Jurgen Klopp had a simple message for the young members of the Red Bull New York organization looking on as he addressed the crowd during the opening ceremony of the club’s new training facility in Morristown, N.J.
“Use it the right way,” said Klopp, Red Bull’s head of global soccer.
The new state-of-the-art RWJBarnabas Health Red Bulls Performance Center is a nine-figure investment by Red Bull GmbH, the parent company of Red Bull New York, and it was clear Wednesday that they expect to see returns in terms of the future talent the club churns out.
“I think we all have eyes and can see how impressive this building is, how big the statement is,” Klopp said. “With a new training center comes responsibility, of course. Use it properly, use it the right way. … We want you to be ambitious. We want you to be full of greed, in a good way. We want you to be really competitive. Make sure you and all your teammates and all the other kids who are training here, and all the other boys and girls who will train here in the future, make sure you use it properly.
“Because, now this is a place of no excuses. Everything is provided, no pressure. A little bit, but everything is here.”
The new facility boasts eight fields — five of which are heated and one turf — hydrotherapy areas, a 4,635-square-foot pro gym, a full-service kitchen area and a teaching kitchen for team chefs and nutritionists to provide meal prep education for academy and pro players.
The building also includes dedicated academy spaces that feature educational classrooms, study spaces and coaching clinics, along with advanced training technology that will help the club’s analytics and player development.
All of that to say, the feeling inside the facility is that the tools are now there to develop top talent, and Red Bull New York head of sport Julian de Guzman agreed “totally” that the pressure was now on for the club to win as well.
“We want to be competitive, and we want to win trophies, and that’s going to always be a big part of our philosophy at Red Bull,” de Guzman told The Post after the ceremony. “But then you also want to have that with young players, and that’s never an easy thing to pull off. But to help sustain that pressure, you want to have the right settings for the players to develop and achieve high-level performance.”
Plenty of talk Wednesday centered on the future, which included that of the sport. The new 80-acre facility would certainly fit into that category as the World Cup quickly approaches this summer.
The Red Bulls’ training facility will be used as the home base for the Brazilian national team during their run in the tournament, which Klopp said didn’t take any convincing once Brazil manager Carlo Ancelotti saw it.
And MLS commissioner Don Garber called the grounds part of the “foundations” that the league is “building” for American soccer.
“Whether it be development centers or whether it be stadiums, it really is about the generation of players that we’re trying to provide an opportunity to,” he said.
And speaking of pressure, the commissioner wasn’t shy about adding his own.
“This is for you and we expect you to win trophies, to represent our country and your countries if you’re not from Major League Soccer,” he said. “Then when you leave the game, either sitting on this stage [working in MLS] or to be sitting here as legends of the game.”
