The last couple years for the New York Red Bulls haven’t been the easiest to get a read on, but one aspect of the club in its current state is fairly undeniable: it’s never been more linked with its corporate parent company.
Fifteen years into the energy drink era of New York soccer, the long-anticipated but strangely hesitant Mitteleuropean takeover of the club’s operations has finally manifested. Austrian manager and former Red Bull Salzburg academy coach Gerhard Struber has spent the last two seasons installing an extreme pressing system well in line with the tactical identity of sibling teams in Europe, while new sporting chief and Bundesliga veteran Jochen Schneider was adamant in his introduction to local press earlier this year that New York would not waver from the Red Bull strategy of young, efficiently-recruited teams playing vertical pressing soccer.