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a young coach from ohio, a tiny club in new york, and the future of soccer in america

New York City is an untapped market. You don’t hear that phrase too often–the media capital of the world is hardly off the radar. For soccer, though, it rings true. MLS is based here, the president of USSF teaches school here, and though countless kids are playing the global game from the asphalt lots and turf fields of Manhattan to the dusty parks of the outer boroughs, when it comes to developing the city’s youth players, the ball has been dropped, kicked to the suburbs and surrounding states.

That’s not a radical statement, it’s pretty obvious. Building a serious academy singularly focused on soccer development here would help… that’s also obvious but never really attempted. Which means Manhattan Kickers FC represents radical change. Curt Rosenthal, 35, the club’s president and director and a relative newcomer to the city, is breathing new life not just into the game but into the system here, proving in just the few short years since he founded the club that with serious soccer, success need not wait long.

Jeff Carlisle’s five-part series on American youth development lays out the present framework on the national level. After the jump, TIAS goes in-depth with Rosenthal on his story, his club, and what could be the future of cutting edge American youth clubs competing on the world stage. No baggage; just get on board.

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Curt Rosenthal (right) with his brother Evan, who coaches at manhattan kickers fc, at the CBF national training center in Brazil with Flamengo’s first team training behind.

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Rosenthal: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and played youth soccer there for a club called the East-West Soccer Club, which was one of the original kind-of-big professionally run soccer clubs that started to pop up around the country in the eighties. I had a great experience with that club—one of my fellow club members was Brad Friedel; he was a few years older than me, but it was a high level club and it really gave me a solid foundation as a player. The club traveled to Europe back then, Dallas Cup tournaments, all those kinds of things. It was on par with some of the older clubs that you hear about today: La Jolla Nomads or Scott Gallagher, but East-West no longer exists. But again, I had a great experience, did ODP and high school soccer like anyone else would have.

From that I played at Miami of Ohio, which played a pretty strong schedule—locally University of Akron, Ohio State, and then other big soccer schools like Indiana and Wake Forest. It’s division one, a good program, but because of the gender equity campaign the program was eliminated a number of years ago and turned to a women’s program. Our coach is the women’s coach now. I recently went to visit my old coach, who had me speak with the team before the match a year or so ago when they came to New York to play Columbia; it was a really good time. But I got to play at Miami all four years. My senior year we were pretty good—we beat Wisconsin-Madison early in the season, who won the national championship that year and in that game we had one guy break his leg and then in consecutive games we had four starters go down, including me, with season-ending injuries—I tore my ACL. (Curt is an attacking midfielder, sometimes on the left side). So that happened, I had the surgery, and worked hard to come back. And soon after graduating I went over to the Netherlands.

I was set up in Holland by a youth coach that I had, named Joe Raduka, a well-known coach in Cleveland. He played for Red Star Belgrade back when they were really good. Then he came to the US and played in the NASL with a Dutch guy named Dwight Lodeweges, who played for the Dutch national team and is now the coach of PSV Eindhoven. Joe had been guiding me in my youth career, telling me, “You know you should go over to Europe.” But at the time I thought college was what I wanted to do, and my parents thought it was a good idea—looking back it was a good idea. But after school Joe set me up to go over to the Netherlands and have some trials.

I was over there for a few months, played on the reserve teams of two different clubs: Go Ahead Eagles and FC Zwolle. It was great. It was an amazing experience. Dwight met me at the airport when I first arrived and took me around a couple days, he was really a great guy for what he did, he hung out with me a bit and made a lot of introductions and would check in with me now and then, but mostly I stayed all by myself. They gave me an apartment, but I got kind of lonely. There was a youth house I moved into after a while where some of the younger players stay. There was a mom, dad, it was right next to the field, the mom would put out breakfast every morning.

TIAS: Nice set up

It was awesome, but what young players don’t understand is the emotional side of it is hard. Nothing else can matter to you except soccer. And that is how I always was, but I knew there were other things pulling at me. I knew it was a dream of mine, but I also knew the reality. I think I did well from a playing standpoint, but it was going to be a hard road to really make it. I met with club management after a while, along with Dwight, who was acting as my quasi-agent. He was looking after me mainly. They said that they have this rule where if you are from outside the European Union they have to pay you the most of anyone on the team. So they basically are only looking for the best. On the team at Go Ahead Eagles was a Nigerian, Kingsley Obiekwu, who was on the Olympic team that won the gold in Atlanta in 1996. So he was an example of my competition as foreign players. That level. On the world scale he is nothing notable, but it gives you amazing perspective when you watch Messi or Ronaldo—they are out of this world. But a guy like him and another international, Serge Cleshenco, from Moldova—he was a great player who I remember played so hard.  I read years later that he scored against Italy in a World Cup qualifier, then I remember seeing him on TV too, playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv against Chelsea in the Champions League. Great player, but again a no name, but when you play against someone like them as an American kid at that time without a pedigree—I played for good programs, but was also going to school and studying and partying and living an American life. Then you show up with these guys from countries where they don’t necessarily have the background I had and they have to do this to survive. They have to. And this was a time when American players were not really going over to Europe as much as they are today. But those were the kind of players I had to compete against and beat out. The Dutch players were good, but they weren’t all amazing by any means. These were good teams, but this wasn’t AJAX or PSV. I wasn’t blown away—but most of them were definitely very good, smart, technical players. I felt I could hold my own with them.

manhattan kickers fc training along the east river, across from brooklyn.

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How surprising was that?

I didn’t have too many worries at the time. I was always comfortable on the ball, I’d played internationally before—in Holland actually as a youth player, in Germany, in France. I knew what was out there. But it’s a big jump when you see a foreign international versus a domestic player. Think about how small Holland is and then how many people are playing professional soccer. They can’t all be amazing. They have one of the best soccer cultures, and as youth players they are learning the game the right way, but it’s not like Brazil where you have 100 million people (the male population) who are all playing soccer, so the guys who make it to the top are something special. But everyone knows the Dutch still produce unbelievable players. It’s a great country, which is why Joe wanted me to go there. He also felt it was a more welcoming place for a guy like me—they speak English, culturally they are nice and open, they’re westernized, and it wasn’t like if you went to Spain where they might try to break your leg right away. At least that was what Joe told me at the time. So Holland was a good entry point—a lot of great players have gone through there and onto bigger leagues in Europe: two of the best Ronaldo and Romario.

That’s a good point I don’t think is heard enough. So many people tend to question these kids going to the Netherlands and wonder if it is worth heading into a small country onto some unknown (to Americans) team.

It’s like an education. They really are educators in the game. More Americans are going over there. Beasley and Bradley got there starts there. And other top internationals go over there, so the competition is great.

You were over there only a few months—how did that pan out?

I had the option to stay on an amateur contract and at my own expense. They said I could stay and train with the reserve team and see where it would take me, without a contract. And that’s where that breaking point was for me. Maybe I should have said, “Ok, I’ll try. I’ll get a job and give it a go.” A lot of players do just that. That’s when MLS was just starting and I was thinking I could go back and try that, although it was not something I was overly excited about. So I came back to the U.S. and headed to Bradenton, Florida, where they were looking at people for MLS. It was at IMG where the USSF residency program is—I was down there for a few weeks and Kai Haaskivi (Finnish Player who spent time with Cleveland Force of MISL) said, “You could stay for another month and work out and go to the combine, but there is no promise you’re going to be selected by a team.” He wanted me to stay and play against the bigger-named players coming down to see how I did—some international players and guys I played against in college who were well known names. First I was excited for the challenge, but soon I was questioning it and I petered out. It was just hard to find a place and I was not as enthusiastic to work as hard to play in a new league in the US as I was in Europe. So now when I look at stories like Jay DeMerit, I think that guy is amazing because that is what it takes to make it.

Playing on what were basically pub teams in England.

Doing whatever it takes. You have to fight and stay with it. It brings up a whole other topic, but I think more of those types of guys are who we should be looking at for the national team. Not only guys who are brought up through the youth national teams. I see how these players can often get pampered by our system and think they’ve done something because they were good at fourteen or fifteen. I think it’s a mentality thing—the guys like DeMerit are the ones who will find a way to win. Maybe he is not the most technical player, but I was at the Argentina friendly from last summer and on one play in particular I remember thinking he was a player who could match their intensity. I know we have other guys who can step it up—I’m just trying to relate my story to players now—it’s guys like Jay, and I am not trying to focus on him but rather the idea of what he has done and his perseverance, who make it somehow, anyhow, and guys like me who don’t.

Besides just the skill level there are roadblocks. Personal drive is one. A support system is also another one, which affects your drive. I was never led to believe by my parents that I could be a professional athlete—it just wasn’t something you did. What was your family support like during this time?

Beyond my own limitations as a player, I had family pressures, which I think is a very American issue, especially in soccer. I had parents who were nothing but supportive of me in soccer when I was a kid—my dad went to every game, drove all over the place, sent me to all-boys private school. Anything I wanted they were always great, but when I wanted to do this—pro soccer in Europe—Dad had a hard time dealing with it. He wanted me to get a business job, go to law school. As an American who never played, didn’t follow the game, which was not his fault because there was really no way to follow it, he didn’t understand what I was trying to do. He didn’t see it as being real or achievable. My first reserve game in Holland I scored a goal against Feyenoord, and when I called home to tell him about it, he wasn’t happy or anything; he didn’t know what that meant. I called Joe, the coach who helped me get over there, and he was like, “Oh, that’s great. That is one of the best clubs.” Which was something even I did not know at the time. With my family it was like, “Oh, nice, when are you going to come home? When is this over?”

Is it out of your system yet?

Yeah. I’m not blaming them. It was hard. It shows though what an American player has to go through coming from this background and culture. Maybe the African players have entire villages rooting them on and living the dream through them.

futsal is a major component to MKFC winter training.

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There is so much more motivation and direction there.

All that support. Point being, when I got back it was finally a relief in that area. I was just looking forward to getting a job. I moved to Chicago around 1998 and worked in finance for two years. My dad was happy. I was wearing a suit every day, although after a while I just thought, no way.

So my best friend and I, who I was living with at the time, we decided to go to Africa. We both enjoyed writing—I was an English Lit major in college and now actually have a MFA in writing, and he had gone to Northwestern and studied theater and was a musician. We figured we’d go to South Africa, write a screenplay—this is back when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck just blew up with Good Will Hunting—we were young and inspired. We saved some money and took off for six-seven months. I did some training and playing soccer down there too with a club in Cape Town. It was the best time ever.

I always wish I took some real time for those life lessons and never-have-the-chance-again trips. And like you…

Parental pressures.

You need to get a job, have goals.

My dad was not happy. At some point it was a problem. We had some issues. But there was no chance I wasn’t doing it. And looking back it may have been a rebellion against how it went down with soccer. He’s not a bad person. I love him, still talk to him and my mom all the time, but parents want something for you because of who they are and where they come from. As you get older you realize that. Africa and that unmade screenplay still stand as great exercises and learning experiences, getting yourself out there.

So we’re coming up to New York now—did you move here thinking you’d be a writer?

Yep. And I’ve been here since. I met my wife a week after I arrived. I got a writing job with the NBA, putting together scripts for live productions for things like when they would celebrate the 50 Greatest Players at halftime or something.

And at some point I’m guessing soccer was just too much inside you still to avoid it here in the city?

Yeah, I just decided I should coach soccer. I’ve always done it. I started coaching when I was 14. My brother Evan, who lives here and coaches at Manhattan Kickers with me, he was too young when I was on the East-West U14 team to play for the club. At the time serious youth soccer did not reach down into the lower age groups. So I asked the club directors if they would let me start what we called a ‘developmental’ team for younger kids and work with them. They gave me the resources and I put together a team with all the best guys my brother was playing against in his community league. I coached at soccer camps every summer growing up—I just always loved coaching and working with kids.

When I got to New York I knew a guy who was the headmaster of a school named Collegiate; he used to be the Director of the Upper School where I went to high school. He introduced me to someone who asked me to work with a local youth team.

So I did that. And from there it’s just sort of built to five years ago when I went to a club called Manhattan Kickers, which was functioning similar to a recreational organization, and I decided to develop a premier arm of that, which sort of splintered off and we became our own organization. And that is what is now Manhattan Kickers FC. It’s five years old. We have the U14 team which was the original team I started with when they were eight or nine and now all the teams under that down to five and six year olds.

And you’ll build it out year after year into the older age groups.

Exactly, but the problem we are facing is there are now a lot of barriers as the kids get older. There are a lot of competing forces at work and it can get confusing for families that do not have guidance. With the US Development Academy, for instance, my top five or six players from that first team all left to play for Development Academy programs. Our goalie is in the national pool, the U15 player pool, but he left us too.

Guilherme “Val” Pessoa Guimarães Santos—a futsal training specialist from Brazil—works with the MKFC players.

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He’s the kid who you guys sent to the Friedel academy before they closed their doors to out-of-state players?

Yeah. I couldn’t believe it when I heard. It was a good thing Brad was trying to do, but it was such a big expensive operation. And so when he came back to New York the Red Bulls jumped on him right away. And they offered their whole program for free, because they have this energy drink paying for it. It’s hard to compete with that. They just grabbed another one of our players from that team a few weeks ago. Basically the system is beginning to be set up that if your club is not part of the Development Academy certain types of parents have been convinced their kid will not have a future as a soccer player with you, which is the strangest thing when you think about it, but now you have professional clubs like Red Bulls chasing after players from other clubs because they do not have their own youth development system. Our problem is we don’t have a team that is old enough yet to compete in the Development Academy age groups, so we could find ourselves on this track where we are actually developing all these great young players and just when they are getting old enough to begin the next phase of their soccer education, they might get lured by the hope that clubs in this new program will do something for them that we cannot.

You’ll apply when the time comes then, without question?

We applied already. I’ve been talking to the guys at US Soccer and from what they tell me, I think they are taking our application very seriously. I think they like what we are doing.

Certainly your kids getting scooped up by Red Bulls is a good sign in that regard.

Yeah, and my argument is, you want Red Bull to develop their own players, and us develop ours—which means more good players for US Soccer, more so than if all a club like Red Bulls are doing is just collecting players from other clubs.

And a New York City club included in the Academy seems like a no-brainer.

They need it. They really need it. How can you not have an Academy in the biggest city in the country? We want to be that Academy. We are the only club in the city that really has what the Academy is looking for, is of the level as far as quality players and serious coaches. With developing young players from the ground up, I feel we are the best. I really feel that way.

In New York?

On the entire east coast. Granted we don’t win everything and we are still a new club, but in terms of technical ability and soccer intelligence I believe we are developing top, top players.

Which in line with the Development Academy of course is the new directive- top players, not most trophies.

Exactly. Our measure of success is the level of quality of our players. We want our players to be able to go into any environment anywhere the world and when they walk in to be able to play at the level of the kids around their age group, and for the coaches to be like, “this kid is a really good player.” And that’s happened for us. On our website I highlighted a kid we had for several years who moved with his family to Spain and made the Atletico Madrid youth team for his age group. That’s what we want for all our players—for them to be sophisticated players who can fit into a high-level international environment, whether in Spain, England, Brazil, or wherever else. That doesn’t always equate to state championships, although one of our teams already won a state championship, which was the first time that has happened for a youth team from Manhattan, so like I said, winning is a by-product of good training.

And your winter futsal teams have been killing it.

Yeah, so again, a by-product, winning is not the goal of our club. But with regard to the Development Academy, we realized this need to have older players to begin our process in this new system, so we’ve talked to Martin Jacobson (TIAS has covered Martin and his MLK high school dynasty over the years) and he is going to help us bring in some of those kids. The idea is to populate the older teams with our own kids and kids from all over the city, and arguably no one knows the city’s teenaged players better than Martin. We all have our different connections, but Martin will use his to help lead part of our overall community outreach that we already do with our younger teams.

Honestly, I’ve been waiting for someone to get something like this going. FC Harlem is doing wonderful things uptown, and while they’re working with a different model—creating elite players is not their singular focus, education and opportunity is—that leaves still an opportunity to have a club with a singular focus toward player development. A few clubs like you and FC Harlem and the city could become a dominate city. The more the merrier.

Yeah, so U.S. Soccer came down and visited us in the fall. Tony Lepore, the head scout for the Development Academy, spent a couple days with me down here and we had a really nice time together. Part of the site visit was Tony took a look at our younger teams and the way we are running things, our process, our ways of working with players, our coaching staff, but also Martin brought a bunch of prospective players for him to look at, and we had a small-sided scrimmage on the roof at Pier 40. Martin brought something like 40 kids.

Yeah, that sounds like every Saturday for Martin. He has ridiculous pull with the kids. He has this town pretty well mapped out when it comes to soccer.

That’s partly why I think U.S. Soccer sees the potential with us in the city. Even though they’ve spoken to me about their typical way of doing things as far as scouting. I guess you would call it a metric that they use, for finding players for the youth National Teams. And what they said is “we want to go to areas of the country where there have been a large majority of past national team players—places where they’ve come from.” And NYC is not traditionally one of those places. But to me there is another way to look at it with regard to New York City.

A blind man could see the untapped market.

