Transfer window shut with no additions

Jay Sugarman wasn’t afraid to call the Union’s summer transfer window, “an unusual and unfortunate situation” Thursday.

It’s not ideal to be transitioning from one sporting director to another with a week left in the abbreviated summer window. On the one hand was the outgoing Earnie Stewart, who out of respect and practicality wasn’t going to start doling out long-term contracts with the money of a team whose employ he would no longer be in after Aug. 1. On the other was Ernst Tanner, who wasn’t formally introduced as the Union’s new sporting director until Thursday and won’t take office until late September after wrapping up his work with Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg.

The Union have ordinarily struggled with the balance between short-term urgency vs. long-term restraint. So it’s no surprise that the summer window came and went without any reinforcements for a team competing on two fronts despite, for a second straight summer, a glaring weakness to shore up.

“I think for us, we were sort of weighing at the same time, the opportunity to get into the playoffs, but there’s certainly a transition,” technical director Chris Albright said Thursday after the press conference introducing Tanner. “So we want to make sure that what is going to be clearly defined as the way forward, that we were identifying players to fit that system and not endangering long-term flexibility by jumping on some ‘now’ opportunity to maybe, again, push us into the playoffs because none of those things are certainties. We were close on a couple of things, but in the end, it just didn’t make sense in terms of endangering our flexibility long-term.”

The Union are situated in seventh in the Eastern Conference, one spot outside the playoff places. They will contest the final of the U.S. Open Cup Sept. 26 in a trip to Houston, booked with a 3-0 win over Chicago Wednesday night at Talen Energy Stadium.

But even with the glaring need for attacking help on a team near the bottom in MLS in goals scored, the Union didn’t make a move in the transfer window. It was the same story in 2017 when a club on the outside of the playoff picture with an obvious need at the No. 10 spot didn’t make any additions.

The reason this year, Albright and others said, had to do with the risk-reward calculus. Tanner, an executive for 24 years in Europe, will have his first transfer window in January. To encumber him with long-term deals and deprive him of valuable salary-cap flexibility would be to a do a disservice to the man tasked with ushering the next era of the Union’s growth and contrary to the vote of confidence boisterously offered Thursday.

Union owner Jay Sugarman talked at length about minimizing risk in the transfer window — that with the Union’s financial capabilities and the restraints of the salary cap, most dives into the transfer market have to be successful. A desperate purchase under the deadline gun is unlikely to have met those criteria while taking resources from the person brought in with that mandate.

“We went into the window really looking at our cap space and what we could actually accomplish and looking what our needs were, and trying to see if there was a mixture of pieces we could move and pieces that we could bring in that could make us better really for the next 12 games,” Sugarman said. “There is a longer-term view, but really we wanted Ernst to be part of the longer-term decisions, so this was more focused on what could we get right now that would make us a better team through the last third of the season.”

Albright stressed the increasingly collaborative nature of this transfer window. Stewart remained engaged until his final day on the job and maintained normal lines of communication through Albright and manager Jim Curtin up the chain to Sugarman. Tanner was also looped in to the process.

Sugarman and company were adamant while the changing of eras influenced the potential benefits and drawbacks of moves, the inactivity wasn’t because of anything falling through the cracks.

“It didn’t give us our best opportunity,” Sugarman said. “But I don’t think we missed anything that Chris and Jim would’ve pounded the table and said, ‘guys this is the piece; this is what we want to do.’”