7:35 am Sep. 1, 2010
Unlike every other major sports team in the New York area, the Red Bulls have two thresholds to reach. One is a league championship. The other is more abstract, and arguably tougher to achieve: a collective recognition that the team and its fan base are here to stay.
The team has made unignorable progress toward both goals this year. An underachiever on the field since the advent of the self-consciously named Major League Soccer in 1993, the Red Bulls are among the top teams this season, and should contend for a title. And whether measured by attendance in the stands of its new, soccer-only stadium in Harrison, N.J. or unironic attention in the sports media, the franchise is starting to feel permanent.
Bolstered by the recent signing of former Arsenal and Barcelona striker Thierry Henry, the team had a breakthrough on Aug. 21, winning a game (4-1) against the Toronto club in Toronto. It’s something no opponent had done in more than a year.
New York dictated the flow of much of the game, with Rafael Marquez scoring a magnificent goal. (Marquez is one of two recently imported “designated players,” which means the Red Bulls were allowed to offer him whatever they chose and only a small fraction of the salary would count against the team's league-mandated salary cap.)
Most importantly, the win gave New York a seven-point advantage over Toronto for second place in the Eastern Conference—a slot that guarantees a playoff berth. (The top two teams in each conference make the playoffs, along with the next four teams with the best record, regardless of conference.)
Returning home on Aug. 28, the Red Bulls dominated again, beating San Jose 2-0 in front of 21,859 fans. Thierry Henry scored his first goal, and perhaps more encouragingly, Dane Richards scored his first goal of the season. Richards, a Jamaican national, has always displayed superior pace to go alongside often mystifying decision-making. But that, too, appears to be changing.
“I do see a sea change, and I think clearly it comes from bringing in players like Henry and Marquez,” said Jack Bell, who writes a soccer column for The New York Times, and has covered soccer in the area dating back to the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos of the 1970s. “[Arsenal coach] Arsene Wagner said that to become a better player, you have to play with better players. Playing with Marquez and Henry, it raises everybody’s game. Saturday night, it looked like a precursor of things to come. They controlled the ball, they controlled the game.”
But the Red Bulls are more than just the sum of Henry, Marquez and their third D.P., former Aston Villa striker Juan Pablo Angel. Rookie defender Tim Ream has played every minute this season, and rarely makes a mistake. Midfielder Tony Tchani has often controlled the flow of the game. And Joel Lindpere, deployed both in the midfield and lately as a winger, is one of the most gifted passers in the league.
For Paul Andersen, one of the 267 members of New York’s Empire Supporters Club (who can be found cheering in Section 101 at every home game), the game in Toronto was essentially a bar mitzvah ceremony for the Red Bulls.
“Honestly, I believe it would be better to equate the beginning of the season as the birth, and the Toronto game as the maturation into adulthood,” Andersen said in an email.
The improved quality of the play, along with the more dignified venue after years of playing in Giants Stadium, has driven attendance numbers far beyond last season’s figures. For the season, Red Bull Arena has averaged 17,828 fans in a venue that holds 25,189. But there have been three distinct periods to that figure.
Curiosity over the new stadium, a spectacular soccer-specific creation, produced an opening-night crowd of 24,572. What followed appeared to be predicated on an assumption that New York would be roughly the same caliber of team that won just five times in the entirety of 2009. Over the next five matches, the Red Bulls averaged home attendance of 14,117, just a bit beyond 2009’s average of 12,490 in Giants Stadium.
And since June 5, the Red Bulls are averaging home attendance of 20,189 in five home dates, not including 20,312 who came out to see a non-league “friendly” against Tottenham Hotspur and the 23,228 who braved the rain to see New York beat Manchester City.
The spike in attendance comes as no surprise to Andersen.
He said the Red Bulls have “primed themselves for a perfect storm for franchise awareness by planning the stadium opening, new big names, and attractive style of play around the inevitable spike in American interest in soccer surrounding the World Cup.”
The question for the Red Bulls and for the entire league, finally, is whether this is more than a spike.
"I don’t know what the threshold is,” Bell said. “I don’t think there is one tipping point other than the U.S. winning the World Cup. And that might never happen. But it’s building, and it’s building—and it’s inexorable. This isn’t top-down, the way it was with the NASL. This is bubbling from the bottom up.”
Asked about the significance of this year’s attendance patterns, he said, “Why do they come out for certain games, and not for other games? Because New York soccer fans are intelligent enough to know when teams are putting out crap, and when they’re putting out quality. For the first time, they look like a soccer team.”
