Union

Here’s a Comprehensive List of Asterisks, Footnotes, and Caveats for the Philadelphia Union’s Remarkable Supporters’ Shield Triumph

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Oct 8th, 2025 · 3:18 PM EDT

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The Philadelphia Union won the 2025 Supporters’ Shield on Saturday evening, moving to 66 points on the season with 20 wins, 7 losses, 6 draws, and a +24 goal differential. They finish the season with a road trip to Charlotte next weekend, which provides another opportunity for a quality win to put the cherry on top of an already-scrumptious footballing sundae.

As we comb through all of the various pieces of information and legitimate caveats out there, here’s an attempt to parse all of it into bulletpoint format. Use this information as you see fit, either for reference or in social media arguments:

1) Does the Shield even matter? Yeah, of course it does. To what extent is certainly personal opinion.

Of the available trophies each season, I think the Shield is harder to win than the U.S. Open Cup, in which you only need to put together a five-game winning streak, and/or advance on penalties. And oftentimes you play four of those games at home and get a USL team in the early rounds.

It could possibly be more difficult to win than Leagues Cup, depending on the draw and how much the Liga MX teams even care.

The Shield requires consistent excellence over eight months and 34 games, and while the schedule is unbalanced, we examine each Shield winner individually and affix the appropriate asterisks to better contextualize their achievements.

2) To that end, this Union team should absolutely go for it in week 34 in Charlotte. They have a chance to finish with the most points in franchise history and stay above the 2.00 PPG mark, which would go a long way in future discussion of Shield winners. 66 points is a good Shield winner. 69 is really good Shield winner. They can’t get to 70 and match the level of 2024 Miami, 2021 New England, 2019 LAFC, or 2018 Red Bull, but they can finish with more points than the 2022 LAFC team that won it all.

For the record:

• finishing with 69 points would put them in a three-way tie with 2023 Cincy and 2017 Toronto for 5th most points as a Shield winner
• finishing with 67 points would put them in a three-way tie with 2022 LAFC and David Beckham’s 2011 LA Galaxy for 8th most points for a Shield winner
• finishing with 66 points would put them in a two-way tie with the 2012 Quakes (Bash Brothers era) for 10th most points as a Shield winner

Notable, of course, is that the Union won the 2020 COVID Shield with 2.04 PPG. They played a regional schedule shortened by the pandemic.

*The one thing that’s really difficult to research here is how many teams played their full squads in weeks 33 and 34 vs. wrapping up the Shield and resting before the playoffs. Maybe we can get A.I. to research that and add another layer of detail at some point.

3) MLS used to play a shorter schedule before expanding to 34 games in 2011. If you go back and look at Shield winners from 1996 to 2011, there are three that finished at 2 PPG or better. That’s the 1998 Galaxy (won 24 of 32 games, including two shootouts), the 2001 Miami Fusion, and the 2005 Quakes. I personally think this Union team handles the Fusion and Quakes, but that ’98 Galaxy team was a juggernaut with prime Cobi Jones and Mauricio Cienfuegos leading the attack.

4) In terms of schedule strength, the Union did not end up with the world’s most difficult slate. In league play, they ended up facing only two playoff teams from the Western Conference in Vancouver and Dallas, and Vancouver hammered them 7-0 on a night when they were holding some of the starters for the U.S. Open Cup semifinal. The Union managed to avoid San Diego, Minnesota, LAFC, Seattle, Austin, and Portland.

In the Eastern Conference, their best win, by far, was the Cincinnati road game. Brilliant performance out there. They beat Cincy twice, Charlotte (with a chance for 2x), New York City, Orlando, and Chicago (2x). They had some trouble with Nashville and Miami and Columbus, which hurts their resume, but while everybody else was struggling against the dregs of MLS, the Union’s level never dropped. They handled teams like D.C. and Atlanta and New England and it was the strength of those showings that won them the Shield.

A caveat here is that MLS expansion continues to affect SOS. With 30 teams and 34 games now, there’s just less East/West crossover than there used to be. Compare it to 2015, for example, when only 20 teams were in the league. Those schedules deviated much less than they do now.

5) It has to be said that the Union benefited tremendously from a thin fixture list. They did not play in the Champions’ Cup, Leagues Cup, or Club World Cup. They only had the 34-game MLS schedule and a U.S. Open Cup slate that wound up being four games. Before the playoffs, that amounts to 38 games.

