No narrative in sports is more pervasive than that of the star player, who bears not only the weight of expectation but almost singlehandedly affixes relevance competitions of their choice. The bigger star, the larger they loom – MLS marked the eve of the first round of the playoffs by celebrating Lionel Messi’s contract extension with Inter Miami, the World Cup winner once again positioned to be the central focus of the postseason.
The league’s most fascinating and entertaining quirk, though, is that stars have a spotty track record. It is not just that Messi has yet to win MLS Cup in his third season with Miami; in recent years, MLS’ top distinction has mostly been won by teams without a globally-recognized talent leading the way. Gareth Bale was the last to do so with LAFC in 2022, eight years after Robbie Keane’s LA Galaxy combined star power with trophies. It is the perfect entry point for MLS’ less flashy teams to not just catch up to their more famous counterparts, but outdo them with shrewd decision-making.
It is undoubtedly a more complicated approach but clearly an effective one, making the MLS Cup playoffs the most intriguing testing ground for the sport’s data revolution, one that has allowed teams with a perceived lack of glamor to punch above their weight. Most eyes may be on Messi’s Miami, Son Heung-min’s LAFC and Thomas Muller’s Vancouver Whitecaps during the postseason but teams like the Philadelphia Union, the Supporters’ Shield winners, provide the perfect counterbalance ahead of the playoffs as MLS’ stars vs. system discourse rages on.
“Underlying [the Union’s success are] a couple other ideas and these are also, for me, really compelling ways to separate us, perhaps, from clubs that have a different way of thinking about it,” Union chairman and majority owner Jay Sugarman, a self-described contrarian, said. “We love challenging conventional thinking. Tell us what everybody’s doing and we’ll probably try to find something a little bit different. We have to have that mindset to really continue to be ahead of the pack.”
The Union’s little-by-little approach
The Union are not MLS’ most deep-pocketed team, usually falling somewhere in the middle on a list of team valuations and money spent on transfer fees and player wages. It is hard to deny their recent success, though – they have won the Supporters’ Shield in three of the last six seasons and lead MLS in total points since the start of the 2020 campaign. They even got close to MLS Cup during that stretch, taking the final to a penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw with LAFC that remains one of the most exciting matches in the league’s history. Their achievements are rooted in a detailed approach that is more about small steps than big strides.
“I love this idea, always have, in business and in sports of kaizen, which is this idea of continuous improvement,” Sugarman said. “We’re not going to get to the end game in one step. It’s going to be a lot of little steps but if everybody tried to make their piece of the puzzle better, we will look back and realize we’ve made a lot of progress and that’s really been our mantra for the last six, seven, eight years.”
The Union treat their tactical system as their star, a non-negotiable presence on the field in a role frequently filled by a talented player, shepherded by longtime sporting director Ernst Tanner and executed by head coach Bradley Carnell in his first year with the club. Sugarman bills the Union’s tactical approach as a bit counterculture, though it feels in line with recent tactical evolutions across the sport as off-the-ball movement and set plays receive increased importance. The Union value “dangerous possession” closer to the opponent’s goal more than anything else, so they ranked last this season in touches in their own half and pass completion rate. “We may not make the easy passes but we make hard passes,” Sugarman said. “We put the opponent where they have a tough time handling what’s coming next.”
They make up for it by being first in tackles, interceptions and counterpress regains and use all of the tricks available to them. The Union are first in crosses, throw-ins and corners this season, the collection of the strategies leading them to also have the fewest shots conceded and MLS’ best defensive record with just 35 goals against. The team’s data-driven approach extends to their focus on the academy, a sense of pragmatism guiding their overall strategy as they turn interesting statistics into results.
“This is a stat I love: 40 to 80% of players in leagues are domestic,” Sugarman pointed out. “So if you have the best domestic players, you got a big leg up and so we think this is part of winning but it has a double benefit of helping the ecosystem of the sport in the United States continue to grow. Youth development, really important to us. Player development, probably the bigger story. We want player development to never stop.”
The Union’s success in recent years is underlined by the team’s culture, which Sugarman described as a mix of having “players who make other players better” and a coach in Carnell who has high emotional intelligence, something that is “a lot harder to find”in coaching candidates. It also allows Sugarman to actually reject the stars vs. system debate altogether, and not only because it works in MLS.
“You also see that in the Premier League,” Sugarman said. “Man United can spend a fortune. If you don’t get the systems right, if you don’t get the culture right, it’s not just a function of how much you spend. … Look around the table at our [owners’] meetings. Half the clubs are owned by NFL teams and big corporate enterprises. That’s not going to be a sustainable strategy for us so for us, it really comes down to working every day to get a little better at the elements and we think that’s going to serve us very well.”
Stars, playoffs and MLS’ eternal game of push and pull
The stars who have won MLS Cup in the last decade may be few and far between but there is one necessary caveat in this league – those teams have a better track record winning the Supporters’ Shield. The Union and teams like it have come out with the best regular season record time and time again, but so did Messi’s Miami in 2024, Bale’s LAFC in 2022 and a Carlos Vela-led LAFC in 2019. The question facing each of those teams, starry or not, is if they can translate that to the playoffs – and which method is the best one in order to reach the mountaintop.
The Union have already designated themselves as a system-focused team but Sugarman said there is a semblance of a symbiotic relationship between teams like theirs and the star-studded ones, perfectly coexisting in a league defined by its eclectic contrasts.
“Messi’s been fantastic for this league, Sonny’s been fantastic, Muller’s fantastic, so we don’t want to take away their press,” Sugarman said. “I don’t want them not to get the attention. It’s great for the league and it’s great for MLS as a whole, which inevitably is good for us, but at the end of the day, we don’t want the league to be about three cities and three stars. We want it to be about a league that has grown massively, continues to invest dramatic amounts of money to be a better and better and better league and it won’t happen overnight and I think everybody appreciates the progress we’ve made but I think we’re starting to get a little bit of credibility around the world [that] this might be the right place for a lot of really good players.”
Messi’s contract renewal with Miami, then, might just be good news for the Union and their counterparts. While Sugarman admitted that MLS’ new stars shine a light on all 30 teams, many of the sport’s top clubs are still out of the loop on the strides the league has made over the years.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve crossed that everybody just accepts MLS as a growing, exciting, good-to-play-in league,” Sugarman said. “No. We still have work to do and so every one of those ambassadors who come over and say this league’s really good – and you rarely hear somebody come over here and say, ‘this is worse than I expected.’ What I always hear is, ‘this is better than I expected,’ and that trajectory hopefully leads to what we all want, which is: we want to be one of the top leagues in the world.”
Much like it has with the Union, Sugarman believes small improvements could be MLS’ key to success in the long run, perhaps especially so with a World Cup on home soil right around the corner.
“I don’t think we’re going to compete with Premier League tomorrow morning but if we’re making progress every year, I don’t know, the tipping point doesn’t feel that far away but every club’s got to lean into it, the league’s got to lean into it,” Sugarman said. “The World Cup is a big moment for this country and for this league. We’re trying to figure out how to use that as a launching pad for the next big acceleration of the league.”
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