For fans who’ve been waiting years to see the New York Cosmos retake the field, a distant 2026 season can’t come soon enough. But for the men charged with building a competitive professional team from scratch, the next few months are going to fly by. The USL League One campaign typically kicks off in early March, leaving Head of Soccer Giuseppe Rossi and his staff with scant time to spare as they set out to scout, identify, recruit and sign a full complement of players.
“There’s time, but there’s no time. It’s strange,” Cosmos Head Coach Davide Corti said.
Fortunately, there are elements in place that make an imposing task more manageable. The first is Rossi’s vision for the club. The mission provides some definition. The Cosmos are committed to youth, to a fair and functioning player pathway, and to tapping the abundant reservoir of talent in North Jersey and the Tri-State area. Rossi’s vast network has been critical, as has that of Cosmos Scout and Manager of Youth Partnerships Jose Angulo, who also hails from North Jersey.
Angulo, the 2013 USL Pro MVP, was hired in July. He’s been attending matches in person—from high school to pro—and evaluating prospective players via video ever since. Rossi and Angulo then were joined by Corti in early September. Corti arrived from Italy with more than a dozen years of high-level player development experience at AC Milan (among other credentials). Few have an eye for pro potential like the Cosmos’ manager.
While Rossi, Angulo and Corti search for quality across a fertile region, they’re also attracting it. The allure of the Cosmos’ name and history, not to mention the chance to play at a refurbished, historic venue like Paterson’s Hinchliffe Stadium, has prompted several promising prospects to reach out. So while some candidates will have to be assessed from afar, there are plenty within reach as well.
In early August at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, the Cosmos flickered to life, staging the club’s first live soccer activity in nearly five years. It was the first invitation-only tryout for some of the players identified by Rossi and Angulo. With Corti in attendance (he viewed a recording of the first one), the Cosmos then hosted a second invitation-only tryout on the first weekend of September at Hudson Sports Complex in Warwick, NY—the facility owned by former Austrian international Christian Fuchs.
Across the two tryouts, the Cosmos were able to look at nearly 80 players. Over the final weekend of September, back at William Paterson, the best of that group will reconvene for a second crack at impressing the Cosmos’ technical staff and, perhaps, putting themselves in position to earn a contract.
“We’ve narrowed it down to close to 30 players that we want to see at the end of the month,” Angulo said. “We’ll likely make some decisions after that.”
Following the Warwick tryout, Corti and Angulo took the time to answer a few questions about the process and their impressions of the player pool as the Cosmos finally begin to take shape.
Why are the Cosmos hosting these tryouts as part of the roster-building process?
CORTI: It’s not just about performing properly in an 11 v. 11 situation. We also need to understand how coachable they are, and that they can learn constantly every day. When you play a video, it’s hard to tell [everything] because you need to see what they are lacking as well, and if those gray areas or [gaps] can be filled up somehow. You can see the talent they express and even if they’re lacking some things, if they’re coachable, that there’s space for their improvement.
How did you identify and select the players who were invited?
ANGULO: There’s no one way. All these guys have been seen in person, or they’ve been recommended by a trusted person, or they’ve been vetted a little bit on video. We were able to identify certain profiles through video. We don’t rely on video, but there’s certain things that are telling on video. Thats how we’ve been filtering them. We see their profile, the area where they played, and you can kind of create a picture of a guy.
Then you imagine this guy in a [pro] environment. Imagine this guy training with pros every day. Imagine him being part of a team and actually playing big games on the weekend. Can you see that they might have the tools?
How did you set up the tryouts? What happens on the field?
CORTI: For the first tryout, they just warmed up and played a scrimmage, 11 v. 11. For the second one, we had a different set-up and it was more of a real session where you could identify the skills of the players in small-sided games and technical exercises. And then we played for 45 minutes, giving everybody enough space to perform and show who they really are.
In the [late September] tryout, I’ll be on the field so I’ll have the chance to know them better and to control and lead the session as well. That will be about narrowing down the number of players and being closer to the players.
