Getting Reacquainted with the Philadelphia Union, aka, the Closest MLS Gets to a Technocracy

The RAND Corporation: Planning Your Future.

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

In the grand timeline of MLS expansion, the Philadelphia Union arrived fairly early – a couple seasons after Toronto FC, one after the Seattle Sounders, but one before my Portland Timbers – or just 2010. You can pull a couple threads out of that thought, but the one I associate with Philly more than any MLS team doubles as the big feather in their cap: they used that time to figure things, and well. Not perfectly, but still pretty fucking well. Something else about the Union: once you get used to thinking about a team a certain way, that impression becomes sticky. In this case, that meant forgetting they missed the playoffs in six of their first eight seasons. On the one hand, they made the post-season in Year 2 (yay!); on the other, they missed it over the next four seasons. Like any expansion team, most of that first roster came from the scraps they pulled out of the Expansion Draft. When the limits of that approach became apparent, Philly put real effort into signing game-changing players – e.g., Conor Casey and Maurice Edu, or even bigger swings like Cristian Maidana – but those players came and went before their dry spell in the playoffs ended. And then 2018 arrived and the Union hasn’t missed the playoffs since; better, they won the Supporters’ Shield…in the weird season (i.e., 2020) and strolled to MLS Cup 2022, where they contested one of the consensus best-ever finals in league history against Los Angeles FC. Being able to skim a healthy amount of cream from their academy system clearly had something to do with that – players like Derrick Jones, Auston Trusty, Brendan Aaronson, Jack McGlynn and Nathan Harriel don’t grow on trees – but, personally, I consider how much better they got at signing impact foreign signings the bigger story.

Best Season(s)

While I bet winning the Shield felt as good to Philly fans as winning the (one and only…please) MLS Is Back Trophy did for Timbers fans, I have to think reaching MLS Cup feels like their high-water mark*, despite the pain. Again, MLS Cup 2022 was a fucking party…so, why don’t I go with the obvious thing? (Because I’m me.)

(* Also, this call looks past their solid CONCACAF Champions League runs of recent seasons.)

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Philadelphia Union: (Back-Up) Paths of Glory

Again, that's 2 15/16th by one measure.

I wasn’t going to start this post with the question of whether FC Cincinnati’s big, CB-birthed late winner was or was not offside, but then I opened the phone and saw both the image and the measurement at right. Ian Murphy’s nod into the goal-mouth mosh-pit did look half a body offside in real time, but the call survived VAR’s second look and that ushered in Yerson Mosquera’s put-back and Cincy’s 1-0 win over the Philadelphia Union into the history books…

…that said, if that 2 15/16” measurement is accurate, that makes one hell of a statement on the OCD-madness of the post-modern offside rule. That is a fucking fraction, not a cheat-code.

Next thought: bring on Columbus Crew SC and getting the lighting dialed in because TQL Stadium is hosting a goddamn party next Saturday. A body usually has to go to Hollywood to get such perfect plotting.

To acknowledge the obvious, yes, this site fell off the FC Cincinnati beat in August of this season…and then again after the beginning of October. The explanation for that lapse in this boy scout’s duty speaks the thought that will carry this post to its conclusion – i.e., there’s not a lot to say besides, FC Cincinnati good, fire bad, and, whatever else you do, keep on lashing the hounds until they expire or reach the perfect destination, aka, MLS Cup 2023. Just two games stand between Cincy and one of the most thoroughly-redemptive doubles you’ll ever see in this budding whack-job of a league. As others have pointed out – which, here, means MLS’s in-house scribe Matt Doyle in the preview hit for last night’s game – the fact Cincy won anything at all in Year 5 constitutes enough of a miracle. The fact that the trophy in hand is the Supporters’ Shield – i.e., the one that requires consistent, almost grinding success – already gets the story of their 2023 season halfway to Hollywood.

Portland Timbers Preview: In Need of a Little Union Busting

Something to avoid in both soccer and life.

I’ve been eyeing Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Union as the likeliest brick-wall in what, until the Portland Timbers hacked up a lung down in San Jose, looked like a soft landing going into the June break. (And this is an international break, right?) Then again, Philly hasn’t exactly kept up expectations. Since bolting ahead in the Supporters’ Shield race early in the season, the Union haven’t won a game in weeks. Moreover, some of the points they’ve dropped - e.g., all three points away to Toronto (and that damn game sold me on TFC) plus two more at home just a couple nights ago against…fucking Miami?

I just sat through two good chunks of the Philly v Miami game - the first 30 minutes, then the 65th to…around the 80th - and, for what it’s worth, that experience doesn’t match the other spot-checks I’ve done on Philly games. They typically play vertically, even to a fault, but the Union either had an off-day, or Miami upset Plan A. They couldn’t start Julian Carranza, their second highest scorer and all-round second most effective player (four goals, three assists), due to the loan arrangement with Miami, so that’s one hole, and they started leggy, loping (yet generally competent) defender, Jack Elliott, as the defensive midfield in the absence of the regular, Jose Martinez (a player I don’t know well, btw). That might have pulled a leg out from Plan A, but, for all the forward movements that petered out or died on both sides of the center-stripe (so many), Philly still created plenty of chances, firing 20 shots, eight of them on goal. Against that, I saw most of those shots (the highlights include, well, the highlights of those), but it didn’t change the overall, real-time impression of a stymied, ambling Union attack.

