For just the second time in club history, New York Red Bulls made it to the final game of the season. And for the first time in club history, it felt – at least for a little bit, in the second half vs. LA Galaxy – like they would maaaaybe pull it off and find out how to win MLS Cup presented by Audi.
Alas, Red Bull still does not come in Cups. But still, this season represented an undeniable step forward in several ways.
Let’s focus on that:
When Sandro Schwarz was hired as head coach ahead of the 2024 season – a year ago this week, as a matter of fact – the assumption was he was another European who’d lean into the very German aspects of Energy Drink Soccer in the same way Gerhard Struber had during his two-and-a-half years in charge. In theory, he’d take the “high press, second ball” ethos and push it to its logical extent, to the exclusion of everything else.
It wasn’t that way. Instead, Schwarz dialed back a lot of the Red Bullishness of the 2024 version of the team. Don’t get me wrong; they were still unmistakably a direct, high-pressing team. But those moments were interspersed with more patient builds from the back, more subtlety playing through midfield and more moments of valuing the ball.
It produced a lot of good soccer in the first half of the season. It produced plenty of losing soccer in the second half, and Schwarz scrapped it entirely by the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs.
But we got about 30 games of data indicating that this team’s evolving, and I’d expect that evolution to continue into 2025. I am excited about that.
Ever since Thierry Henry retired after the 2014 season, Red Bull fans (and many Red Bull players, including legends like Sacha Kljestan and Bradley Wright-Phillips) had begged for a high-quality, big-name import with the chops to win the biggest matches. They always needed that one last piece, but RB Global never got it for them.
So it’s a little ironic that Emil Forsberg arrived ahead of the 2024 season, because RBNY weren’t supposed to be anything close to contenders.
Yet Forsberg was almost the “one last piece” anyway. The Red Bulls played at something close to a 60-point pace when he was healthy and available, and won two league games in three months when he was out injured this summer. Then Forsberg returned in late September and they upset 2023 champs Columbus Crew in Round One, survived New York City FC in the Conference Semifinals, and snuck past Orlando City SC in the Eastern Conference Final to reach MLS Cup for the first time in 16 years.
It’s not like Forsberg was utterly dominant, but he has a special knack for taking moments of possibility and expanding them into an attacking avalanche. Getting multiple teammates moving at pace into the attacking third is hard-wired into his DNA, and those are the moments (well, those and set pieces) that brought the Red Bulls to Carson this past weekend.
He is living proof of how valuable top-end talent is in the postseason.
This is more of the same from one of MLS’s very best developmental teams. Five local products – the Long Island-bred Nealis brothers along the backline, and the New Jersey trio of John Tolkin, Peter Stroud and Daniel Edelman in midfield, all of whom came through the academy – started in MLS Cup.
Ronald Donkor and Wiki Carmona, both NYRB II projects, gave meaningful minutes throughout the year. Cam Harper, a reclamation project several years in the making, became the starting right wingback. Julian Hall, a 16-year-old forward, looks like a guy who could play 2,000 all-competition minutes next year.
It’s no coincidence that the three teams most consistently making the playoffs (RBNY, NYCFC and Seattle) are three teams absolutely committed to squeezing value out of their developmental pipelines. Doing so keeps the floor high.
- Emil Forsberg (AM): They’ll have to manage his minutes and keep him healthy as he hits his mid-30s, but the dude’s clearly still a special player.
- Daniel Edelman (DM): Got to give him all the credit in the world for fighting his way back into a starting job. Still needs to get better on the half-turn.
- John Tolkin (LB/LWB): I’m genuinely surprised he hasn’t been sold already. But if he’s still here next year, he’s still one of the league's best left backs.
- Felipe Carballo (DM): Was fine in the regular season and then was excellent in the playoffs. Brings a bit of misdirection to that midfield mix.
- Sean Nealis (CB): Plays damn near every minute, wins everything in the air, is better defending in the channels than people realize, and understands his limitations in distribution.
You could add Harper above; he clearly fits what Schwarz wants in a lot of ways.
They have an option on goalkeeper Carlos Coronel, who spent most of the season being very bad, was unbelievably good through four playoff games, and then was a disaster on Joseph Paintsil’s opener in MLS Cup. I… would understand if they felt it was time to move in a different direction. That’s one to watch.
The rest of this team should be back, and much of it should be better given where they are on the age curve. You know what that brings us back to, right? Like swallows to Capistrano… They need that one last piece, and RB Global have to get it for them.
It’s the eternal question, the same refrain for the past decade, and it will never die until RB Global actually do it. This winter, that would mean buying out the remaining two years of Dante Vanzeir’s DP contract and bringing in another Forsberg-level piece.
If they do that, we could be talking about RBNY finally getting a cup of some sort next year (and that's beyond the reportedly imminent signing of ex-Bayern forward Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting). If not… well, Red Bull fans will always have fond memories of this Cinderella run.