Julian Hall and Adri Mehmeti are New York teenagers living a dream: they’re not old enough to drink, but they need to turn against Messi.
Like any patient mother, Agnes Zakrzewska spent much of the last month waiting in a parking lot near a field in New Jersey. When her teenage son, Julian, finished training, Zakrzewska took him to an important event — his first practice test for his driver’s license.
He passed and they returned to their two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Three days later, on April 11, Julian Zakrzewski Hall was a starter for the New York Red Bulls in a hostile stadium in Miami, in front of 26,000 fans. He had turned 18 less than three weeks earlier and was now playing against Lionel Messi, the most famous football player in the world. He even outplayed Argentine superstar Messi, assisting two goals, including a brilliant pass to his friend and teammate Adri Mehmeti —another talented teenager from New York City.
“To be honest, I was more nervous getting my driver’s license,” Hall said after the match. “It’s weird to have a stranger sitting there watching everything you do.”
Funny, because being watched by strangers is 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 MLS (Major League Soccer). They are part of the club’s latest generation of young talent, having joined the team’s football academy since the ninth year of primary school and now shining in the first team, even though they still live with their parents and brothers.
At just 18, Hall is the Red Bulls’ top scorer with six goals and is the youngest player in MLS history to score five goals in his first six games. Mehmeti, 17, has one goal and three assists in his impressive debut season.
“They are not the first to do this, but it is a novelty to have young homegrown players playing so many minutes so early in their careers,” Red Bulls sporting director Julian de Guzman said.
The Red Bulls, who host their games in Harrison, New Jersey, are proud of their history of developing local talent.
Hall and Mehmeti, since elementary school, were among a select group recruited to local football academies, first in after-school programs and then in the Red Bulls’ full-time program, where football is combined with academics. Now, as full-time professionals, they study online and dedicate themselves to their work.
“Of course I care about his education,” said Suada Mehmeti, Adri’s mother, from her Staten Island home. “It’s very important, but it’s something he can always come back to, maybe to go to college.”
Mehmeti, standing in the kitchen while her younger sister, Ava, sat at the table, smiled and shrugged shyly. He is making high-level plays in the pros and has no plans to attend college.
Hall and Mehmeti are children 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 the start of ninth grade, and within two days she was working as a cleaner with her grandmother. She attended Rutgers University and later settled in New York. Julian lived his early years in Harlem before they moved to their current apartment on the Upper West Side, where Julian still sleeps on a rollaway bed that is tucked away during the day.
As a child in a small Manhattan apartment, he spent countless hours dribbling a stuffed football pad around the living room.
Even now, with Hall earning a base salary of around $125,000, little has changed. He sleeps in the same rollaway bed and plays with the stuffed soccer ball 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 — although he shares the last name of his American father, Lorenzo Hall, they don’t live together. Julian doesn’t mind if the commentators call him Hall, but he wanted Zakrzewski on his jersey to express his love for his mother and his Polish heritage.
A father’s dream
The Mehmetis live in a detached house on a quiet street in Staten Island. They are: Adri; Ava; his mother, Suada; and his father, Ritvan, who played semi-professional football in Greece. The parents own a shipping company, and Ritvan, or Vani, as he is known, tries to schedule interstate deliveries to coincide with his son’s away games. He’s already 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 got married, Vani told Suada that he intended to raise a professional football player. There was no negotiation.
“That was always his dream,” she said.
Mehmeti’s parents know that despite all the constant traveling they do for their son, this would have been much more complicated in the past. Even a generation ago, a promising young American might have had to leave the country to turn pro.
De Guzman, 45, executive director of soccer from New York, left his home in Canada at age 16 to join the academy at Olympique de Marseille in France. His only contact with his parents was through a time-limited calling card and 20-minute calls once a week.
“I left my family, my friends, everything,” he recalled. “The difference for them is that now they can go home and spend time with their families, which makes me very happy.”
He said the Red Bulls follow standardized practices for minors. No beer in the locker room, and the club employs a player care manager, who accompanies all athletes on trips, with special attention to teenagers. They stay in individual rooms or share a room with another teenager. Instead of going to bars, Hall and Mehmeti said players usually stay at the hotel.
The goal of both players, of course, is to play in Europe, and that could happen soon.
The Mehmetis have an apartment in Albania and can join their son if he goes abroad.
Zakrzewska knows that the prospect of going to Europe also hangs over her son. Until then, she wants Julian, the Red Bulls’ top scorer who just got his driver’s license, to continue sleeping on the folding bed, drive to work and play with his little brother in the afternoon.
“I know he’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “I want to spend as much time with him as possible now.”
