A year after winning their first trophy, are the Union good enough for an encore?

The Union have become a top developer of young talent. But many of the world's top developers also win lots of trophies — especially the team that's the Union's model. So it's time for the next step.

Union manager Jim Curtin, left, would get a big boost this year if striker Sergio Santos, right, can stay healthy and score more goals.Read moreCHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published April 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

Jim Curtin knew the question before it was asked, because it’s the same one everyone asks of his team. So he asked it aloud himself.

“The Union won their first trophy, but how will they back it up?”

As the Union prepare for their Concacaf Champions League debut Wednesday night at Costa Rica’s Saprissa (6 p.m., FS1 and TUDN), the manager is just as interested in the answer as anyone else. But before he looked ahead, he took a moment to look back, citing a stat that even Twitter savants might not know.

Over the last three years, the Union have recorded the fourth-highest regular season points-per-game average in MLS, behind powerhouses Los Angeles FC, New York City FC, and the Seattle Sounders. Star-studded Atlanta United is sixth, and Toronto FC is 11th. The Los Angeles Galaxy, who’ve boasted Zlatan Ibrahimović and Javier Hernández in that span, are 15th.

So really, the question isn’t a question. It’s a point, and it’s a sharp one stuck right in Curtin’s chest.

You aren’t really that good. Last year was a fluke. The Supporters’ Shield you won counts less because the season was upended by the pandemic. Then you flopped in the playoffs, sold Brenden Aaronson and Mark McKenzie, and you haven’t made the kind of big-money offseason signing that tells fans that you matter. Now go back to being irrelevant.

Curtin was ready for that, too.

“Ultimately now, it’s the MLS playoffs and going further than we’ve ever gone in that,” he said. “People will laugh when I say this, but we have to lift an MLS Cup. That’s the next box to check. It’s literally the holy grail, if you want to put it that way, but it’s one we don’t have — and to be quite frank, we haven’t been close to in the playoffs.”

You rarely hear Curtin raise the bar that high in public. Fans in Seattle, Atlanta, and elsewhere probably will indeed laugh.

But Curtin wasn’t really talking to fans. He was talking to his new crop of young players about the standards he will hold them to.

That’s in part because he doesn’t have a choice. Not only did the Union not make a big-money offseason signing, they didn’t make any attacking purchases at all. Fans are rightly upset about that.

They also know, though, that this year’s rookie class of academy products has enormous potential. Midfielder Quinn Sullivan, age 17, has German powerhouse Borussia Dortmund watching him. Paxten Aaronson, 17, is on track to inherit his older brother Brenden’s mantle as a playmaker. Right back Nathan Harriel, 19, is likely to play significant minutes this year as a backup.

Also new this year are midfielders Jack McGlynn, 17, and Brandan Craig, 16. McGlynn looked good for the Union’s reserve team last year as an amateur, and Craig also has European interest.

Curtin said that “from what I’ve seen in the preseason, their starting points are higher than that last batch” of academy graduates that included Brenden Aaronson and McKenzie. A lot of outsiders agree with him.

That naturally creates pressure and expectations. Curtin welcomes them.

“Everyone is going to compare them to McKenzie and Aaronson. That’s normal and natural,” he said. “It’s a good kind of pressure for the kids to have. And look, no players advance to the level that Aaronson and McKenzie advanced to without pressure.”

But if the Union are to win a trophy for a second straight season, the real pressure will land elsewhere on the roster.

Four key players

Mark these players as the ones with the most on their shoulders: Anthony Fontana, Kacper Przybylko, Sergio Santos, and Olivier Mbaizo.

Fontana will be the starting playmaker, following in the footprints of Aaronson, Marco Fabián, Borek Dockal, and Tranquillo Barnetta, and all of those footprints are pretty big. The 21-year-old from Newark, Del., has an outstanding scoring touch, and the instincts to get in the right places to score. But he’s been an understudy in his three years as a pro. Now he’s center stage.

Przybylko carries the biggest burden of anyone. After scoring 15 goals in 2019, he struck just eight last year, and the mental effect of his cold streaks was clear for everyone to see.

“The hardest thing, and I’ve tried to teach Kacper this, is to have a shorter term memory — almost like a defensive back when you get beat for a touchdown,” Curtin said. “You have to forget about it and get on with the next play.”

Santos needs to stay healthy, which he currently isn’t, having been sidelined for a few weeks with a toe injury. At least it’s not the muscle issues he dealt with while getting adjusted to life in America. If he can clear, say, 25 games and 2,000 minutes played, he can be a force.

“If we get him 25 starts in this league, he’ll score over 15 goals,” Curtin said. “That has to be on all of our minds — Sergio’s mind, myself, [fitness chief] Garrison Draper, how we manage him this season. Because he’s that talented and that special.”

Mbaizo succeeds Ray Gaddis at right back. A lot of fans have wanted this for a while. They need to be careful what they wish for. While Mbaizo’s attacking skills are better than Gaddis’ were, his defending isn’t yet.

If Mbaizo improves his defense, it won’t just propel him to success here. It will keep him a starter with Cameroon’s national team, which could earn him a ticket to next year’s World Cup and a big move to Europe.

“This is his season to show it,” Curtin said. “It’s a big one for him, and we have full confidence that he can step in and do the best job to replace Ray.”

Where the pressure is highest

The line that gets used around MLS about the Union (including within the team’s own walls at times) is that it has the potential to be America’s version of Ajax, the famed Dutch club that has produced global stars for decades. Johan Cruyff, Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Kluivert, Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids, Luis Suárez, and Ibrahimović became famous in Amsterdam before joining bigger teams.

But the idea has a big flaw. If all you know of Ajax is what it has done in the Champions League — winning it all in 1995, reaching the semis in 2019, making runs every few years with a new batch of hotshot prospects — you’re missing a big part of the equation.

Ajax is what it is not just because of what it does occasionally in Europe, but because of what it does every year in its home country.

The club has won the Dutch league 34 times, 10 more than anyone else, and has won the Dutch cup a record 19 times. It has failed to reach the Champions League just twice this century, and hasn’t missed European competition entirely since 1966. Since the Dutch league’s current format began in 1956, Ajax has finished worse than sixth a grand total of once.

All the players named above won multiple trophies with Ajax before moving on. So did the new golden generation that made the epic 2019 run, including Frenkie de Jong (now at Barcelona), Donny van de Beek (Manchester United), Mathijs de Ligt (Juventus) and Hakim Ziyech (Chelsea).

The Union have finished in the top six in MLS overall just twice in their 11-year history: last year and the year before. They have won just one playoff game, ever. And of course, there’s just one trophy in the case.

So let’s be clear: Being the American Ajax means winning a lot of games, not just developing great players.

And it means upping the spending ante when it matters to stay at the top. Ajax has paid eight-figure transfer fees 10 times in the last five years. The Union’s spending records remain Jamiro Monteiro’s $2 million transfer fee last year and Fabián’s $2.27 million salary in 2019.

The Union-as-Ajax concept sounds good, and it’s out there for good reason. But it’s time for everyone to understand what it really means. If the Union want to make it happen, this year is the time to prove it.