SNAPPED: A Eulogy for RBNY’s Now-Dead Playoff Streak | OneFootball

The New York Red Bulls have missed the playoffs for the first time in 15 seasons. But while that postseason streak may seem impressive at face value, the red half of New York has been toiling in mediocrity for longer than it might suggest.

Being a New York Red Bulls fan is not for the faint of heart.

We (yes, we) are one of only three original MLS teams that have never won an MLS Cup. We’re the only MLS team to have gone through a rebrand complete with a corporate brand name. We were clowned when our crosstown rivals won the MLS Cup in 2021 (although I personally put a big old asterisk on that and refer to it exclusively as “The COVID Cup”). We’ve seen our best young players, and even a manager, shipped off to Europe for pennies on the dollar because we are, after all, nothing but a feeder club for the much more important Red Bull global conglomerate.

In their stead, the club has brought in a handful of past-their-prime players from European leagues, as well as taken a handful of swings at recruiting from obscure leagues, with a particular fondness for the Polish Ekstraklasa. None of them ever work out.

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But we’ve had our share of successes upon which we hang our hats. Three Supporters’ Shields from 2013 to 2018 proved that the high-octane Red Bull philosophy really could be the future of the sport in North America. A surprise run to the MLS Cup final last year got fans energized in what could otherwise be seen as a fallow period for the club. Former players like Tyler Adams, Tim Ream, and John Tolkin have all been involved with the United States men’s national team in their preparation for the 2026 World Cup.

The piece de resistance of the whole RBNY project, however, is certainly the almost unheard of 15-year playoff streak. You read that right: from the 2010 to the 2024 seasons, the New York Red Bulls appeared in the MLS Cup playoffs, which represented the longest active postseason streak in all of North American professional sports. But when the Chicago Fire ran rampant over Inter Miami with a 5-3 win on September 30, that iron-like streak that generations of Red Bulls players fought tooth and nail to keep alive came crashing down. Among the ruins, fans, players, coaches, and front office staff are left wondering: what the hell do we do now?

How Did It Happen?

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The New York Red Bulls finished dead last in the 2009 season. Manager Juan Carlos Osorio and sporting director Jeff Agoos were summarily axed, and the club brought in Swedish coach Hans Backe to lead the transition from Giants Stadium to the brand new, state-of-the-art soccer-specific stadium, Red Bull Arena.

A brand new stadium deserves a superstar player to open it up, right? Enter: Thierry Henry. The Red Bulls would go on to finish first in the Eastern Conference in Titi’s maiden season in the Big Apple. 2010 was a strange format, however, and only two teams qualified for the playoffs from the Eastern Conference, as all four wildcard slots were claimed by Western Conference teams. As such, New York would face off against the San Jose Earthquakes in the first round of the playoffs, winning the first leg 1-0 but dropping the second 3-1 and being eliminated.

Similar early exits in 2011 and 2012 spelled the end for Backe, and Mike Petke took over the helm in 2013.

The first former player to serve as coach of the team, Petke played back during the MetroStars iteration of the club. His debut season as a manger saw the arrival of some now-legends in Bradley Wright-Phillips, Fabian Espindola, Juninho, and Jamison Olave, who along with mainstays like Henry, Tim Cahill, and Luis Robles led the Red Bulls to the first trophy in club history (unless you count the 2011 Emirates Cup, which I totally do) as they claimed the Supporters’ Shield. However, the Red Bulls once again couldn’t get out of the conference semifinals.

Another semis exit in 2014 led to Petke’s dismissal in January of 2015, a decision that left players, supporters, and Petke himself scratching their heads. Petke oversaw the first trophy in club history, was a legend as a player himself, and seemed to be a promising up-and-coming manager in Major League Soccer, but was fired without receiving so much as an explanation from NYRB sporting director Ali Curtis.

