Sitting near the top of the Eastern Conference standings with 16 points from their first 9 games, the New York Red Bulls are just doing fine with only one of their Designated Player slots in use (that’d be reigning MLS Golden Boot holder and freshly-crowned Week 10 MLS Player of the Week Bradley Wright-Phillips).
But that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from connecting the club to potential new arrivals from overseas.
Ghanaian-German midfielder Kevin-Prince Boateng has been very publicly cast out from his German club Schalke 04 as their season winds to an unhappy close, and media reports last week claimed that the Red Bulls had placed a discovery claim on the Ghana international and former AC Milan man.
But RBNY coach Jesse Marsch – while he hasn’t explicitly denied the discovery reports – continues to dismiss the links to Boateng, telling MLSsoccer.com’s Eric Giacometti “that isn’t happening,” and that “I'm focused on the group we have” over the weekend.
Marsch repeated that message after Sunday’s 2-1 defeat of New York City FC.
“Not much has changed,” he told BigAppleSoccer.com. “I'll just say that nothing has changed from what I said before.”
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RBNY have also been linked to another, albeit much younger and less well-known, Ghanaian talent, striker Abdul Aziz Yusif. Reports out of Ghana claimed that the club was set to bring the 23-year-old in on a three-week trial, but Marsch pumped the brakes on all that, too.
“The kid Aziz, we know of, but we're familiar with him and we've looked at him,” Marsch told BigAppleSoccer.com on Monday, “but there's but no discussion about him coming here yet.”
New York Post reporter Brian Lewis posited a similar conclusion on Twitter:
