Kai Wagner calls out Union ownership as the season threatens to go off the rails

The Union (4-5-8) are on a four-game winless streak, and a shocking seven-game winless streak at home halfway through the season.

Nathan Harriel (center) summed up the Union's emotions after the team lost to Inter Miami despite a man advantage for the last half-hour, and a two-man advantage for the last 16 minutes.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published June 16, 2024, 1:37 p.m. ET

The Union’s 2-1 loss to Inter Miami on Saturday was just about as bad as it gets.

They blew a lead after a terrific early Mikael Uhre goal. They failed to come close to scoring while a man up for the last half hour, and two men up for the last 16 minutes. Then former Union academy player Leo Alfonso broke away past a too-slow Jakob Glesnes for a 94th-minute winner, another sign of Glesnes’ startling decline this year.

To cap it off, the thousands of fans in the Subaru Park fans wearing Lionel Messi’s Miami jersey even though he wasn’t there roared for Alfonso’s goal like the Herons were at home.

It left the Union (4-5-8, 20 points) with a four-game winless streak, and a shocking seven-game winless streak at home halfway through the season.

The players heard the fans’ boos Saturday night. They know they play for a team in a big city — or at least down the road from one — and many of them are fans of Philadelphia’s other sports teams. So they know what the expectations are across town, and they usually don’t mind them. After all, they want to win games too, even as they get how much the Union prioritize developing prospects.

Kai Wagner certainly has been around long enough now to understand all of that. Especially since he chose to sign a new long-term deal here in January after years of considering a move back to Europe.

So it raised eyebrows fast when Wagner joined the lineage of Union players who’ve called on ownership to spend more money to help the team win.

‘Everybody sees it’

“I think we should see now that we have to invest in the team,” Wagner told a group of reporters. “We need players who can help us. We should not just believe [that] our young guys can come up and play, and everybody just says ‘OK, we have young guys coming up, they should help us’ — that’s not how it is.”

Wagner’s words need a disclaimer, and it’s not just that he was speaking in the heat of the moment. It’s that the Union have invested quite a bit in him after he came back to the Union because he didn’t get an offer he wanted in Europe. His new contract here is worth just over $1 million this year, a raise of $335,000 from last season.

But he’s right on the principle, just like Andre Blake was in January and Alejandro Bedoya has been in the past.

“We talk all the time about it, not just in the locker room,” Wagner said. “I think everybody sees it: the fan base, we see it. I think if that’s not clear and honest, everybody should know [in] the front office that we should go out now and get new players.”

Wagner also came rather close to throwing shade at his teammates.

“They don’t have to be million-dollar players, just players who have different profiles, different styles,” he said. “In my opinion, we need a guy with pace. We don’t have a guy with pace on the whole pitch. Now [that] Julián [Carranza]’s gone, we need a real finisher in front of the goal.”

Let’s hope the locker room doors are shut if Wagner takes that “real finisher” line up with Uhre. His breakaway finish was just the kind Wagner was talking about — and Uhre has a decent amount of pace, too. But even though he’s the Union’s most expensive player, he shouldn’t be asked to carry the load alone as Carranza leaves for Dutch club Feyenoord.

No, the answer must lie in Curtin giving backup forwards Tai Baribo and Markus Anderson more minutes, especially if the front office won’t open the checkbook this summer.

All is not lost yet

Wagner’s remarks are the closest thing there’s been this year to a sign of strife in the locker room. But there are no signs yet that things will get worse on that front.

In particular, there has been no breakdown between the players and manager Jim Curtin. Leon Flach made that point emphatically in comments to The Inquirer on Saturday night.

“No,” he said, “there’s no problem or issues between the team. And that makes it sometimes even tougher, because you’re obviously looking for solutions [to] what could be the issue. And right now, it’s so hard to find.”

Flach called the goals conceded “stupidity” borne of taking too much risk defensively, noting that the first score “should never be a goal” because scorer Julian Gressel was way too wide open when he got the ball near the penalty spot.

He reiterated, though, that “there’s definitely no issue in the locker room. … The locker room is getting smaller and smaller, but the atmosphere is staying the same.”

Wagner gave his own signal of that when he praised the team’s work ethic.

“The players we have, everybody wants to get everything all the time on the pitch, everybody wants to play,” he said. “We have amazing training sessions all the time — believe me, it’s really good. Sometimes I’m really impressed, it’s way better than last year. But in moments, it’s just small margins that we miss.”

‘It’s not going to change’

Flach’s quip about the locker room shrinking wasn’t about Subaru Park, it was to players gone with their national teams at the moment and Carranza’s impending departure. Curtin confirmed the striker has played his last game for the team, and Carranza watched Saturday’s game from principal owner Jay Sugarman’s suite.

Curtin also said, and not for the first time, that he doesn’t expect his bosses to buy him a new striker this summer.

“You know who we have, and it’s not going to change,” he said, “so we have to find a way to get ourselves out of it.”

At least Curtin sent Baribo in for some amount of time in the second half, after yet again turning to Chris Donovan’s limited skill set as the first choice off the bench. Baribo nearly scored, too, creating a shot while flat on the ground that Miami goalkeeper Drake Callender did well to stop.

Anderson, whose speed and dribbling skills should make him a good complement to Uhre, was on the bench and warmed up but did not enter, even when the Union had their two-man advantage.

Is Curtin’s job in any danger? Not when the players are still with him, and not when he played such a big role in brokering Cavan Sullivan’s signing.

It’s understandable if that doesn’t matter to some fans who want this team to win trophies, not just develop players whose most famous days come elsewhere. But know that if Sullivan had spurned the Union to go straight to Europe, the embarrassment heaped on the team from the entire soccer world would have looked far worse than the current winless streak does.

It does take goals, though — not expected ones in box scores and spreadsheets, but real ones scored by real players.

There’s still time to turn things around, anyway, especially because nine of the Eastern Conference’s 14 teams will make the playoffs. The Union are still in eighth, as unbelievable as that may seem, and it doesn’t take any team in MLS much to turn things around.

“You do get rewarded for mediocrity, but we’re not happy with, obviously, where we’re at,” Curtin said. “When it happens this much and you dig this deep of a hole, it hurts. … But we’re the only people that are going to be able to get us out of it, the group that’s in that locker room.”