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The 29th-Place Philadelphia Union Have the Lowest Payroll in Major League Soccer
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The MLS Players Association releases salary information each year, and for the first time in franchise history, the Union are dead last:
They also happen to be 29th out of 30 MLS teams in the current standings, with 6 points through 12 games and a record of one win, eight losses, and three draws.
This is not some revelation by any means, as the Union have historically been one of the league’s most thrifty teams. In fact, they wear it as a badge of honor, and they won the 2025 Supporters’ Shield with Major League Soccer’s second-lowest payroll, playing their version of Red Bull Moneyball en route to 66 points and the #1 playoff seed.
Jay Sugarman’s club has largely overachieved relative to first-team spending by investing in the youth academy, promoting those players from within, and focusing their trade and transfer strategy on the pursuit of diamonds in the rough, guys like Kai Wagner and Julian Carranza, who inevitably become studs. They do not pay large transfer fees and they do not pursue superstar players like Lionel Messi, Son Heung-min, and Thomas Mueller, preferring to play a direct and non-possession German system in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, Messi’s guaranteed compensation of $28.3 million is more than twice the Union’s entire payroll, which is headlined by Andre Blake as the only seven-figure earner.
It’s always been a precarious balance for the U, who have overachieved tremendously in recent years. They’ve outperformed their payroll while other teams have spent a lot of money and failed miserably, so it’s not always a clear correlation between the two. But this is something that has kept fans at bay, and limited enthusiasm for a team that has done everything else right in recent years. They have an identity. They have a great academy. They have a distinct style of play. They just don’t spend on transfers like a big and ambitious club and that’s probably not changing as long as Sugarman owns the team. And their effectiveness within this identity is heavily tied to Ernst Tanner’s uncanny ability to identity these dudes we’ve never heard of, and turn them into All Stars.
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