Jurgen Klopp walked into the New York Red Bulls' new performance center and felt something he hasn't felt since leaving Liverpool. "Maybe I would've gone back," he said. The man who spent over a year insisting he had zero interest in returning to management came within a good weather forecast of reconsidering.
That's the best endorsement a facility can get.
The RWJ Barnabas Health Red Bulls Performance Center opened in Morristown, New Jersey, this week — a decade in the making and arguably the most complete club infrastructure in MLS. Eight full-size pitches. High-end recovery rooms. Private player spaces. A test kitchen where players get cooking lessons. Classrooms for academy kids. And come this summer, Carlo Ancelotti's Brazil side will use part of it as their World Cup base camp — without Klopp needing to make a single sales call.
"I didn't have to convince anybody," Klopp said. "Carlo, definitely not. He knows what's good when he sees it. He saw it."
Bradley and the youth project taking shape
The facility isn't just a trophy building. It houses the first team, an MLS Next Pro side, and a full academy under the same roof — the proximity is the point. Under new head coach Michael Bradley and sporting director Julian de Guzman, the Red Bulls have leaned hard into youth this season. 18-year-old Julian Hall already has five goals and two assists. 17-year-old Adri Mehmeti — in his first professional season — has one goal and two assists. These aren't academy kids being showcased. They're producing.
Klopp was characteristically honest about where the project stands. "From time to time, we will get smashed. That happened already. But in other moments, we will be surprisingly good because the boys are extremely talented." That's not spin — it's an accurate description of what building around teenagers looks like in practice. The Red Bulls' results will be volatile. Their odds on any given week should reflect that.
The multiclub model has also shifted in tone, at least in how Klopp frames it. The old perception — New York as a feeder club shipping talent to Salzburg and Leipzig — is being actively replaced by a different pitch: that the Red Bulls are a destination, not a stepping stone. Whether young players buy that argument depends entirely on what happens on the pitch over the next two or three seasons.
What the World Cup presence actually means
Brazil training here this summer is legitimately significant for the club's profile, even if the Red Bulls retain their own locker rooms, training pitches, and day-to-day operations throughout the tournament. The arrangement is less about disruption and more about visibility — having Ancelotti's squad on site puts a spotlight on what the Red Bulls have built in a way that no press release could manage.
Bradley's fingerprints are already on the culture inside the building. His coaching staff chose to display Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" passage at the entrance to the first-team locker room — every player reads it every time they walk in. Small detail. Not an accident.
Klopp kept returning to one idea throughout the ribbon cutting: the building means nothing without the people inside it. "We have to make sure we use that in the right way." For a club that has spent a decade constructing the infrastructure to compete, that's now the actual test.
