For the first time since 2017, the Philadelphia Union endured a season without qualifying for the MLS Cup playoffs in 2024.
For the first time in at least that long, the team on the field lacks a clear direction forward, at least in the immediate short-term.
Organizationally, there is a coherent plan. The club has brought in three foreign signings in their early 20s. They boast a roster with 12 Homegrown players, most of fleeting professional experience that will have time to grow together. They’re led by a coach in Bradley Carnell who is far more of a counterattacking soccer absolutist than they’ve ever had before.
The current group, which finished 12th in the Eastern Conference last year in getting Jim Curtin relived of his duties as coach, is minimally improved in a league that continues to accelerate away from the Union in terms of spending.
In a league where Atlanta United can pay $22 million for a player, the Union’s club record signing of Bruno Damiani for a reported $3.4 million pales.
For the first time in a long time, the Union present a Rorschach test. Whatever Jim Curtin’s failings as a coach, six consecutive playoff appearances indicate the high floor he’d established year to year. Even when they weren’t great, they were never bad — until last year, when all collapsed and regime change descended.
This year seems a matter of perspective.
The club’s long-term direction is set; those in Chester believe it’s sound, or at least that it’s the soundest one their limited financial powers can secure. But the immediate future, starting Saturday night in Orlando, is caught between players who seemed irrevocably on the decline last year and prospects on the rise. That part of the process is up to interpretation.
Maybe …
• Carnell got a raw deal in St. Louis, after a Coach of the Year job in 2023 to take an expansion side to the top of the Western Conference.
• Curtin had let the standards drop so far as his decade at the helm culminated that last year’s group was capable of more that it showed on the field and the starting point for this year is higher than last year’s finish indicates.
• Ernst Tanner’s run of bad signings has owed to limited resources allotted to him. With more money and more urgency this season, Jovan Lukic will look more like Jose Martinez than Sanders Ngabo, and Damiani will work out more like Julian Carranza and less like Mikael Uhre.
• Uhre, after years as a productive if not dominant striker, is enlivened by the new system and a contract year to take the step to a 15-goal guy.
• Curtin was wrong about Olwethu Makhanya in the way that he was wrong about Tai Baribo, who went from exile to 16 goals in 19 starts.
• Jakob Glesnes’ decline owed in part to the demands of the schedule and a coach that didn’t like to rotate his squad, issues to be lessened by the lack of Leagues Cup/CONCACAF competition and a more mobile partner in Ian Glavinovich.
• Danley Jean Jacques’ cameo in MLS was just the beginning, with more time to settle in and grow into an elite CONCACAF player.
• Cavan Sullivan is the best 15-year-old that America has ever produced.
• The counterattacking ethos that Carnell professes and Tanner originally brought here is the great equalizer, a way to negate superior talent on opponents and turn their strengths against them, with high ball pressure leading to easy goals.
Or maybe …
• Carnell is the coach who was fired from St. Louis in 2024 once his group stopped playing well over its talent level would indicate it.
• Curtin’s standing as the eighth-winningest coach in MLS history isn’t an accident.
• Tanner’s magic touch that turned pennies into Kacper Przybylko into Carranza has permanently curdled, that the Richard Odadas and Matej Oravecs end up more representative of his abilities than the Kai Wagners and Glesneses.
• Uhre is what he ever will be.
• Baribo’s torrid summer of 2024 was a flash in the pan.
• Makhanya didn’t play a single MLS minute of 18 months for a reason, one that will be exacerbated by the lack of depth in defense.
• Glesnes’s decline, like for so many center backs, is as irreversible as it seemed sudden.
• Jean Jacques is a good but not great player in MLS.
• Sullivan is just a kid who will look like a kid when playing against players twice his age.
• The counterattacking ethos that the Union are going all-in on does bridge the talent gap, but that chasm remains yawning, and unsustainably so, because of the underlying economics.
In a league that oh-by-the-way contains Lionel Messi, the requirement is still to line up your guys against the other guys 34 times and come out on top, with no grading on a curve just because of how much you’ve spent relative to the competition.
Which reality the Union end up settling into will take time to divine. But belief in either is a question of faith.
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com.
Source: Berkshire mont