The Philadelphia Union season begins next Wednesday with a trip to Costa Rica, where Jim Curtin’s squad will play Champion’s League soccer for the first time.

That’s the reward for winning the 2020 Supporter’s Shield, which granted entry into the highest continental contest. It’ll be Union at Deportivo Saprissa in the first leg, with a second leg taking place at Subaru Park on April 14th.

Joining the club this season is a new color commentator, Danny Higginbotham, who played in the English Premier League and married a Philadelphia native. He moved to the United States this past November and you may have watched him years ago playing with Stoke City and Sunderland, or during recent media appearances with NBC and Sky Sports.

He recently joined me on the It’s Always Soccer in Philadelphia podcast to talk about his U.S. move, the growth of the American game, and his time in the Premier League. One of the topics we got into was his tenure at Stoke, who were sometimes negatively described as a blue collar team that played ugly, but effective soccer.

Here’s part of our conversation:

KK: Back then, when you were playing for Stoke, you also had Barcelona with Xavi, Messi, and Iniesta. And they were playing ‘tiki-taka’ and beautiful football and you had all of these people saying that this was how the game was supposed to be played. That always bothered me because I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong way to play the game. And I can see “beauty” in areas where others might not. To me, there was beauty in Ryan Shawcross putting in a crunching tackle, or Rory Delap throwing the ball 40 yards into the box. It wasn’t always pleasing to the eye, but it was effective in a lot of ways, and I’m curious as to your take on that. 

Danny Higginbotham: There is a snobbery in (saying) that there’s only one way to play. Now, in the Premier League, with Stoke, if we said ‘right, we’re gonna play the beautiful game, we’re gonna play like Barcelona,’ we’d have gotten relegated with zero points and probably a minus-500 goal differential (laughing). So, you play to your strengths. When you talk about different identities and philosophies, there’s no right or wrong in my opinion. There is winning. That’s what it comes down to.

Now, you’ll have a few teams who can do both. They can win while also playing football that’s pleasing to the eye. But they are very few and far between. You had your great Barcelona teams. And Barcelona now are not the team of Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets, when he was playing at his best, or when Messi was at his best. They’re not the same team because they don’t have those players anymore. You look at Manchester City and they’re absolutely incredible and deserve credit for what they’ve done. The managers, players, recruitment. People talk about them having hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, and I get that, but you know what? If you gave me 500 million pounds, I would not have been racing away with the Premier League, no matter what team I was at.

…

But to answer your question, it never used to bother us. It used to fuel us. Because we knew that teams did not want to come to Stoke. We knew that 90% of the games we won at home were won just as we walked outside of the tunnel. I played at all different stadiums, and Stoke was like 28,000 or 30,000 (capacity). The atmosphere there during those first two or three seasons in the Premier League was incredible. It would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, including us, who were used to it every week. And we used to speak to opposing players. Sometimes after a game you would be in the tunnel having a chat and it would just be like, ‘thank God we’re not playing you again.’ Teams would practice all week how they were going to defend Rory (Delap’s) long throw. So that prevented them from concentrating on their game.

We also got into the role of the color commentator and had a brief discussion about contemporary defending. Here’s the full podcast for your listening pleasure: