Sugarman wants the Union “to be one of the top clubs in the league.” He knows his team is almost there. Will he do his part to help finish the job?
As the possibility of the Union playing in next year’s FIFA Club World Cup grew, fans and the media couldn’t help wondering what if.
Neither could principal owner Jay Sugarman, it turns out.
“Absolutely,” he told The Inquirer in an interview last week. “I mean, being a sports owner is all about dreaming of what your club can achieve, and that would have been an amazing achievement. I still hope we’ll get there — I think we have to win the Cup this year to have any shot at it, but there’s one slot left, and maybe that’s a way we can get in.”
The odds of that are slim, and not just because of the Union’s bad form lately. Sugarman was referring to the host country’s slot in the 32-team field. It historically went to the country’s last domestic champion in the Club World Cup’s previous smaller format. This time, the widespread expectation is Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami will be given it for spectacle purposes.
But even though the Union would have back-doored their way onto the big stage, they wouldn’t have been out of place. Sugarman’s team still has the most regular-season points and best points-per-season average of any MLS team since the start of 2019 and reached the Concacaf Champions Cup semifinals twice in that span — even though its only major trophy is a Supporters’ Shield for the best record in the pandemic-upended 2020 regular season.
“Sustained excellence will bring its own rewards, and playing in a Club World Cup is recognition of sustained excellence,” he said. “So we want to get there. We want to win more trophies. We want Philadelphia to be one of the top clubs in the league.”
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Still, there was a caveat.
“We’re going to be different than other clubs,” Sugarman said. “There’s no doubt about it. Everything we do, we do a little bit differently.”
If those words don’t necessarily form a contradiction, they certainly form tension. Within it lies the biggest question that has always hovered over Sugarman and the entire Union organization.
What exactly is their ambition? To play in MLS’s fourth-smallest stadium, half an hour from the city, with a suburban-focused fan base and a team that develops elite young prospects but rarely spends on stars?
Or is there a desire for something more, something bigger, something different?
Sugarman has taken questions on the subject many times and always answered them dutifully. He has never said directly that money isn’t there for someone the sporting staff wants to sign and certainly never meddled in daily operations the way other owners in all sports sometimes do.
That remains the case today. But Sugarman knows the landscape around him has changed and will keep changing fast.
So, knowing how close the Union are to being truly elite, is he more inclined now to push the boat out, to up the ante — and, yes, to spend more money?
“I ask Ernst [Tanner, the Union’s sporting director] every week, we have weekly calls, and I say, ‘What do we need to be successful?’” Sugarman said. “He’s 100 times smarter about what it takes to be a sustainably excellent team, so I defer to him. And if he comes to me and says there’s a piece we must have, he’s going to get support.”
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Sugarman praised manager Jim Curtin, too.
“Jim has done an amazing job developing a strategy, a playing style,” he said. “We’re still not as good as we’d like to be. We can still be better. So I think they think there’s more to come, even from what we’re doing.”
And for emphasis, he added: “There’s no resistance to our technical staff saying, ‘Here’s a piece we really need.’”
Then came another caveat — but this one felt different from the past.
“It can’t block the longer-term plans that Ernst has and the players coming up,” he said.
The difference was not just in Sugarman’s words, but in the truth behind them. The players coming up do have that much potential: attacking midfielders Cavan Sullivan and David Vazquez; strikers Anisse Saidi, Jamir Johnson, and Diego Rocio; and centerbacks Brandan Craig and Neil Pierre.
Only Vazquez among them is truly close to playing for the first team. But the rest could be just a year or two away, depending on their ages. Their time truly is coming, and it’s a good principle not to block them.
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“We don’t just play for every weekend,” Sugarman said. “We’re looking at how we’re going to be successful long-term, and that requires young players to have a chance to play.”
He acknowledged it’s “a trade-off for sure,” and it’s one he’s made willingly for many years. As much as fans complain about the Union’s lack of stars, they can’t question how much the team has spent on its youth academy: the high school, the new facilities in Chester, coaches, scouts, and even a few fines for bringing in marquee prospects from elsewhere.
“It’s never going to be the case that we’re going to go, ‘We’ll spend it there, but we won’t spend it here,’ but it has to be the right piece,” said Sugarman, who defined that before being asked.
“It has to be a piece that the technical staff says, ‘This is going to make everyone on our club better — this is going to make us a better club, and not be a short-term positive and a long-term negative,’” he said. “That, I know from Ernst, is kind of off the table for him. But a short-term win that’s also a long-term win? Sure, we are open to that conversation.”
Sugarman indicated that the door is open to that at any time, and hinted that the last few years have helped keep it open.
“I know how fleeting success can be, and it needs to be fed,” he said, “and Ernst and Jim have the opportunity at any time to say, ‘This is something really important for this club.’”
As important as pushing for trophies is, making money also matters. And while Subaru Park’s capacity is limited, there’s another way to profit: selling players abroad for big sums.
It’s not just about the prestige that comes with the checks. The cash — especially the $21 million in transfer revenue earned from 2020-22 — makes a big difference. So do the Union have to sell players, not just want to, to achieve their goals?
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“The transfer model is part of the model,” Sugarman said. “But if there were no agents pushing players to go to Europe, and there was no player desire to do that, I am sure we would keep these players here. So it is not a requirement, certainly not in every case.”
He didn’t hesitate, though, to say it helps.
“As you look around the world at the clubs that have been really good at this, they are constantly developing players, putting them in a position where they’re desired by other clubs, bigger clubs, and then bringing up the next group,” he said. “The model doesn’t really work if there’s no place for the next group to go.”
As for the money part?
“When players are ready, and there’s an opportunity for them to develop further [and] even better, and we can benefit financially to reinvest in the next group, that makes a ton of sense to me,” Sugarman said.
Later, he added: “We do need the revenue over time and the space on the roster. And we’ll just put that back to work into the system to continue to try to get better.”
Sugarman also offered a few cents on expanding Subaru Park in the coming years, as president Tim McDermott recently discussed.
“Subaru Park is our fans’ home,” Sugarman said. “We want it to be great. We think it’s an unbelievable stadium — it’s beautiful, the setting is fantastic, the sight lines are great. It’s just a little too small, and there are opportunities in Subaru Park to add some things I think our fans would really like, and we’ve got to figure out all the pieces of what that means structurally.”
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But just like with the Club World Cup, he admitted that he does at times dream bigger: of what it would be like if the Union played in the city, with real public transit access.
“It’s a fair question,” he said, one given extra significance by Philadelphia’s hosting the biggest international World Cup of all time in 2026.
“Post-World Cup, we’re hoping the fan base for the sport and particularly for the Union continues to grow,” Sugarman continued. “There may be a time we have outgrown our stadium, but right now we’re still in the process of making it the best small stadium in the league. And there’s plenty more we can do there, so we’ll focus on that first and foremost.”
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