‘Building’ mantra falls flat in another lost season
CHESTER » Jim Curtin has been in charge of the Union for more than three years. Earnie Stewart’s reign is approaching its twoyear anniversary. All the while, they’ve talked about building — incrementally, sustainably, locally.
“We spoke about the foundation last year and we’re still building on that foundation,” Stewart said back in May. “All the clichés — ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and all that — it’s all fine and dandy because it doesn’t really mean that much.”
All that chatter about building and the Union left Talen Energy Stadium Saturday night with its playoff hopes in a pile of rubble, scattered in the wreckage of a 3-0 loss to Montreal. That result dropped the Union to 10th in the Eastern Conference on points-per-game, marked the club’s worst home loss in more than four years and, with four of five looming on the road, casts a pall over already slim hopes of avoiding a sixth playofffree season in eight years.
The symbolism of Saturday’s dismantling, wrought by two goals and a drawn penalty by exactly the kind of No. 10 in Blerim Dzemaili that the Union so desperately lack, underscored the deficiencies of the Union’s roster. But they also highlight a more pernicious malady at the heart of the Union’s rhetoric.
The Union have chased the playoffs since a disastrous start. With 10 games to play, six on the road and eight against teams in playoff position, they are six points from the sixth and final playoff spot. Yet they chose to stand pat in the summer transfer window when five months of the season made it plain that they weren’t of playoff caliber as currently constructed.
Instead, the club bided its time. When the right opportunity failed to present itself (or, put another way, they failed to find the right piece), Stewart opted to wait for the club’s stocks of young talent to blossom before augmenting the roster further with established players.
That is the great fallacy of the Philadelphia Union: That the internal wellspring of talent is poised to gush forth at any moment. The evidence in the roster paints a concerning picture about the club’s track record developing talent.
For years, building from within has been billed as the way of the future. But when it substitutes for spending on polished players, it looks parsimonious in comparison to 21 other MLS teams that made moves to strengthen their squads ahead of last Wednesday’s summer transfer deadline. The Union’s big acquisitions? A Chief Tattoo Officer to bolster the glossy marketing materials come convention season, and a paltry $50,000 consolation from Columbus for the international spot they couldn’t fill.
All of which would be more acceptable if the Union had a years-long reputation for coaching up its talent. The central conceit is how much they’ve struggled in this department.
Keegan Rosenberry, last year’s runner-up as MLS Rookie of the Year, hasn’t sniffed an MLS start in four months. Fabian Herbers’ sophomore year has been blighted by injuries, as has Josh Yaro’s, though the defender for the second time in as many starts Saturday committed an error leading directly to a goal.
Richie Marquez has fallen off the map. Derrick Jones has started three games in four months, around an injury and international duty. Fellow Homegrown Auston Trusty is nowhere near a start.
All that should pour cold water on rosy prognostications of where Jack Elliott, Marcus Epps and Adam Najem could be in a year.
And it’s a systemic problem. The Union’s previous three Homegrowns failed to pan out. The Union have made eight top-10 SuperDraft selections in franchise history; only one, Andre Blake, is currently an MLS regular. Three of the Union’s 10 all-time firstround draft picks are out of MLS altogether.
Countless other young players of promise (Sheanon Williams, Michael Farfan) or talented reclamation projects (Andrew Wenger) have washed out in Philadelphia.
And while many of those stumbles were overseen by previous coaches and a patchwork of executives, the ownership’s spendthrift ethos is the connecting thread.
Until a success story other than Blake, a can’tmiss talent whose development stalled with the Union before being rebooted, appears, there’s little reason to believe the trend changes. That gives the Union no justification for believing they’ve somehow gamed the system to exempt them from spending on players. The “money” part of the moneyball ethos so often bandied about, even in paragon Billy Bean’s strictest interpretation, still involves some efflux of cash.
“What we set out to do 18 months ago was build something for the future and make sure there was a foundation set and the add-ons we would do at a certain point would be good, would be better than what we have,” Stewart said this week. “And up to now I think we’re doing a good job at that.
“Sometimes people want to go very fast with things. It’s as simple as that. It’s for us to judge if going that fast is good, and I don’t believe that right now. A lot of these things that a while back we were talking about, we need to change this and that because I don’t believe in that. Consistency, structure and vision is going to get you somewhere. Sometimes less is more.”
This season, the Union have shown that when it comes to talent and spending, “less” results in less in the standings, less in the playoff qualification category and, you’d imagine by October, less in the attendance column.