Rush Soccer is investing in SKN St. Pölten, a nine-time Austrian league champion, and can place its top women on its roster.Tom Seiss / SKN St. Pölten Frauen
The culmination of Tim Schulz’s dream came to fruition in the mayoral office of Varaždin, Croatia, last year.
Even when Schulz, a former U.S. pro soccer player, first started coaching an under-19 soccer team in Littleton, Colo., in 1991, he envisioned the creation of a full player pathway from youth programs to the pros.
The merger of two rival clubs in 1997 — the Columbine program Schulz led, along with nearby Lakewood — spawned the creation of Rush Soccer, which, over the past quarter-century under Schulz’s leadership, has grown into the world’s biggest club. More than 55,000 players are part of the Rush program, spanning more than 125 clubs in 50 countries and six continents.
All that was missing to complete the pyramid was a direct link to the professional level. Given such considerations as costs, club philosophies and league limits on international players, Rush Soccer zeroed in on NK Varaždin in the top tier of the Croatian Football League.
NK Varaždin has a strong history of developing and then transferring promising young players to bigger franchises. Rush acquired a 5% stake in the clubs, with the opportunity to increase its investment to 20% over the coming years, and its logo adorns the first team’s kits.
And, as of this week, Rush is making a similar investment in Spusu SKN St. Pölten, an Austrian women’s club that has won nine consecutive ÖFB-Frauenliga titles and competed in the UEFA Champions League.
“For me, it’s amazing,” said Schulz, who recently stepped back as CEO but remains on the board. “After working so hard for 25 years and to finally see it — in my opinion, the pyramid is just about completed now. And now it’s up to the staff to really make it work and grind it out. But the skeleton is there now. Start filling it in.”
Adding to the complexity and uniqueness of the deal is that Rush Soccer, despite its massive size, is a nonprofit, and NK Varaždin is a public association owned by the citizens. Hence, the trip to the mayoral office to gain local support.
But the mutual benefit was apparent. Rush gained an entry point into European soccer while NK Varaždin immediately had access to a larger pool of prospects, an easier road for some of its academy players to earn scholarships to American universities and increased brand awareness.
“We are now putting Varaždin, as a city and as a club, on the soccer map of the world,” NK Varaždin CEO Toni Dalic said.
It’s not quite the same as Hollywood stars buying Wrexham AFC, but the way Dalic does the math, the partnership created overnight name recognition in the U.S. for some 200,000 players and family members from the Rush organization. The agreement also included a partnership with Capelli Sport, which has been Rush’s official uniform and apparel supplier since 2019. (The two are so closely linked that Rush operates out of the same New York City office space as Capelli.)
Andrea PichlerSKN St. Pölten Frauen
“Working with the biggest youth football club in the world can only have advantages, especially in sporting terms,” new SKN St. Pölten President Andrea Pichler wrote in an email. “But the co-operation also helps us at Spusu SKN St. Pölten Frauen economically,” noting that Capelli is also joining as a partner.
Rush Soccer, whose alumni include U.S. national team stars Christian Pulisic and Lindsey Horan, spurned interest from larger European clubs because it didn’t create a realistic pathway for most of its elite players who would need what Dalic called an “adaptation period to European football” that Varaždin could offer.
Through its large base of players, Rush Soccer is able to generate enough revenue that it allocates some of its annual budget specifically for top talent development. That, combined with its own charitable foundation, enables the club to award scholarships to its residential Rush Select Academy in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Newly appointed Rush Soccer CEO Justin Miller describes it as “just like IMG [but] way more boutique.” It has a boys program now, with plans to expand and include girls soon.
A meticulously built Rush Way defines details as minute as choice of font and even an ideal developmental record — six wins, three losses and one tie for every 10 matches — to provide just the right amount of boosting confidence and learning from adversity. The organization maintains its own rating system and player evaluation dashboard.
And now with ownership stakes in two European clubs and two other international partnerships — with a men’s team in Dubai and a women’s team in Costa Rica — Rush has succeeded in creating its own alternate route to, say, an MLS player’s journey through amateur ranks to the pros. But they’ve created it in reverse.
“It always starts top-down: It’s always pro team first, and then it’s an easier path,” Miller said. “So we’re definitely taking the hard route. But we have, in our hard route, built some really, really unique pieces.”
NK Varaždin, a first-division team in Croatia, now wears Capelli-supplied kits with the Rush logo.Courtesy of Rush Soccer
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Daniel Sumalla grew up playing soccer in Spain, but his family moved to South Florida four years ago, at which point he joined Miami Rush Kendall SC — one of two Rush-operated clubs that also participate in MLS Next. In January, Sumalla found himself back on a European pitch as part of a weeklong training program with NK Varaždin.
