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After Latest Big Game Loss, Slumping Union Risk Throwing a Tremendous Season Right into the Toilet
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Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Philadelphia Union played a tournament semifinal and lost, this time crashing out of the U.S. Open Cup after a relative thumping at the hands of Nashville SC:
“Relative” is a fair term because the Union did cut the lead to 2-1 in the second half following a beautiful Quinn Sullivan curler. They looked like themselves for a 10-minute window, but spent the other 80 minutes on their heels and defending at an amateur level, conceding on a flicked throw in and a recycled set piece. What we saw out there was a shell of the team that’s won 17 league games and currently leads Major League Soccer with 57 points through 30 games.
Going into Tuesday night, there were two prevailing schools of thought.
1) Saturday night’s 7-0 loss in Vancouver was an aberration, a total outlier made possible only by squad rotation ahead of the USOC semifinal.
2) Maybe that thumping would linger for 72 hours and stick with the team in Tennessee.
It seems like the latter ended up being the case. Over their last two games, the U have scored one goal and allowed 10. They’ve been a step off the pace and haven’t been able to press and turn over opponents and get out in transition like they typically do. The lack of typical bite was jarring.
One prevailing storyline that’s top of mind in Union land is the team’s constant run to finals and semifinals, where they inevitably fall short. More often than not, they get played off the pitch, so it’s one of those things where they hit their head on the ceiling, and very hard. As such, we keep a running list of big game losses in the franchise’s 16-year history, a list that now looks like this:
- 2014 USOC final – lost at home
- 2015 USOC final – lost at home, on penalty kicks
- 2018 USOC final – thumped on the road in Houston
- 2021 Champions League both semifinal legs – lost 4-0 on aggregate to Club America
- 2022 MLS Cup – conceded in the dying moments and then lost on penalties
- 2023 Champions League 2nd leg – smoked 3-0 in LA, took a bad red card
- 2023 Leagues Cup semifinal – trounced at home by Lionel Messi and company
- 2024 Leagues Cup semifinal – lost 3-1 in Columbus
- 2025 USOC semifinal – lost 3-1 in Nashville
That list is mostly comprehensive The caveat is that they certainly do have big game wins as well. Obviously you don’t reach a final without winning a semifinal, but at the end of the day they’ve got just one trophy to show for their otherwise stellar efforts, and that was the 2020 COVID Shield, an achievement, of course, just a different kind of achievement.
We’ve talked in the past about betting trends. The Union were a road dog on Tuesday night and were dogs in most of these games. Even the games that were played before the advent of legal sports betting, they probably would have been dogs as well. So it’s not necessarily surprising, the end result. Nobody is shocked that a team with Lionel Messi beat a scrappy moneyball Union team. But they’ve been poor in a lot of these games, so it’s less about the losses themselves and more about how lackluster they always seem to be.
It’s like they reach the second-to-last stop on the Mount Everest climb and can’t seem to reach the summit. It’s a topic we’ve talked about over and over and over again, whether or not that final bit of investment is required to win the second trophy in franchise history. Ironically, the Union were offered Thomas Muller this summer, went public in explaining why they wouldn’t sign him, and then he scored a hat trick against the U on Saturday. Not that it made much different in a 7-0 win, because if you took away those three goals, they would have simply lost 4-0, but like most things Union, the optics of star power, or lack thereof, totally stink.
The good news is that the Union have two more opportunities to win trophies this year. They lead the Supporters’ Shield race with four games left to play. Two are winnable at home, one is winnable on the road, then they have a tough trip to Charlotte to close it out. But we’re gonna learn a lot about this team on Saturday night, when they return to Subaru Park after back-to-back hammerings at the hands of good squads.
Is this Union squad for real, or does a tremendous season give way to yet another admirable bit of overachievement without actually winning a trophy?
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com