This led to the infamous “Town Hall Meeting” of January 2015, at which Curtis, general manager Marc de Grandpre, new manager Jesse Marsch, and keeper Luis Robles were trotted out in front of 300 angry season ticket holders who used the opportunity to stage a “Red Bull Out” protest as well as demand to know why Petke had been fired, and why the club had moved on from legends Henry and Cahill. (Spoiler alert: they were old.)

Marsch was largely seen as a retread, having, as some saw it, failed out of a much less ambitious club in Montreal. “You have one year!” one angry fan yelled at Marsch from the crowd.

All of this seems a little silly in hindsight, since Marsch went on to become one of the best coaches in MLS history, leading the team to the Supporters’ Shield that very season and again in 2018. He coined the phrases “Energy Drink Soccer” to describe his high-pressing, high-octane brand of soccer that exemplified the essence of Red Bull principles. Marsch set the 2018 season on course to set an MLS points record, but he couldn’t resist the siren song of the European game, and he left in June to serve as an assistant to Ralf Rangnick at sister club RB Leipzig. He would go on to do alright for himself in Europe as both an assistant and a manager, although he now suffers the ignominy of serving as Canada’s head coach.

Chris Armas (the most gym teacher manager of all time and future Manchester United cone-setter) took over the second half of the season, and the club set an MLS single season points record and looked nigh-unstoppable…that is until it came up against the buzzsaw that was the upstart Atlanta United.

So despite playing second-fiddle in their own city to new boys NYCFC, the Red Bulls finished the decade of the 2010s on a high, becoming something of a model of youth development and intelligent spending. Just when would RBNY finally turn the corner and convert their years of playoff regularity into that coveted first MLS Cup title?

Well, they wouldn’t. The 2020s have not been kind to the red half of New York.

Armas petered out by the end of 2020. It seemed that the Red Bulls found themselves a diamond-in-the-rough with interim coach Bradley Carnell, but he inexplicably wasn’t asked back for the 2021 season. The club instead opted to unveil new coach Gerhard Struber in October, and he was bafflingly allowed to debut on the touchline for a playoff game against Columbus. It didn’t go great.

Struber spent the better part of the next two seasons doing his best impression of an “Angry German” caricature (despite being Austrian), only managing to sneak the Red Bulls into the playoffs in seventh place of seven qualifying teams in 2021, needing a sad little draw against Nashville on Decision Day to book their ticket. They finished fourth in the following year, but after a truly putrid run at the beginning of 2023, Struber was let go in favor of interim coach Troy Lesesne.

While the coaching carousel turned, the Red Bulls roster was being slowly hollowed out from the inside. While the club had spent so wisely in the 2010s, it now seemed as if it was throwing ideas against the wall to see what stuck.

Instead of recruiting widely, the club took punts on players who were underperforming for other Red Bull Group teams and giving them a Stateside trial. The spine of the successful team of the late 2010s like Phillips, Aaron Long, Daniel Royer, Kemar Lawrence, and Luis Robles seemingly aged out of the RBNY project and were replaced on the cheap with academy kids or signings from obscure leagues around the world.

The club signed and struck out on countless DP and TAM players like Dru Yearwood, Patryk Klimala, Dante Vanzeir, Luquinhas, Kaku, Marc Rzatkowski, and Gonzalo Veron. Decent midfield contributors like Sean Davis and Frankie Amaya were discarded in favor of younger and cheaper options. The club continued to boast a stodgy defense, but numbers in attack dwindled. Under Lesesne at the end of 2023, the club snuck into eighth place of a nine-team playoff, having needed a miraculous three-game winning streak at the tail end of the season to keep the playoff dream alive.

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This all came to pass while the rest of the Eastern Conference was knee-deep in an arms race at the top of the table. With the arrival of Lionel Messi and friends, Inter Miami instantly flipped from a basement-dweller to genuine Supporters’ Shield threat. Philadelphia Union took the opportunity to basically become the Red Bulls, and now boast one of the most productive academy programs in North America. Cincinnati and Columbus both rode waves of smart young managers and savvy investment to the top of the Eastern Conference. Orlando, Nashville, and NYCFC became tricky opponents all while the Red Bulls were sleepwalking into disaster.

