When the New York Red Bulls professional soccer team heads to practice at its new state-of-the-art training facility in Morris Township, New Jersey, the players will be doing so alongside a bunch of 9-year-olds.
The $100 million facility, which officially opened in April, was designed as much for the pros on the Major League Soccer squad as for the roughly 6,000 kids that take part in the club’s academy and soccer camp programs every year.
“The objective was always to have a space that we could grow into—not just good for the moment, but to think about the future,” says Marc de Grandpré, president and general manager of Red Bull New York. “Our success on the first team is going to be predicated on our success in the academy, ultimately.”
It’s an unusual investment for an American soccer team. The facility, officially named the RWJBarnabas Health Red Bulls Performance Center, spans across 80 acres and features eight full-size soccer pitches—including a 350-seat match field—as well as gyms, physiotherapy spaces, classrooms, and a team-building dining hall.
The facility is now the main practice area for the Red Bulls and the second-division Red Bull New York II, but it’s also the training ground for the organization’s youth development academy, with teams ranging from under-10s to under-18s. Rather than separate the younger athletes from the pros, the organization decided to bring them all under one roof as a form of encouragement and development for the junior players.
“When you’re in an academy meeting room, you’re looking out the window and you can see the first team train,” says Julian de Guzman, Red Bull New York’s head of sport. “That’s where you want to be one day. And that’s something to be reminded of every day.”
De Guzman says this is the norm in Europe, where the academy arms of professional soccer teams are valuable sources of new talent. Red Bull, which also owns several other professional sports teams, including soccer teams in Leipzig, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria, is now bringing this approach to the U.S.
To do so, they’ve worked with the global architecture and design firm Gensler, which has a deep portfolio in sports training facility design. Previous projects include training facilities for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and the professional basketball teams in Phoenix. Kristin Byrd, the lead designer on the Red Bulls facility, says the team came with high expectations for how the space could function and match the caliber of facilities used by its other teams, particularly its European soccer teams.
One primary demand was that players be as connected to the field as possible. That translated into a design ethos of extreme transparency throughout the facility, with its 4,600-square-foot gym that looks out of a two-story wall of windows onto the main training pitch, and everything from the dining hall to the hydrotherapy pool offering clear sight lines to the field. “The flow and the adjacencies are different from many training facilities that we’ve done previously,” Byrd says.
Views to the training fields are all about keeping players connected to the game, and to the team. “If a player is injured, more often than not, they’re in the back room working out or getting worked on,” de Grandpré says. “It was important to have all that be visible so that someone who is not training with the first team can be rehabbing and still watching the team play, and feel like he’s part of the squad and not removed somewhere else.”
The spaces and connectivity within the facility are also guided by Red Bull’s deep expertise in sports medicine and exercise science, working not just with its European soccer teams but also the extreme athletes it supports, like mountain bikers and skydivers, through its Athlete Performance Centers.
Everything at Red Bull New York’s facility—from its dual-depth pool and its outdoor running hill to its wellness lab—serves a purpose, according to de Grandpré. “It’s not just there because there’s some new trend that we need to have X or Y technology,” he says. “Everything was designed with use in mind and the intent of making our players better.”
That also includes some unique elements, according to Byrd. One is an outdoor recovery courtyard, accessible through the players’ physical therapy area. “It’s sort of a walled garden, a relaxation area, an area for the players to get outside where they can have that green space, have that natural light, but not be on display to anybody else that would be visiting the facility. Because the only way to really enter it is attached through that recovery zone,” she says.
“It’s something we’ve explored in a lot of our other projects, but for whatever reason, it’s gotten too value-managed out. Or maybe the other teams didn’t see it as a value. Having that access to green space and natural light is a huge element for healing,” she adds.
The facility also includes a stand-alone building intended for use by visiting teams, with their own private training areas, gym, and locker room. The Brazilian national team plans to use the facility as its home base ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
Recognizing that it won’t just be players using the facility, the design also accounts for another major user group: the parents and family members of the youth academy players. In addition to covered spectator seating on the main pitch, the facility also includes an indoor area for families to get out of hot or cold weather or to grab a snack. “They really wanted to make sure that the parental community was taken care of,” Byrd says.
It’s an extension of the facility’s focus on building up the community of the team, from its youngest members on up. “What we want to do here is enable all these young kids to fall in love with the game,” de Grandpré says. “We all know that 99% of them will not end up pro, but we want them to enjoy the game. And for that 1%, we want to give them the best chance to end up playing with the first team.”