Miami, LAFC, Cincy, Vancouver, and Seattle, by comparison, played in the CCC. Three of those teams also played in the CWC. Vancouver had the Canadian Championship while Miami and Seattle both played 6 Leagues Cups games en route to the final. So the total volume of games for other Shield contenders was considerably more than the Union’s total.

Credit to the Union for taking advantage of this. Bradley Carnell employed heavy squad rotation to keep the team fresh and ready to go. They often looked like the more energetic and rested club. They dealt with their share of international absences just like everyone else, but their depth really showed up in a big way, especially during that middle part of the schedule when guys like Markus Anderson and Jesus Bueno were scoring huge goals.

6) Never forget that leading goal scorer Tai Baribo missed games because he got stuck in Israel while a war was going on. He was also injured for a time.

7) What’s incredible is to think that the Union did this after selling both Jack McGlynn and Daniel Gazdag. The McGlynn sale made sense since he was just not a good fit for this system, but Gazdag started relatively well before he was shipped out to Columbus, where he scored 3 goals and contributed 4 assists. That move ended up working out for the Union, as did the record signing of Bruno Damiani, who came on strong at the end of season and scored in three of the last five games leading up to the Shield clinch.

8) Not only the big moves, but Ernst Tanner hit on basically everything. Jovan Lukic was a dawg. Danley Jean-Jacques was a dawg. Olwethu Makhanya had his breakout season. Frankie Westfield looked unfazed in year #1 and Jakob Glesnes rediscovered his All-Star form. Milan Iloski was an aggressive mid-season addition and they got quality minutes from guys like Indiana Vassilev and Andrew Rick. We weren’t totally sure what would happen when Ian Glavinovich was lost for the season, but it ended up not mattering, because Glesnes and Makhanya played incredibly well and Nate Harriel deputized admirably at CB.

Tanner’s 2025 was 2024 Howie Roseman-levels of quality.

9) It’s hard to measure “buy in” from the outside, but these guys just looked so much more committed than other squads. They always played hard. No divas, no crappy body language, none of that. Just dawgs up and down the roster. That’s the #1 thing you can say about this team. Every single night they went out and there and outworked the opponent, and outside of the Vancouver game, they weren’t played off the pitch. Of their seven losses, five were by a single goal.

10) The system adjustment really did this team well. We did the “Red Bull Philadelphia” joke at the beginning of the year, but that’s exactly what they were. They played Red Bull soccer better than any Red Bull team going back to 2018, when Carnell was an assistant up there.

Specifically, they shifted out of the single-pivot diamond and played a flat midfield instead. They pressed out of a 4-2-4 and just sent wave after wave of pressure at opposing teams. If you got through that first wave, you had Lukic and Danley waiting for you.

On the back end, you had the best LB in the league, a seemingly-reincarnated Glesnes, Makhanya, and then Westfield and Harriel in front of either Andre Blake or Rick. There wasn’t a single position where they didn’t have quality.

11) You want a stat that shows off the team-wide contributions? 18 different players scored for the Union this season.

12) Who would win in a 10-game series: the 2025 Union or the 2022 Union? That’s probably an exercise for another time, but the way I see it, I think the 2022 team had a lower floor and a higher ceiling while the 2025 team had a lower ceiling and higher floor. Make sense? That 2022 run was incredible. +46 goal differential and a run to MLS Cup. They were just killing teams for a while. We’ll see how this team does in the playoffs, then revisit the hypothetical.

13) I’m sure the league office was annoyed that a Moneyball team with no marketable superstars won the Shield. The Union had the second-lowest payroll in all of MLS this season. What does it mean when the high-spending teams flame out and the cheapskates win?

For what it’s worth, as thrifty as the Union have been over the years, they did go out and spend $5 million in transfer fees on Damiani, Iloski, Lukic, and Vassilev if you factor allocation money into the equation. On the other hand, they brought back close to the same amount in the McGlynn and Gazdag moves. So did they really spend more, or just sell a few players to generate the money? I guess it depends on how you break it all down. But the bottom line is that they were just more aggressive with larger dollar amounts both inbound and outbound, which hadn’t been the case in 2023 and 2024.

Anything I missed? Drop me a line and I’ll add it to the post.