Ad Disclosure
Indomitable Philadelphia Union Win the 2025 Supporters’ Shield
Published:
The Union won the Supporters’ Shield on Saturday night with a 1-0 victory over New York City FC. They now have 66 points with one game to play and nobody can catch them:
It should not be lost on anyone that the Shield-winning goal was a deflected shot created by a midfield turnover. They’ve been doing that all year, turning defense into offense and tilting the field with numbers. It was a blue-collar goal scored by a blue collar team.
That was snapshot one.
Snapshot two was Jakob Glesnes capping his turnaround season with a huge block in stoppage time while Andre Blake caught the final corner kick to seal the deal.
Winning the Shield is obviously a tremendous accomplishment. It’s a trophy! It’s hardware! You can only win a handful of trophies every year, and this is the second in franchise history, joining the 2020 Shield in the figurative display case.
It’s even more of an accomplishment for a team that came into the season with a new coach and no expectations whatsoever. It wasn’t that they had low expectations, they had no expectations at all because we had no idea what they would be after Jim Curtin was fired and players like Daniel Gazdag and Jack McGlynn were sold. All we really knew is that Bradley Carnell was going to play the frenetic Red Bull system that did him well in St. Louis, matching the approach of like-minded sporting director Ernst Tanner, who, by the way, had a Howie Roseman-level season in the player-personnel department.
This team went 13 games unbeaten through the spring and into the summer and led the Shield race for most of the year. They lost only one game at home along the way and answered their few poor results with big turnarounds, for instance, a two-game win streak after losing in New York, then a three-game win streak after crashing out of the U.S. Open Cup a few weeks back. They showed a ton of resilience along the way and just outworked and outhustled every other team they played. They played a ton of guys and rotated the squad heavily and got contributions from so many guys. It really was incredible how deep they could go at times and still find a way.
We’ll do a longer writeup after the season finale and analyze the final numbers and do some comparisons to other Shield-winners, but in the meantime, enjoy:
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