According to Rush Sporting Director Raoul Voss, a German-born soccer player and coach in the U.S. and overseas, Sumalla could be the first beneficiary of the new pathway from Rush to Croatia. (Sumalla is also said to be weighing a contract offer from MLS’s Inter Miami.)
In 2018, Voss was the head coach of Penn FC, a USL club owned by Capelli Sport CEO George Altirs. Penn FC ceased operations after that season, but Voss was courted by Schulz and Miller to further develop the top end of the program. At the time, he admitted, he had never heard of Rush, but saw value in its mission.
“At the time, Rush was already very large in size, but for the top performers, there was something missing,” Voss said. “The best players — boys and girls — would usually leave at some point.”
Voss and Tiago Calvano, a former pro player from Brazil, have led Rush’s international efforts and also built up its domestic select program — essentially a Rush national team for under-13 through U19 — with robust scouting and infrastructure.
Those methods are now in alignment with NK Varaždin — and soon will be with SKN St. Pölten — to ensure consistency in player evaluations.
“Their academy and my guys from my academy are almost in daily contact, sharing knowledge,” said Dalic, whose father, Zlatko Dalic, is the manager of the Croatian national team that has finished second and third at the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. “They’re all doing the same tests together so we can compare the results between their players and our players.”
Roughly two-thirds of Rush’s clubs are in North America, but there are 20 outposts in Africa, 18 in South America, eight in Europe, five in the Caribbean, four in Oceania and two in Asia.
“Our footprint is expansive,” Miller said. “It’s not just in the United States. So overnight, they have scouts everywhere.”
NK Varaždin’s business model is largely based on developing young players and selling them for transfer fees. Its need for access to more prospects is important.
Dalic noted that the club is in the process of becoming a privately owned company, but it would be the first in Croatian history to do so voluntarily and not because of debts. “We can cover ourselves with the blanket that we have,” he said.
Dalic said other international groups seeking partnerships were “always like, ‘OK, how can we make business here? How can we make money?’” With Rush, however, the priorities were different.
“Once we got to know each other, once we started working with each other, we saw that we have the same points of view and that we are thinking exclusively towards developing the players,” Dalic said.
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Miller grew up in Littleton, Colo., and as a 13-year-old in 2005, began playing for Colorado Rush, the legacy club Schulz had founded. Other than a stint playing for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an NCAA Division II program, Miller has been part of Rush ever since. Upon graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in finance, he rejoined Colorado Rush as general manager and then was promoted to the national office in New York, where a series of promotions led him to COO and now CEO.
“We keep growing. I don’t really see a ceiling for the organization right now,” said Miller, noting that the interest in joining pro clubs is “incentivizing us to continue to expand the base and get into unique markets.”
New Rush CEO Justin Miller as a player in 2009.Courtesy of Rush Soccer
“Without question, we really want to get in Asia next,” added Miller, as Rush’s two clubs on the continent are in Dubai and Mumbai, India. “We think that that’s a really untapped market, much like the U.S., that has a lot of driven talent.”
From the very beginning, Rush has had a magnetic pull on young players. It started with Schulz’s first club. The pedigree of a professional career and short stint with the USMNT put “a target on my chest,” he recalled, noting the influx of players from across Colorado joining. Very quickly, Schulz began overseeing a larger club program, which included three state championships.
“Now we were growing in teams, not just kids,” Schulz said.
That continued through the recent rise of MLS Next, which Miller described as “an opportunity for players and a challenge for the Rush.” While Rush has entered a few teams in the sprawling youth league, there are more competitors, and the industry, Miller added, remains “fragmented significantly.” Rush is trying to remain agnostic and is willing to participate in MLS Next, ECNL or any other notable youth league.
Rush has done better to retain its best girls players because the NWSL doesn’t support a similar developmental league. As the USWNT has experienced at the World Cup, there’s more global competition, especially from Europe, where most women’s teams are owned by a club with a men’s team that has a long-running boys academy. It takes fewer incremental resources to jumpstart the women’s program.
“In the rest of the world,” Miller said, “the women are catching up fast because the infrastructure is already there.”
Part of SKN St. Pölten’s interest in collaborating with Rush is that it’s independent — meaning, no adjoining men’s team — so it couldn’t rely on the same template. In fact, it was the only all-women club among the top 15 in Europe.
“Rush players and coaches are supposed to exchange ideas through training, test matches and coaching events in Austria, but also in the USA, and above all develop further,” Pichler wrote.
The club will now be known as SKN St. Pölten Rush, a validation of Schulz’s long-term vision after rejecting takeover offers from major clubs.
“He wants the Rush brand to be the brand who makes it to the top,” said Voss, noting the success in connecting the pyramid “from the base up, grassroots up. So it’s very unique, but I think it’s actually working and gives us a lot of stability.”
Schulz was never in a rush to get here, but Rush has truly now arrived.
