The Union wanted one more shot at a title. They delivered a failure of a season.

The Union won nine of 34 games in the regular season, tied 10, and lost 15. Why shouldn’t the responsibility fall on the veteran players who didn't deliver in too many big games this year?

The reactions of Union players including Jack McGlynn (right) at the final whistle of Saturday's season-ending 2-1 loss to FC Cincinnati at Subaru Park.Read moreElizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published Oct. 20, 2024, 8:00 a.m. ET

The seeds of the Union’s failure to make the playoffs for the first time in seven years were planted long before Saturday’s season-ending 2-1 loss to FC Cincinnati.

They were planted before the sales of Damion Lowe, José Andrés Martínez, and Julián Carranza, and before any of the 20 games Andre Blake missed due to various injuries.

Some of the fans who shuffled out of Subaru Park on a day of summerlike warmth before winter’s chill knew it. But a lot of others might not have, so it bears saying here, and saying bluntly.

Those seeds were planted last offseason, especially by a loud chorus of players who wanted one more shot at a trophy together. With help from manager Jim Curtin and a chorus of fans, they made so much noise that sporting director Ernst Tanner yielded to their wishes.

Now that the season is over, it’s only fair to ask: Having been given what they wanted, what did the players do with it?

They won nine games out of 34 in the regular season, tied 10, and lost 15.

Why shouldn’t the responsibility fall on them?

Key stat tells the truth

If you want to believe a healthy Blake would have solved all this year’s problems, ask yourself this. Would he have kept out enough shots to close the 15-point standings gap from the 12th-place Union (37 points) to fourth-place Orlando (52), never mind higher-ranked Cincinnati (59), Columbus (66), and Miami, which ended with 74, a new MLS record?

We’ll never know, but one statistic is a worrying sign: how many shots per game the Union’s opponents took. At that point in the action, it’s not yet about how many goals the Union conceded or the quality of shots measured by soccer’s expected-goals metric. It’s simply about how often the other team had time, space, and ability to shoot.

According to FBRef, the soccer sibling of the famed (and Philadelphia-based) Baseball Reference stats website, the Union allowed an average of 13.82 shots per game this year, and 4.88 shots on target. Tallying all regular-season and playoff games, the total shots average is the team’s highest in a year since FBRef started tracking the stat in 2015, and 2.5 shots more than last season. The shots per game average is the highest since 2017, and 1.23 more than last season.

That’s a considerable difference in a sport in which goals are the scarcest quantity, and shots are the second-scarcest. And it bears repeating: A goalkeeper usually isn’t involved in an opponent’s act of taking a shot until the ball reaches him. His teammates are responsible for trying to stop shots from happening.

So we repeat this, too: These players wanted another year to prove themselves, then got worse. How does that make the case to Tanner that they were right? And why shouldn’t Tanner put his foot down this time and start the roster overhaul this team needed a year ago?

That overhaul might take out players who, judged individually, might not deserve it. If that happens, it will be another unfortunate consequence of waiting. It might take out fan favorites, and there is no pleasure in saying that could include veterans Alejandro Bedoya and Jakob Glesnes.

Curtin tells the truth, too

That necessity is increased by the traffic jam building up in the Union’s prospect pipeline, especially Jesús Bueno and CJ Olney in midfield. Brandan Craig and Olwethu Makhanya need to be tested at centerback, to see if they’re good enough. A third starting-caliber striker is needed, but would the better backups after that be low-ceiling Chris Donovan and Sam Adeniran or young academy products Nelson Pierre and Eddy Davis?

Curtin gave all the evidence needed by leaving Donovan and Adeniran on the bench Saturday night when his team needed two goals. The Union would have made the playoffs had they won the game, thanks to other results, but Curtin made only two second-half substitutions: Bedoya for Glesnes in the 65th, shifting the formation to a 3-4-3, and Jeremy Rafanello for Leon Flach in the 88th.

“The guys that were on the field are more likely to score and make a play than anyone else that was there,” Curtin said afterward. “That’s not just my opinion. I think that’s a fact.”

It’s also as damning as anything he’s said in his decade in charge of his hometown team.

“We have to find a way to make good decisions” this winter, Curtin said at another point. “It’s an important offseason. and we have a lot of work to do because the trajectory of the league, it’s going up. I think the talent is going to continue to increase, it’s going to make things hard.”

If you’re the kind of Union fan who wants Curtin to openly rebel against the team’s owners, this is as close as you’re getting.

“I wouldn’t say our luck ran out,” he said, “but, you know, we paid for a lot of the mistakes on the field, off the field, all the decisions. And that’s why we’re not in the playoffs.”

And so do the players

Curtin was asked if he felt his players didn’t give enough effort in a game as big as Saturday’s, which felt like a fair accusation at the final whistle.

“That’s a great question,” he answered. “I think it’s a fair one.”

If you’d blame the coach for that as a fan, hold your fire. A few minutes later Kai Wagner blasted his own teammates for having “too many players today in the locker room who probably don’t care that we [are] out of the playoffs.”

That was close to the right message because professional players ought to be able to motivate themselves for big moments. (Look no further than the recent failures of the U.S. men’s national team.) But it came from the wrong messenger because Wagner spent multiple offseasons — including last winter — wanting to return to Europe before finally signing a long-term deal with the Union.

After Wagner spoke, Glesnes took responsibility for his own goal that lost the game, ending a season that coincidentally started with a Glesnes own goal. He took some responsibility for the season, too, and it’s good he did. Let’s not forget that he was a leading campaigner to keep the squad together last offseason.

“I would say people were fighting for what was right in that moment … but I also understand the question now, when we are not making the playoffs,” Glesnes said. “The whole season, it comes down to, in the end, [the] playoffs. If you’re not making the playoffs, it’s a fiasco. And that’s where we are today — it is not good enough.”

The last word goes to Bedoya, about whom much more will be said in the coming days as he awaits his fate. If this was his last game with the Union, he went out with a strong message to the fans who’ve cheered him on for so long.

“There’s going to be a lot of good players still coming through,” he said. “Stick with the team, support the team. Players come and go, but the club is here to stay, so that’s the most important thing: to continue to root for what’s on the badge, right here, the Union.”

Bedoya knows what’s coming, as difficult as this winter will be for him and others.

It’s time for fans to know, too.