To turn to some things that went well for Philly, Daniel Gazdag fired some menacing shots, and they’ve got a pair of solid shuttlers in Leon Flach and Alejandro Bedoya (who apparently speaks five languages), and they get solid overlapping options out of Kai Wagner and Nathan Harriel and/or Olivier Mbaizo (depending on who starts). Finally, to defend Philly’s…reasonably-maligned forwards, Sergio Santos and Cory Burke, both made good runs - e.g., see Santos’ run on one of Gazdag’s better shots (coulda had a tap-in) - and, even if either of them only puts away one chance in 15, the risk to Portland of allowing them 15 chances is real.

To flip in the other direction, even with a handful of other defenses in touch, the Union are the only team left standing on single digits for goals allowed. They’ve allowed just five goals over their past nine games, and three of those games came against your livelier attacking teams - e.g., Montreal, Red Bull and LAFC. Based on goals scored alone, Portland keeps up with all three of those teams, but anyone with a working memory knows that seven of the Timbers’ goals on the season came in a wheels-off blowout over Kansas City. Moreover, all those teams score steadily, whereas Portland has been shut-out three times and limited to one goal on six other occasions - i.e., a 0.67 goals-for average across most games. So, the question is, how does a putzing Timbers attack get past that, plus Andre Blake as a back-stop?

FC Cincinnati 0-2 Philadelphia Union: Alternate Timelines & Lassoing Metaphors

They do dress better over in that timeline...

To start with a notice from the Department of Corrections/Over-Reach: my preview tweets suggested that FC Cincinnati might benefit from the Philadelphia Union playing in a 4-4-2 diamond. Nope.Oh, and before getting rather existentially into the weeds below, I don't intend any of what's below to stand as "what it all means" judgments about FC Cincinnati, or their larger fate in 2019. If anything, this loss complicated all that.

If you missed the Philadelphia Union’s 3-0 win over Columbus Crew SC, you caught a fairly linear encore with their 2-0 win over FCCincinnati. It featured the same feeling of suffocation, of no way to keep the ball going where your team wants it to, and no thorough way of keeping it away from where they don’t. It seemed like Philly won every 50/50 ball, that they always had a player where they needed one to be and, even when it was one lone Union player that had to perform in order to keep bad things at pay, that player performed.

The Union had a better afternoon on the slippery turf of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, pure and simple. That left me more curious than usual to see how that game looked according to the box score, and FC Cincy’s tiny handful of shots feels like the number to highlight – even more than Philly firing off three times as many (and, just to note it, the duels/tackles data says the Union didn’t win every 50/50, and that says something about the function of perception). To hang a frame on it, this was the performance that critics of FC Cincinnati’s roster build expected to see in 2019, present company included. And, after yesterday’s loss, I mean that globally: expansion teams are supposed to look out of their depth, lacking in polish and sophistication, and on both sides of the ball. And that brings me to the Union’s second goal.

Matthieu Deplagne has impressed me as much as any player on FC Cincinnati’s roster; I’m also a Forrest Lasso stan going back to last June, think the world of the big lug and his upside, etc. And yet, examining the anatomy of that goal reveals that both players fucked up in that moment – Deplagne with his clearance-in-two-minds that dropped the ball at David Accam’s lurking feet, Lasso for biting on Accam’s cut eagerly as the world’s dumbest trout. Mistakes happen in these decisive moments (when mommy and daddy love each other very much, this is how goals happen, etc.), but that split second in time captured the macro-trends of the larger contest: the Union forced Cincinnati to do things…sub-optimally all game long. For the just the second time in 2019, FC Cincinnati looked like the out-classed expansion team.

Philadelphia, and Taking One’s Chances in the Shooting Gallery

Opposition defenses feel this, with even less comfort.

In my last "todo MLS" post, I clocked the warning signs that the long season and a little special attention might be catching up with the Philadelphia Union's stout-of-heart, green-in-age defensive outfit. Exhibit A in this argument came with the blind-side losses to the Vancouver Whitecaps in Philly and to New York City FC in New York, to games where the Union scored two goals and coughed up three. It looked like a pattern: after all, even Andre Blake, the man most likely to in conversations involving, say, Nick Rimando or Bill Hamid, slipped up a couple times.

That same game contained the seed of the flipside argument for how Philly survives into the playoffs (and maybe even goes deep): they score more than they give up – something they did against the Chicago Fire just a few weeks before. Yeah, yeah, that failed against the 'Caps; I have seen the Union's attack when it's firing and it's a lethal, glorious thing.

Philly fully embraced a "shooting gallery" approach to their games in June. They went 2-2-0 over the month, scoring goals, coughing 'em up, with eleven falling on either side of the ledger. No doubt, it took some quantity of cigarettes and booze to steady their nerves, but, when they considered those games, I like to believe that every man on the Union's roster knew he had lived that month, and well.