ANGULO: In a small-sided environment, you get to see more actions. You see more repetitions: a striker on a center back, goalie repetitions. We saw a different element of the players that you don’t see in 11 v. 11. So some reduced-space drills—not long—led into small-sided, so we could see all these elements. And then from that, we were able to see enough that we were able to pick out that we wanted to see his guy here, this guy there. And then we incorporated that into 11 v. 11.
What were you looking for during the tryouts?
CORTI: If you see players live, it’s the best thing because you can understand their character. I know it’s for a very short time. But you can see from the way they look at you how much they’re engaged in what you’re demanding, and that’s the reason why we didn’t just put them on the field and play 11 v. 11 [in the second tryout]. It was a sort of realistic session.
So you start asking the players to keep possession in a very tight space—to do something to gain some points—and through those kinds of exercises you understand how much they will try to accomplish something that might be tougher. At the end of the day, you’re looking for players who can solve problems on their own. You can understand how much these players can be engaged, how hard they’ll try to do something that might be new to them. The more they commit to try to solve the problem, the more we believe that those guys can be coachable.
ANGULO: A good player is going to show you something at some point. Can you expand on that if you work with him? Can more be added to what he is? I think a player who naturally plays in a certain system we may be looking at is also very interesting, and I think having a good attitude and a good personality as a player also goes a long way. When you meet them, are they willing to be a team guy, or are they difficult in the locker room? You get hints.
Any of the staff could be around you at some point. That’s the interview: how you respond. Are you greeting everyone respectfully? All these things are seen, and there’s experience with all of us that picks those things up. [Rossi and Corti] have been in locker rooms all over the world. They understand the etiquette. They understand football. They see all these things.
A tryout creates a challenging situation for a player, who likely (and understandably) cares more about standing out than performing within a team context. How do you account for that during your planning or evaluation?
CORTI: Everybody wants to get a spot and find a job, and because of that sometimes players that attend a tryout try to show their best skills. So if you’re very good at dribbling 1 v. 1, but I see you taking on an opponent in a 1 v. 1 situation when it would potentially be better for you to pass the ball and play easy, that’s one of the things we’re looking for. If we ask the players to play easy, we’ll see the choices they make. So don’t stress yourself out to show how good you are, because we see all the things you could potentially do.
It’s not just about you having the ball, which might be disorienting for some them because they all want to have the ball. But we pay attention to the space that you fill up—where you want to go to get the ball and how you want to receive the ball. Asking them to play easy will push them to be more relaxed and trust that we can see what they potentially have within each of them.
How would you assess the overall level of play you’ve seen so far?
CORTI: Of course we need to understand that [USL League One] is in the third division. The third division might be good for the level of players that we saw in the tryouts. Then we’re going to be looking as well for players that can be game changers with their own quality. But we found some really interesting players, so I’m actually happy about what we found up til now and we probably need to be more concentrated on [specific] positional players in the future.
ANGULO: The general consensus was we were impressed by the level of guys we were able to bring in that aren’t under contract anywhere. To see those guys and the level kind of opened our eyes a bit: “Wow, there are some guys out there.”
But we haven’t seen the full spectrum, which is crazy, because we’ve already seen almost 80 players. But we haven’t seen a full spectrum of what we could see before the end of the year. So far though, we have seen a lot of good stuff.
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As the roster finally starts to come together, so will the Cosmos community. Just a few days after that third tryout, the club will mark another milestone as it welcomes fans to Hinchliffe Stadium for the first time.
On October. 4, 2-6 p.m., Hinchliffe will open its doors for the club’s Fan Fest and Select-a-Seat event. Admission is free, although registration is required. Fans will have an opportunity to walk the stands and pick their ideal view, see the stadium’s extensive refurbishment, play pick-up soccer, and visit the Charles J. Muth Museum. The Cosmos’ trophy collection will be on display, while food vendors, music, youth clinics, merchandise sales and more round out a fun and historic afternoon.
Registration for the Oct. 4 event is available here.