That’s the first thing. And second of all, are you happy with the players you are getting? If the answer is yes, than it makes more sense. The answer is not yes. So you have to look into other areas of the country and different types of people. The city player, if you look around the world, it is the urban environment that is producing many of the best players. From cities like Rio and Buenos Aires in South America to Rome or Paris to wherever. We need to start looking in these types of places where, arguably, people have a harder edge and the selection of players is more diverse—our national team should reflect the country’s ethnicity, and it really doesn’t. All the best soccer nations do much more of this, almost whatever it takes, to find the best players and get them on the field, and we should be doing that too. Right now one of my major jobs away from the field is to convince U.S. Soccer that Manhattan Kickers FC is the club that can do that for them as their partner in New York City.

You mentioned Red Bull offered your top keeper free everything essentially. How are the Kickers set up now in regard to finances and will that change in the future?

We’re pay for play right now. The kids pay a fee. We have three seasons—fall, winter, spring—and it’s around $600 per season. For New York City especially, or really anywhere else, considering all of the time and resources we are putting into our players, that is cheap, and if you are a kid who can’t afford that amount, and you’re a good kid and a good player, you can get a scholarship.

How long has the club—the Kickers—been around?

Since 1980, but it has gone through various types of programming, mostly local recreational-level teams, there is an adult team, although the youth teams never really had proper trainings, a focused curriculum or professional coaching. And they still have a rec program. The rec program has a separate website and everything. We function as two different entities, although when they have players come through that they think are good enough, they send them to us at Manhattan Kickers FC.

Given the relative age of your academy I was impressed by the backgrounds of some of your coaches. Obviously New York City is not lacking in interesting candidates, but still…

That’s one of the things I’ve been working really hard on. I believe the most important aspect of a youth soccer club is the coaching staff. I could not be happier with the staff we have at Manhattan Kickers FC. When I say that, as much as the coaches need to know the game, they need to be guys who love working with kids and have an ability to communicate with the kids the right way and know what it means to have a leadership role in a serious youth soccer program. Knowing soccer alone, or having played, that does not make someone a good coach. Passion for the game and a love of teaching are what all of our coaches have, along with solid experience in youth soccer. And that translates to when we work together as a staff, have meeting, on the field. We have a very good working relationship, like a brotherhood. We all work with each other’s teams and give advice to each other. There are no egos. We make sure each of the coaches try to take an interest in every player in the club, to know the child as a person as well as a player. To know what the player needs, to know the family situation. To me this is part of the player development process in this country. Keeping the club feeling as much as we can like a family and having a lot of really smart, experienced soccer guys sharing insight on how to make our players better. That is our clearly defined goal, to make our players better. I’m really proud of our coaching staff.

When you look at the Development Academy what are your other options besides that?

One thing we’ve spoken about is that instead of spending money on what they’ve put together—one of requirements of the Development Academy is that you have to go to three out-of-town showcases each year, usually on a plane, stay in a hotel. So if you don’t have a sponsor and kids are paying that out of pocket, it’s a huge amount of money. One of my thoughts would be to take that money and rather than go play in California and Chicago against domestic teams, go to Amsterdam and Brazil for a week and play against their best teams.

So it becomes which do you think the kids get the most from?

Exactly. At a tournament like the Dallas Cup you could go and get a game against a Chelsea youth team, Bayern Munich or a foreign club who travels here to play, but the showcases the academy has set up are all matches against other domestic clubs. I’m not saying it is not worthwhile—these are the best domestic clubs for the most part and we would not have applied to be part of these matches if we didn’t think it was good for our program. There is also a regionalized league for the Academy that you play in, which is very well organized and has some rules that are thinking in the right direction as far as substitutions, increasing training time and decreasing the amount of matches. But in terms of where the money is best spent, playing international soccer is what American youth players need more than anything else. It is what our senior players need more than anything else. And we are already playing internationally once every year as a club. Even as part of the Development Academy, I will still continue to take our players and teams to Brazil every year, that is something I am passionate about and our experiences in Brazil have been invaluable for our players, but I want to do all of this on a bigger scale both here in the US and abroad.

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Rosenthal holds the exclusive U.S. rights with CBF to bring American youth, college and professional teams to the CBF National Training Center at Granja Comary (pictured above), and is working with CBF to develop coaching courses and programs for American coaches. That topic will be part two of our discussion, coming in the future at TIAS. UPDATE: it can be found here.

Banner photo of MKFC parent Alex Arce en route to practice. Much thanks to Alex for introducing me to Curt Rosenthal. All photos courtesy of Manhattan Kickers FC.