Sports Illustrated Stadium and the Red Bulls

The stadium you see here in Harrison, New Jersey, is one of the finest purpose-built soccer venues in the United States, and the team that plays in it has one of the more tangled identities in American professional sports.

The club that would become the New York Red Bulls was one of ten founding members of Major League Soccer when the league launched in nineteen ninety-six. It played its first years as the New York slash New Jersey MetroStars, a name that captured exactly no one's imagination, at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, sharing a football facility with the Giants and Jets. The experience was what you might expect: a soccer crowd of twelve thousand in a stadium built for eighty thousand is not an atmosphere.

In two thousand six, the Austrian energy drink company Red Bull GmbH purchased the club and rebranded it. The company had already established a network of soccer clubs in Salzburg, Leipzig, and Sao Paulo, and the New York franchise became the American flagship. Four years later, in March of two thousand ten, the club opened this facility: a twenty-five-thousand-seat stadium designed specifically for soccer, where the first row of seats is just twenty-one feet from the touchline. It was a revelation for American soccer fans accustomed to football geometries.

The greatest player in the club's history arrived the same year. Thierry Henry, the French striker who had scored two hundred twenty-eight goals for Arsenal, the club's all-time record, and won the World Cup with France in nineteen ninety-eight, signed here in two thousand ten. He played five seasons, left as the club's all-time leader in assists with thirty-seven, and led the Red Bulls to the two thousand thirteen Supporters' Shield, their first major trophy. The stadium was called Red Bull Arena for its first fourteen years, then renamed for Sports Illustrated in a partnership announced in two thousand twenty-four.

The venue has also hosted the United States men's and women's national teams, and served as a World Cup fan hub during the twenty twenty-six tournament staged across the New York-New Jersey region.