The Philadelphia Union dispatched Liga MX floppers Mazatlan F.C. on penalty kicks Saturday night to advance to the Leagues Cup semifinal for the second straight season. It was Andre Blake coming up with a huge regulation save and displaying the PK heroics after Tai Baribo was sent off with with a fugazi double yellow that forced the Union to play with ten men for 45 minutes.

If Blake was a baseball player, his WAR would be right up there with Aaron Judge, and if we’re talking basketball, his VORP would be Jokic-esque. That’s how much of a difference he makes when he’s on the field. They likely are out of the tournament if Oliver Semmle or Andrew Rick had to play, and not because those guys are shit, but because Blake is that good. That’s the very definition of “wins above replacement.”

But there’s a bit of cheeky irony in all of this, for several reasons:

1) The Union were so bad in league play earlier this year that they dropped all the way to last place in the Eastern Conference, resulting in fan protests and a town hall meeting that took place last week. Funny enough, that meeting coincided with a seven-game unbeaten streak that included two rounds of penalties against Mexican teams.

2) The team sold Julian Carranza to Feyenoord and Jose Martinez to Corinthians, so if they’re gonna win this tournament, they’re gonna do it without two of their best players from this incredible, multi-year run. Carranza has been gone for weeks, but Brujo’s last game was Saturday night, and he came off the bench to bang home a penalty in a symbolic final Union moment.


3) Some fans hate the Leagues Cup and are boycotting it. That includes a portion of the Sons of Ben, who haven’t gone to any of the games, and a number of season ticket holders who opted out of the tournament. Their stance is that Leagues Cup is a cash grab tournament, played exclusively on American soil, and they don’t like Major League Soccer’s dismissive stance on the United States Open Cup, which is the historic FA Cup-styled competition that includes lower division teams from across the country.

Alas, here we find the Union. Much maligned and facing scrutiny, having sold two of their best players while fans and media justifiably gripe, yet once again advancing to a tournament semifinal with a trophy and Champions League berth on the line. They reached this same point last year and got absolutely fucking trounced by Lionel Messi and Miami in the most frustrating Union game I’ve ever watched (and there have been many). Now they go to Columbus midweek to try to take out the defending MLS Cup champs for a shot at LAFC or Colorado in the final.

On one side of the spectrum, you might hear people say something like, “well the fan protests look silly now; they just needed a healthy Andre Blake and the end of summer international duties.” That’s true, the absences killed them in the spring, but I think it proves the point that myself and other people have been hammering over and over for two years now, and that’s the idea that this remains a very good team and was deserving of reinforcements and additional spending. That core of Blake, Kai Wagner, Jakob Glesnes, Jack Elliott, Daniel Gazdag, (an aging) Alejandro Bedoya, Leon Flach, Nate Harriel, and Mikael Uhre remains mostly intact. They’ve lost Carranza, Brujo, and some peripheral pieces. So the original and mostly consistent argument wasn’t really about blowing up a washed team, it was criticism for running it back twice without making the necessary moves to help the core get over the hump.

And you might say, “well they signed Tai Baribo, and Danley Jean-Jacques is here, and they got Sam Adeniran.” Yeah sure, but Baribo inexplicably sat behind Chris Donovan on the bench and DJJ just arrived two minutes ago. Adeniran is a bench piece. It was all reactionary. They didn’t introduce these reinforcements until the bottoming out that coincided with selling Carranza and moving Brujo to Brazil. We weren’t looking to replace the entire squad, we were looking for additions to win that second trophy and bolster a team that:

  • lost the 2023 Leagues Cup semifinal 4-1
  • lost the 2023 Champions League semifinal 4-1 on aggregate
  • lost the 2022 MLS Cup in the dying moments
  • lost the 2021 Champions League semifinal 4-0 on aggregate

That was always the concept. This was a team that was really close; they just couldn’t clear the final hurdle and would thump their head on the ceiling once they got there. We’ve seen it time and time again, twice in the CCL and most painfully in MLS Cup, when LAFC brought Gareth fucking Bale off the bench to hand Philadelphia one of its three championship losses that season.

Now the situation presents itself again, curiously, since we had all assumed this team wasn’t going anywhere following the 6-0 Champions League exit and poor start to league play. If you’re Union ownership, you’re thinking what? That this team is good enough and the strategy continues to work? You don’t need to make a splash signing because the core is still good enough to go on a semifinal run like this? To me, it just strengthens the prior argument. This was still a very good team and there needed to be more urgency in the last two to three transfer windows.

Regardless, they can beat Columbus in Ohio. Why not? The Crew are nasty, don’t get me wrong, but they thrashed Cincinnati on the road last week and they’re in good form. If Blake keeps playing at this level, he’ll keep them in the game. And if they get smoked again, we add it to the semifinal loss list with an asterisk, because they really were not supposed to be here.