive and familiar-feeling.

Nationwide Impact

Look across Major League Soccer rosters and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a team that doesn’t employ an RBNY academy graduate or two.

The 2018 New York Red Bulls set a then-points record en route to capturing the Supporters’ Shield for the third time in club history. That season, a full 25% of MLS minutes went to Red Bull Academy graduates. Each Red Bulls team dating back to the beginning of its impressive 15-year playoff run included at least one academy product as a regular starter.

Red Bull products have made countless U.S. men’s national team rosters in recent years, from the youth levels all the way to the senior squad. Daniel Edelman, now of St. Louis City SC but recent scorer of one of the more important penalty kicks in RBNY history, captained the U.S. team at the 2023 U-20 World Cup in Argentina.

Examining the potential USMNT roster for this summer’s World Cup, there is one name that’s sure to be first on the team sheet if healthy: Tyler Adams. When he’s not angrily asking opponents if they know where he’s from (answer: Wappinger’s Falls, a quaint suburb of Poughkeepsie), Adams is bossing the midfield for Premier League regulars Bournemouth.

He became a vocal leader of the Red Bulls’ midfield at a young age, leading the squad to the semifinals of the CONCACAF Champions League (that’s what it used to be called, I think) in 2018.

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Adams made the leap from the New York Red Bulls to RB Leipzig the following year, reuniting with Marsch, the same manager that had given him that start against Chelsea four years prior. He suffered injury woes while in Germany, but after a brief stopover with Leeds United, he seems to have settled in nicely on England’s south coast. Adams served as captain for the USMNT during the 2022 World Cup, becoming the youngest American captain at the competition since 1950.

Left back John Tolkin seems to be trodding the Adams path of late, as he gained immense popularity and importance playing a pivotal role for the Red Bulls on their wild ride to the MLS Cup Final in 2024. He then signed with Holsten Kiel of the Bundesliga to develop his tactical acumen and taste in haircuts. Tolkin is only the latest in a long line of Red Bull exports to play meaningful minutes for a European club.

Miazga, Omir Fernandez, Alex Muyl, Derrick Etienne Jr., Kyle Duncan, Peter Stroud, and Jared Stroud are just a few of the solid MLS players to have come out of the Red Bull system. These are only a few of the players who saw meaningful action at a young age, at a stage in their careers where their skillsets and habits were still malleable, when they were supremely coachable and could combine their budding physical prowess with the neuroplasticity of people whose prefrontal cortices haven’t fully developed.

New York, San Diego, and Philadelphia have created a new generation of higher-floor players precisely because they were willing to trust them in high-pressure moments early in their careers. Stakeholders have slowly realized that the key to strong development in terms of domestic stability as well as international performance lies in forging players in the fire, so to speak.

The worldwide impact speaks for itself. These days, dynamic young players like Lamine Yamal, Lennart Karl, and Estevao are scoring in spades for top European teams.

While some bemoan the lack of depth across the clubs of MLS, it’s fair to say that the Red Bull Academy has raised the standard league-wide.

Is it Lazy?

Red Bulls supporters (I count myself among them) have frequently accused the club of lacking the requisite ambition to become a real powerhouse in Major League Soccer. Careening between appearing as miserly spendthrifts and avant-garde paragons of soccer’s future tends to give even the most dedicated of RBNY supporters debilitating whiplash. Providing the next generation of U.S. Soccer superstars and investing in the future of the sport nationwide is all well and good, but the point of supporting a soccer team is enjoying the possibility that the team might, you know, win something at some point.

As rival fans are keen to point out at every possible opportunity, RBNY remains one of two original MLS clubs never to have taken home an MLS Cup (don’t you go getting any ideas, New England Revolution), and despite three Supporters’ Shields, the Curse of Caricola continues to haunt the New Jersey denizens come playoff time.

Bringing in proven playoff performers from around the league, logic would hold, could do more to get Red Bull over the line than even the best youth development program. But some view the club as unwilling or unable to recruit real difference makers. They’re more interested, posit some critics, in serving as a feeder club for the real priorities of the Red Bull Group: the teams in Salzburg and Leipzig.

But building a competitive MLS roster doesn’t have to be a binary. Clubs shouldn’t have to choose between bringing in aging superstars and churning out their own homegrown talent. The challenge, at the end of the day, lies in striking a balance between winning now and creating a sustainable future. In the modern age of soccer, a robust academy just might hold the key to both.