MARIETTA, Ga. — When the New York Red Bulls and Atlanta United meet in the Eastern Conference Championship to determine who will play for MLS Cup, it’ll be a matchup of two teams that have set the bar high, both on and off the field.
Both clubs performed with remarkable success this season in the league. Atlanta tied the points record set by Toronto FC last year, only to be bested by the Red Bulls, who set a new points record en route to winning the Supporters’ Shield for the third time in six years.
Off the field, Atlanta is a club helping to change MLS through its strategy in the transfer market — spending big money for younger players who can return profits on the field and in the account balance. New York’s goal is the same, but the means by which they get to those profits are different, and something Atlanta United manager Tata Martino greatly admires.
Rather than buy it up for big money, the Red Bulls are producing their own talents through its prodigious academy that is well-refined after years of development. Illustrating its effectiveness are central midfielders Tyler Adams and Sean Davis.
Both players developed through the Red Bulls Academy, Adams will likely be sold in the near future for substantial sums, and perhaps most importantly, both players are at the heart of the team’s tenacious pressing style.
“I think Red Bulls are the team in the league that are the best at using their academy,” Martino told media through a translator last week. “That is the long term goal [for Atlanta]. It's not just that those guys are from the academy, but it's that they are able to step into the first team so seamlessly.”
Martino has long talked about Atlanta’s Academy system and its USL team, Atlanta United 2, as a means to not just cultivate talent, but to mold players to be ready to play in a style that's employed by the first team. In New York’s case, that style is predicated on aggression and tenacity that has fueled Red Bulls’ high press under Jesse Marsch and now Chris Armas.
“You can see in those guys that Red Bulls have done a really good job of developing their academy kids and giving those young guys a lot of minutes,” Julian Gressel said. “You can see that on the field how much pride they have — how much pride they have to wear that shirt gives them an extra bit of fight, of intensity, of willingness — because they've been with the club so long and they've gone through their youth system.”
As far as emulating another team’s model, Gressel noted that clubs can’t make a carbon copy of Red Bulls system, which itself has developed and refined over many years.
“I hope that Atlanta can go the same path to a certain extent. Obviously you can't be exactly the same,” Gressel said. “We're two years old. Red Bulls are much older, so it's still obviously in the very early stages [here]. We're very early in building our own identity.”
