Comments on: Red Bull: Fizzing Out in New York and Austria

By: Red Bull’s Global Brand Expands: RB Leipzig Launched | Pitch Invasion

Red Bull’s Global Brand Expands: RB Leipzig Launched | Pitch Invasion — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:45:31 +0000

[...] off the field. Their first takeover — and erasure of a club’s existing history — came in Austria near the company’s headquarters in Fuschl, where SV Austria Salzburg were rebranded as FC [...]

By: tzimaki

tzimaki — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:09:24 +0000

I believe another factor is the tremendous amount of difficulty in being successful in sports in New York City. In theory, there should be no such thing as rebuilding and each year should be a winning season.

The Red Bulls have failed as a soccer team because they’ve failed to win so much as one major championship.

As a New York team, they’ve failed due to their lack of ability to make themselves the center of the league.

Soccer fans aren’t coming because the team doesn’t win. New Yorkers aren’t coming because nobody cares about the team.

By: Thomas Dunmore

Thomas Dunmore — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:49:18 +0000

Interesting stuff Dubya. Still, I’d say the Arena affair does illustrate Red Bull’s massive ambition, lack of knowledge of the game and their resulting lack of patience. De Grandpre’s comments are really quite remarkable — he repeats again and again that he expected that simply investing money would lead inevitably to MLS Cup victory (stating clearly that was the only thing which could have saved Arena’s job).

Given the playoff structure, not to mention the parity enforced by the salary cap, that seems an amazing demand to make of a coach in his first season. No wonder Arena made bad decisions under that pressure, frankly. Not that I think Arena did a good job and we don’t know whether he’d have improved things, but it seems Red Bull looked at Chelsea’s instant success under Mourinho (for example) and thought that it would be straightforward to buy the MLS Cup and create a winning brand.

As for Red Bull Salzburg, it’s a good point that they are not exactly struggling and Austrian teams don’t generally do well in Europe (though Salzburg did make the UEFA Cup final in the 1990s). But again, the point is Red Bull did not buy them to just be competitive in the Austrian league. They wanted to make the team a force in the Champions League, and a European-wide brand of success, and they wanted it quickly. But it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, and one has to wonder how long they’ll stick both situations out.

By: Dubya

Dubya — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:33:52 +0000

While I won’t absolve Red Bull completely in the New York fiasco (de Grandpre should have been bounced back to the beverage-selling part of the corp a long time ago in favor of someone who, you know, has worked in soccer before), Arena wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire here. It wasn’t Red Bull that demanded the Dunivant-and-cash-for-Goldtwaite trade. It wasn’t Red Bull that gave Wynne to Toronto. When it was obvious to people who didn’t even watch the game that we needed some help in the defense back in the summer, it wasn’t Red Bull that hitched its wagon to old man Sanneh and, when that fell through, responded by buying…a forward. We could have given Arena another year or two, but I can’t completely blame Red Bull for being disappointed with the way this team and season was put together.

(This is where I’d go on for a while on how Red Bull still needs to know that MLS and its rules are different than the rest of the world’s, and understanding that would help them in the long run, but…)

And just a heads up regarding Salzburg…while they did crash out of the Champions League, that isn’t anything unusual. Austrian teams haven’t exactly set the world on fire in the CL (three teams this century have entered, only one since the change in format, and none with much success), and while Red Bull may be in fifth, they’re only two points out of first. If Red Bull is disappointing this year, the entire league is.