Like any patient soccer mom, Agnes Zakrzewska spent a chunk of her day waiting in a parking lot outside a field in New Jersey earlier this month. When her teenage son, Julian, finished practice, Ms. Zakrzewska ferried him to a big event — his first road test to get his driver’s license.
He passed it, and they returned to their cozy two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Three days later, on April 11, Julian Zakrzewski Hall was starting at forward for the New York Red Bulls inside a hostile stadium in Miami in front of 26,000 fans. He had turned 18 less than three weeks earlier and now was playing against Lionel Messi, the most famous footballer in the world. He even outplayed Messi, the Argentine star, assisting on two goals, including one brilliant pass to his friend and teammate Adri Mehmeti — another gifted teenager from New York City.
“I was more nervous getting my license, to be honest,” Hall said after the match. “It’s weird having a stranger sitting there watching everything you’re doing.”
Funny, because being watched by strangers is a big part of Hall’s job description.
While most of their peers are still in high school, Hall and Mehmeti play professionally for the Red Bulls in Major League Soccer. They are part of the club’s latest youth movement, matriculating up through the team’s soccer academy since they were ninth graders and now flourishing with the first team, while still living at home with their parents and siblings.
At just 18, Hall leads the Red Bulls in goals with six, and he is the youngest player in M.L.S. history to score five goals in his first six games. Mehmeti, who turned 17 earlier this month, has a goal and three assists in his eye-opening debut season.
“They are not the first to do this, but it’s a new to have young home-growns playing this many minutes this early in their careers,” said Julian de Guzman, the head of sport for the Red Bulls.
The Red Bulls, who play home games in Harrison, N.J., take pride in their history of developing local talent.
Hall and Mehmeti, from the time they were in middle school, were among a select group recruited into the local soccer academies, first into after-school programs and later into the Red Bulls all-day program, where soccer is combined with school. Now, as full-time professionals, their schooling is online, and the focus is on their jobs.
“Of course I worry about his education,” Suada Mehmeti, Adri’s mother, said at the family’s Staten Island home. “It is very important, but it is something he can always go back to, maybe to get a degree.”
Mehmeti, standing in the kitchen while his younger sister, Ava, sat at a table, smiled and shrugged sheepishly. He is 17 and making high level plays in pro soccer. He currently has no plans to attend college.
Hall and Mehmeti are both sons of immigrants from former communist European nations, but their paths to the Red Bulls were different.
Hall’s mother immigrated to New Jersey from Poland just before ninth grade and within two days was working as a house cleaner with her mother. She attended Rutgers University and then settled in New York. Julian lived his first few years in Harlem before they moved to their current apartment on the Upper West Side, where Julian still sleeps in a Murphy bed that is tucked away during the day.
As an active boy in a small Manhattan apartment, he spent countless hours dribbling a fluffy soccer ball pillow through the living room.
Even before first grade, he joined a sports program at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan and gravitated to soccer. He soon transitioned to the Manhattan Kickers, an elite travel team with an artificial turf field surrounded by a parking garage on the Hudson River. By the time he was 12, he was in the youth academy of N.Y.C.F.C. (the other M.L.S. team in New York) before switching allegiance to Red Bull academy.
Ms. Zakrzewska, a vice president of a clothing company and a single mom, says her employers allowed her to work remotely while she shuttled her son to practices in Whippany, N.J. For years she hunched over her laptop inside her parked car while her son practiced, then brought him back to Manhattan, a 45-minute commute each way on good traffic days.
Even now, with Hall earning a base salary of about $125,000, not much has changed. He sleeps in the same Murphy bed and kicks the stuffed soccer ball around with his 8-year-old brother, Leon.
Zakrzewski (pronounced zak-CHEF-skee) is Hall’s middle name, but he chose it for the back of his jersey when he turned pro. (Though he shares the surname of his American father, Lorenzo Hall, they do not live together). Julian is fine if announcers call him Hall, but he wanted Zakrzewski on his shirt to express his love for his mother and his Polish heritage.
“I did it to honor her and everything she has given me,” he said, gesturing to his mother, who sat nearby. She burst into tears, she said, when her son revealed the jersey at a news conference.
As they spoke, highlights of Hall’s brilliant pass to Mehmeti against Inter Miami burst loudly onto a large television screen, startling everyone in the room. Julian gave a knowing glance toward his cheeky little brother, who smiled and held up a remote.
A Father’s Dream
The Mehmetis live in a detached home on a tranquil street on Staten Island. It is Adri, Ava, his mother, Suada, and his father, Ritvan, a soccer fanatic who played semipro in Greece. The parents own a trucking company, and Ritvan, or Vani as he is known, tries to schedule out-of state deliveries to coincide with his son’s road games. He has driven to Texas to watch his son play, and saw his first goal in Miami.
“I was crying in the stands, ‘That’s my boy,’” he said.
Mehmeti’s parents immigrated separately from Albania to New York, where they met at a party and soon fell in love. But before they married, Vani told Suada that he intended to raise a professional soccer player. It was not negotiable.
“That was always his dream,” she said.
A generally cheerful sort, Mehmeti says he shared that dream for as long as he can remember. He recounted the daily practice sessions in their backyard or in the basement when the weather was bad. But Vani demanded that before they could play together, Adri had to make 1,000 short passes.
Those sessions still happen. On a recent afternoon after a Red Bulls practice, they played again in the basement, avoiding appliances and picture frames while aiming for makeshift goals under a desk and a door frame. Adri won, 3-2.
Mehmeti’s parents are aware that for all the shuttling back and forth they do for their son, this would have been more complicated in the past. Even a generation ago, a young American prospect might have had to leave the country to become a pro.
De Guzman, 45, New York’s chief soccer executive, left his home in Canada when he was 16 to join the Marseille academy in France. His only contact with his parents was with a timed phone card and 20-minute calls, once a week.
“I left my family, my friends, everything,” he recalled. “What is different for them is, they get to go home and still spend time with their families, which I am happy to see.”
He said the Red Bulls follow standardized practices for minors. No beer in the locker room, and the club employs a player-care official who looks after all players on road trips, with special considerations for the teenagers. They either get their own room or share a room with another teenager, and instead of going to bars, Hall and Mehmeti said the players tend to hang around the hotel, anyway.
Though most players on the Red Bulls are in their 20s, there are a few in their 30s, including some who have played in World Cups and at the highest levels in Europe. Hall and Mehmeti recalled nervous moments when they first joined the club.
“Julian was already up there and he showed me around and introduced me,” Mehmeti said. “That made it way easier.”
The goal for both players, of course, is to play in Europe, and it could happen soon.
The Mehmetis own an apartment in Albania, and they might join their son if he heads overseas. Ms. Zakrzewska knows the specter of Europe looms for her son, too. Until that time, she wants Julian, the leading scorer on the Red Bulls who just got his driver’s license, to stay in that Murphy bed, commute to work and play with his little brother in the afternoons.
“I know he will be going away soon enough,” she said. “I want as much time as possible with him now.”
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