“In Salt Lake, we only had two academy teams, U16 and U18, and they were both down in Arizona. In Manchester, it’s all integrated down to the U9s. You can walk out and watch the U11 team play on Saturday, and it looks and plays exactly the same as the senior team. And that, to me, was the most amazing thing I’ve seen. The performance of 11-year-old kids in this club, it was off the charts.”

The decision for each Manchester City team in the club to play with the same style “comes from top down,” Kreis said. The philosophy provides continuity as players develop, he added, but also a consistent mind-set that Kreis says is missing in the United States.

“I have an opinion about why we haven’t created good attacking players or creative players that are among the best in the world,” Kreis said of soccer in America. “For me, it’s because we’re very reactive. When I watched the national team play in the past, I’ve always felt the team was playing very reactive to the opponent. We never seem to dictate the game. If you’re always reacting, it’s impossible to create young, attack-minded players because we’re always chasing the ball.”

With less than a year until N.Y.C.F.C. begins play, Kreis described himself as impatient. He called himself “a worrier” intent on waiting for this summer’s international transfer period to make some core acquisitions that he then can augment through the M.L.S. expansion draft and the next college draft.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone now employed by one of the world’s richest clubs, Kreis was particularly adamant about the need for M.L.S. to loosen the purse strings and increase salary budgets. He complained that the current restrictions leave clubs with little depth.

“I believe the cap has got to be raised, not to allow to spend on big players, but in the middle, the players who really make a difference between winning and losing,“ he said. “The biggest improvement our teams need to make is in the depth of our rosters. We need more cap money to compete in the world market for players.”

Last week’s trip to Barcelona was Kreis’s first outside England since taking his new post. It was not, he said, a vacation.

“We won’t get around Europe until June,” Kreis said. “And I’ve only been to one E.P.L. game, other than City, and that was Liverpool-Everton. Tim Howard got me tickets, which was great. Other than that, I’ve been to a few lower league games looking at players.”