Perhaps Julian de Guzman was always destined to pick Michael Bradley as his first coaching hire as Red Bull New York’s head of sport.
He’d faced off against the longtime MLS and US men’s national team star in midfield battles during their playing days, and watched how Bradley anchored the transformation of his hometown club Toronto FC from league punchline to perennial trophy hunters.
The firsthand observations he gleaned from Bradley’s half-year in charge of RBNY’s second team, which the New Jersey native led to last year’s MLS NEXT Pro championship in November, may have been the most powerful data points.
Again and again, de Guzman explained at Bradley’s introductory press conference on Monday afternoon, he noticed his colleague was one of the first ones into the office in the mornings, and the last to leave at night – not just crunching video or drawing up practice notes, but even fitting in workouts of his own on the training pitch.
“You watch that, you say, 'OK, this is a real dude. This is a real individual that's serious about his work,'” recalled de Guzman. “I’d leave the office around 7 o'clock at night, and then he's the one doing box-to-box runs. At first, I thought it was one of our players. But you realize this guy is here to win, and this is not just a one-off.
“Everyone feeds off of that, from players, from staff, and that creates the culture. And this is the person you want every day in your building.”
Built for the job
This is the first top-flight head coaching gig for Bradley, who turned 38 last July. But that phrase underrates the extent to which his whole life has been leading up to this moment.
As the wunderkind son of MLS and USMNT coaching legend Bob Bradley – at age 16, Michael was RBNY’s youngest-ever signing in 2004, way back when they were known as the MetroStars – and a field general for most of his 20 years as a do-everything center mid in some of Europe’s biggest leagues before joining TFC, he’s long been burnishing the leadership traits that powered him to a post of this magnitude faster than even he expected.
It’s not only de Guzman who sees something special in the younger Bradley, but also the likes of Jürgen Klopp and Mario Gómez, the German icons steering Red Bull’s global network.
“When I came to the club six months ago, it was in the back of my mind for sure. It was something that I hoped to, with time, earn, work for,” Bradley explained.
“I didn't think it was something that was going to come necessarily this quickly. But when the season ended, when Julian and I were able to speak, when I was able to have discussions with Jürgen and Mario, and just understand even more what this club wants to be going forward, how in the world could you say no?
“Certain things come, and you've got to go for it.”
Red Bull revamp
Over nearly an hour’s worth of questions from area reporters, the young duo overhauling both RBNY’s roster and tactical philosophy also dropped a few hints as to how they plan to reinvent a team that fell well short of expectations in 2025, letting a North American pro sports-record streak of 15 straight Audi MLS Cup Playoffs berths die in the wake of a sterling run to the 2024 MLS Cup final.
“We're going to have a team that's younger, for sure,” said Bradley. “We, especially in certain spots, feel like we've needed to be faster, more dynamic, in some cases, more athletic. But then how do we combine that with players that also have football qualities, that can, with their skill, with their quality, with their intelligence, understand how to play, how to move, how to find spaces?”
As those words, and RBNY’s early litany of winter ins and outs, would suggest, the club’s conception of ‘energy drink soccer’ is evolving.
“The foundations of Red Bull football that have always been there in terms of pressing and intensity and making a game that's fast, trying to put the game on our terms in every moment,” Bradley noted. “We're also going to try to combine that with really good ideas when we have the ball.
“I think the better and more aggressively you press, the more you have the ball, and the better that you can be with the ball, the more passes you can connect, the more ideas, the more ways you have to create chances, the better you'll counterpress, and the more aggressive you can be against the ball.”
Maximum ambition
As is so often the case around MLS at this time of year, optimism is sky-high on the red side of Gotham. Even de Guzman had to catch himself from setting unreasonably lofty expectations for the new gaffer.
“I mean, you talk to this guy on any given basis, you're sensing titles – sorry, I’ll rephrase that,” the former Canadian international said of Bradley. “I know we are on the right track, appointing him.”
Plenty of work remains for both men. Seven players have departed RBNY while three have arrived, and it seems more turnover is likely, though the foundation of a player pathway based on their prolific academy remains in place.
“When you look at the type of football that we will play going into the era of Michael Bradley and the future of New York Red Bulls,” said de Guzman, “we need change. It's as simple as that.”
Through all his globetrotting, North Jersey remained “home” for Bradley, and he’s kept an eye on his local club over the decades. He yearns to, eventually, deliver the MLS Cup title that’s eluded their long-suffering faithful across three decades.
“I know the history of this club,” he said. “When we think about the football that we want, when we think about the team that we want to build, it's not just with the idea of, ‘how can we scrape back into the playoffs?’
“Yes, the playoffs are the first goal. We know that. But it is still with the idea of how we can put a team on the field that can compete and play football week in and week out, that when people come into the stadium, they're proud of, they're excited about, and that with the right work and with the right time, we have a group of players in a team that can really do something.”
