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More than 25% of the USA’s Gold Cup Roster is Union Players or Alumni
Published:
This is the U.S. team that will compete for the 2025 Gold Cup, which is a summer tournament among CONCACAF countries that sometimes features invitees from other continents:
That’s two current Union players in Quinn Sullivan and Nate Harriel and five alumni in Matt Freese, Mark McKenzie, Jack McGlynn, and the Aaronson brothers. Freese is an academy product who got stuck behind Andre Blake on the goalkeeper depth chart and was eventually traded to New York City. Paxten Aaronson was similarly stuck at his position, so the Union sold him to Eintracht Frankfurt in November of 2022. McGlynn wasn’t a fit for the Union’s Red Bull system and sent to Houston this winter, while McKenzie and Brenden Aaronson were key pieces on the Shield-winning 2020 team.
Seven out of 26 players is 26.9% of the roster and impressive regardless of how much these guys did or didn’t play for the Union first team.
The Union pride themselves on youth development and bringing kids through the ranks. It’s nice to see these guys go on to Europe, so long as you’re balancing competitiveness at the club level with smart transfer business to the point where you’re not becoming a “selling club.” In the case of Paxten, it feels like the Union didn’t get much out of him, the counterpoint being that the guy blocking his inclusion, Daniel Gazdag, went on to become the top goal scorer in franchise history. There are only so many spots on the field, so if you get yourself into a logjam, you offload the players with transfer value and keep churning.
In a perfect world, the best players would stay here, and not go on to Europe, but unless you’re one of the top 8-10 teams on the planet, you’re selling players to bigger clubs. The ideal situation, knowing what we know about the Union philosophy, is for this team to become the Ajax or Benfica of Major League Soccer, essentially a team that competes for trophies while developing and transferring at the same time.
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