To keep up, the Red Bulls unveiled Sandro Schwarz, a young, tactically-astute German with a strong European pedigree, as new manager in December 2023. He seemed to be an excellent fit, but the club lacked high quality players all over the field. The signing of Emil Forsberg accomplished nothing more than papering over the cracks, and it’s fair to say that it’s a signing that wouldn’t have happened had Forsberg not been a player for another RB Group team.

But Forsberg struggled mightily to stay healthy, only appearing in 19 regular season matches in 2024. The once-vaunted high press grew just a little less intense, and Red Bull Arena became a less fearsome venue to visit.

Then something magical happened. RBNY got healthy at the right moment. The meat grinder of the Eastern Conference playoffs chewed up and spit out most of the teams that had given the Red Bulls trouble during the regular season, and they strung together a cinderella run to the MLS Cup Final. They fell to the host LA Galaxy 2-1, with star defender Andres Reyes mysteriously getting sick just before the game started, but this run stirred in the Red Bulls faithful a sense of pride and optimism that had been lacking from the team for years.

I even got to attend the home game against the Columbus Crew which the Red Bulls won on penalties, and there was a palpable air in the stadium that night that we had somehow collectively exorcized some demons of playoffs past.

Surely the team would reinvest, doubling down on this playoff run to have more sustained success! The Red Bulls as we knew them would be back with a vengeance, ready to bring home the long-await top prize!

Instead, the 2025 season would prove to be the end of the vaunted playoff streak. The club sold Tolkin, its top young player, to the relegation-threatened Holstein Kiel of the German Bundesliga for a $3 million fee that seems awfully low. It also traded Reyes for under $1 million of GAM, and let the sometimes-productive Elias Manoel walk. They upgraded the striker position, kicking Vanzeir back to Belgium and bringing in Stoke City legend Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting at the ripe young age of 36.

Choupo-Moting didn’t have a bad season at all, chipping in 16 goals which eclipsed the number Vanzeir managed (11) in his entire tenure at the club. Forsberg stayed healthy, playing 31 regular season games. So what went wrong?

The rest of the league collectively got a lot better. The Red Bulls brought a tired old knife to a gunfight. While the rest of MLS, particularly the Eastern Conference, invested in wide attackers, spent money on the right DPs at the right time, and occasionally splashed the cash to back their promising managers, the Red Bulls as an organization cut corners and relied on the same methods that worked 10 years ago.

A prime example of the evolution the Red Bulls have failed to make is the Chicago Fire team that put the final nail in their coffin. Regardless of what USMNT Twitter says, Gregg Berhalter is a proven MLS coach, and the Fire slowly but surely built the team that he needs to play a cohesive, defined style.

What Now?

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Erstwhile Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp is occasionally seen around the Red Bulls’ training facility in Hanover, New Jersey. Now the Head of Global Soccer for Red Bull GmbH, Klopp has shown face, decked out in team gear, to publicly support the RBNY front office. He clearly believes in MLS, stating, “I can tell you, the quality is really, really good. Good players, a lot of talent, high intensity… I think [MLS] found its spot and now let’s work with it.”

If Klopp and the rest of the Red Bull brass believe so much in our fledgling league, why do they refuse to take a page out of the rest of the league’s book and approach it the right way? New York should by all rights be the most exciting soccer market in North America. Instead, it feels like a footnote that, much like a patient experiencing rigor mortis, is slowly turning blue.

Maybe the playoff streak ending will serve as a wakeup call. I’m cautiously optimistic. But I can’t help but think that the entire Red Bull apparatus is getting exactly what it wants out of the New York Red Bulls: a billboard in the nation’s largest market. Anyone else think it’s high-time for a rebrand?