Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Owner Sugarman speaks up: ‘We’re going to figure this out’
Jay Sugarman pauses a beat before addressing the question that he himself has posed.
After eight seasons and nearly a decade from its official inception, what are the Philadelphia Union’s core defining principles? Sugarman has the answer loaded and ready, outlined in three bold-faced points. But suffusing the argument are two arguably more vital facets, more style than substance.
The first, freely admitted on several occasions during a wide-ranging conversation with Digital First Media last week, is the blank that fans would fill in for him: That the ownership group, of which Sugarman is the principal, will not and cannot spend at the level of MLS’s exalted oligarchs.
The second is a level of tenacity and devotion to the mission for which the owner, long adopting an involved but recessed role, isn’t often credited with.
“I don’t back down from a fight,” Sugarman said. “We’re going to figure this out; we’re going to be successful. I’m not going to give up where we are. I don’t think there should be a shred of doubt in people’s minds that we’re going to get as close to building this into something that we should be proud of, that the fans will be proud of.”
Sugarman’s voluntary shying away from the spotlight has often led to observers filling in the blanks with certain assumptions. But Sugarman’s adamancy at maximizing the on-field return of his investment shows little sign of waffling. He’s spoken passionately in the past of learning the game, and though he’s delegated the operation of that side of the business to Earnie Stewart, the owner has reduced his reclusion in recent years and shared his philosophical spin on the game, couched in the investment terms that made him his fortune.
Hence the three-point plan he outlined. The first is the obvious, a commitment to player development and generally economical investment in talent, primarily from within the youth ranks that Sugarman reckons the team has invested in “more than anyone else” in MLS. Sugarman includes the “physical facilities strategy,” the extensive outlay of funds on infrastructure like the Power Training Complex, indicating that that phase is completed. That includes the cost of the youth training apparatus erected at YSC, which Sugarman pointed out affects not just 28 first-teamers but 120 players across all age levels.
Sugarman’s answer was less complete on the comparison of what, for instance, a dollar spent on the
first team yields compared to a dollar spent on the Academy, but those models continue to evolve. At a nascent stage, he’s more focused on ensuring that conclusions drawn with that data evolve apace.
The other two prongs are more ephemeral. The second involves team chemistry, the aspiration that “the collective talent of the team isn’t just the sum of its individual talent.” And the third involves finding competitive advantages via what Sugarman calls “unconventional” approaches, exploiting particular dimensions like set pieces to subtly increase the chances of winning for the long-term.
All that, Sugarman is careful to point out, isn’t a substitution for a greater expenditure of funds, but rather the framework for which the Union can maximize return on said money.
“We’re going to have a team that plays incredibly well together,” Sugarman said. “We’re going to have a youth development pipeline which will be as good or better than anyone in the league. And we are going to be good at those unconventional elements and innovations that can give us a couple of percentage points more than we otherwise would have. And if we do those three things well and the fans see that on the field, I’m going to call that real progress.”
The progress most fans are looking for, though, involves more tangible elements, such as how much money is poured into the first team. Sugarman was frank in declaring that spending will increase — and that he’s pledged such funds for much of Stewart’s tenure, but the time and opportunities weren’t right to strike. But the idea that the Union will ever match the wealth of teams like Atlanta United, backed by billionaire Arthur Blank, is out of the question — not by choice but by pragmatic necessity.
“We have some very, very wealthy owners in the league and financially, I can’t keep up with them,” Sugarman said. “I think we invest $5-10 million a year
in this club, and that’s all we can ever do. If teams have more resources than us, so be it. We’re going to figure out how to beat them. We’re going to crack the code and figure out what our competitive advantage is. …
“We shouldn’t be the team that just lines up and tries to play it straight up against teams that have spent two or three times more than us,” he continued. “We should line up against them and go, ‘yeah, you’ve spent more on your individual talent, but we’ve built a better, more cohesive, collective team. We do things you probably haven’t seen before and probably haven’t practiced against before, and we will win our small individual battles because of that. And you may win some games and we may win some games, but we will walk into that with a very high level of confidence that we will win.’ And that’s what we’re trying to instill in the entire organization, all the way down to our youngest kids, is that there is a Union style, a Union identity.”
The solution, he emphasized, isn’t quick fixes or one-player panaceas. And he’s willing to admit that, “near-term, clearly if we reallocated all those resources to the first team, we’d be a better team.”
But the goal is sustainability, embedding within the organization a long-term framework on which to build winning teams year after year, not just based on a winter or two of successful transfer splurges. That’s a path many years in the making, one that the Union embarked on long ago and with such a critical mass of resources that deviating from it isn’t likely, were it even desired.
A consequence of Sugarman’s investment is that when broached with the Columbus Crew question, he didn’t flinch. Despite residing in a much larger media market (albeit one where they’re marginalized by an established and revered sports centerpiece), the Union are in a similar boat as the Crew in certain metrics (Columbus was 20th in attendance
this season, the Union 19th) with less history of success on the field. Sugarman sits on the MLS expansion committee, much the same as Crew owner Anthony Precourt did before a plan to abscond with the Crew to Austin after the 2018 season in an end run around expansion rules.
Sugarman, though, espoused a continued commitment to Philadelphia and Chester, in particular.
“The team’s not going anywhere,” he said. “We just spent seven years buying a mile of riverfront to build a campus that we think will be an incredible long-term commitment to soccer in Philadelphia. Our actions should speak louder than words. We spent 10s of millions of dollars doubling down on, can we build a campus?
“The vision here is not small. It’s very big. We want to be successful, we want a great environment for our fans, for our employees, for our front office, and we want our players to walk onto that campus with pride and for their families to walk onto that campus with pride.”
The Union aren’t going to spend $20 million on a player in the foreseeable future, Sugarman conceded. But that’s doesn’t preclude a fervent desire to improve incrementally. And with Sugarman promising to loosen the purse strings this winter, he hopes benefits will come sooner rather than later.
“I would be disappointed if we don’t show up next year and look at our lineup and don’t go, ‘wow, we could be really good; this could be the best team in Union history,’” Sugarman said. “… It’s not going to happen tomorrow; we’ve still got a lot of work to do. But you should see improvement every year. …
“If you stick with us, you’ll be able to say, yeah, I was there when they were building all this. My goal is when we look back five or 10 years from now — and the fans should hold us to this — we need to be really good at all the things we say we’re going to be good at. I’m not saying we’re going to be good at buying $10 or $20 million players, but we’re going to be good at this.”