The Union want to expand Subaru Park, but know it won’t be easy: ‘We want to be better, bigger’

Union president Tim McDermott sees the same things that the team’s fans do when they go to Subaru Park on a Saturday night.

The stands are full, with this year on track to be the second straight where every regular-season home game is sold out. The backdrop is one of MLS’s prettiest, the Commodore Barry Bridge towering over the Delaware River as colorful freight ships pass by.

But McDermott also knows too well how that portrait doesn’t tell the full story. Subaru Park’s 18,500-seat capacity makes it the league’s fourth-smallest. Its limited luxury seating areas mean the Union can’t make as much money on game days as other MLS teams — especially the many leaguewide with newer and fancier homes.

And there is the eternal problem the Union have faced since Day 1 in 2010: the lack of proper public transit access. Subaru Park is great to drive to, right near I-95 and not far from the Blue Route. But for fans in the city, or anyone who simply wants to have a day out without a car, it’s a headache.

McDermott has taken stock of all this as the Union’s 15th season rolls out. He has hired architecture firm Gensler, which designed the MLS venues in Toronto, Los Angeles, Austin, and San Diego — and whose many projects in Philadelphia include $125 million of upgrades to Lincoln Financial Field a decade ago — to study how to expand Subaru Park.

“We kind of looked at where we are, and said we think the time is right to start looking at our stadium, and how do we potentially expand it,” McDermott said.

» READ MORE: Top prospect Cavan Sullivan will turn pro with the Union before joining Man City in a few years

The premium-seating aspect is the bigger short-term priority, and that’s understandable. Philadelphia sports fans who don’t follow the Union might not expect cities like Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Portland to have fancier stadiums, but soccer fans know they definitely do. That impacts not just the money those teams make, but how they’re perceived as big-time.

McDermott said Gensler “came up with about nine different projects, the bulk of which are premium-oriented. I think if all goes as planned, we will look to unveil maybe one to two going into next year.”

Where in the stadium would they be?

“Close to the field,” McDermott answered.

As for expanding Subaru Park’s overall capacity, that’s a longer-term plan. McDermott revealed that the Union are at “around 14,000 season-ticket holders” right now, with the rest of ticket sales going to single-game buyers and group-sales buyers.

» READ MORE: The Union are the last unbeaten team in MLS. How have they rebounded from the Pachuca disaster?

“You’ve got to be really careful on capacity,” he said. “You’ve seen other teams in other leagues where they expanded, and maybe they expanded too quickly, their stadium. So I think that’s one where if, when, we build up a significant wait list [for season tickets], that’s when I think we’d be more likely to pull that trigger.”

McDermott believes that from an architectural perspective, Subaru Park can be expanded to a capacity of 27,000. That isn’t too far off what original Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz dreamed of when he talked with Villanova in 2011 about bringing the school’s football games to Chester as part of a move to a bigger conference.

The Wildcats ended up staying put at the FCS level, Sakiewicz left the Union in 2015, and there wasn’t any reason to think about stadium expansion for a while afterward.

The land around Subaru Park looks different now than it did then. The Union built a campus of soccer fields over what used to be the big Lot B parking area, a garden between the stadium and river, and a gameday entertainment space on the other side of Seaport Drive. A new brew hall for pregame eating and drinking was scheduled to open this Saturday.

So the question becomes not just how to fit everyone into the stadium, but how to fit everyone around the stadium. Is there enough room for 27,000 people’s worth of parking spaces, especially without good public transit?

» READ MORE: Andre Blake reflects on a decade with the Union and his growth as a leader

“We have enough capacity of the stadium to get us to 27 [thousand],” McDermott said. “I think there’s other components to this, which are certainly parking [and] mass transit.”

He knows how many local soccer fans complain about the latter — especially those in the city who fill bars to watch the English Premier League on Saturday mornings, but can’t easily get to Subaru Park on Saturday nights.

“Look, I think we don’t have a great mass transit system at all right now for coming to this building,” McDermott said. “That’s a big gap, and I’ve been fairly vocal, internally and externally, that that needs to be better.”

The closest regional rail stop to Subaru Park is Highland Avenue, a mile away. It’s such a small station that the Union run shuttle buses on game days from the larger Chester Transportation Center, 1.8 miles away, instead. That stop is a major bus transfer point for routes across Delaware County, but the only one that runs to the stadium is infrequent.

“The train station down on Highland is not nearly appropriate,” McDermott said, “and I think it’s probably doing a disservice to the city of Chester. I think they deserve a better train station than what they currently have.”

» READ MORE: Apple is still keeping secret how many — or few — people watch its MLS telecasts

Even if there was a stop at a better location — by Engle or Reaney Street, for example, which McDermot has pondered for a few years — that wouldn’t fix how little service SEPTA’s Wilmington Line has on weekends. Right now, the last train into the city on Saturday nights is at around 9:30 p.m., a few minutes before most Union games end.

“That’s another piece of it,” McDermott said. “I think, yeah, you’ve got to solve mass transit, you’ve got to solve parking. And to expand our footprint capacity-wise, those are all pieces of it.”

Floating amid all of this is perhaps the biggest question of all, especially with Philadelphia hosting the men’s World Cup at Lincoln Financial Field in 2026 — and possibly the women’s World Cup in 2027 too. Why not use that as a springboard to build a new stadium in the city, which could revolutionize perceptions of the Union and be a statement of the World Cup’s legacy?

“I would say that’s not on our near-term horizon,” McDermott said. “We certainly are not oblivious to the fact that a lot of the new teams that have been started over the last seven, eight years, one of the common themes is not all of them, but a lot of them have a downtown stadium. So that fact is not lost on us at all.”

But while he said the team is “always mindful of trying to think about that and weigh that out,” he signaled pretty clearly that a move away from Subaru Park isn’t in the plans.

» READ MORE: Philly’s 2026 World Cup games are the city’s ‘moment on the global stage,’ local official says

“I think the growth that we’ve seen over the last three, four, five years has been pretty promising,” McDermott said. “So we’re bullish on what can be accomplished here. But I think it’s also fair to say we’re always mindful of the trends that are happening in the league, and what some of the drivers for growth are. And if we find out that would be certainly one of them, then we’d have to think about that a lot.”

It would be a big lift for the organization financially — “a very, very huge lift,” McDermott said — and politically, given the 76ers’ arena firestorm. It would even be difficult if the Union wanted to build land in the sports complex that’s currently a sea of parking lots, because Comcast-Spectacor and the Phillies have plans to turn much of it into new commercial development.

Still, the dream lingers, even for McDermott at times.

“I think it’s one of the things we continue to monitor, continue to watch, continue to look at, continue to evaluate,” he said. “Right now, our focus is here, and making Subaru Park even better than what it is and what it’s been. At the moment, that’s very, probably, low on the radar. But we’ll continue to evaluate it.”

» READ MORE: How the Union can play in next year’s Club World Cup

No matter where the Union play long-term, McDermott made it clear that he’s got plenty of his own ambitions for the team and MLS as a whole. He knows that if the Union make next year’s FIFA Club World Cup, which they very much could, it will have the power to change perceptions of the team locally and worldwide.

“I tell people all the time I want this club to be the best in MLS, and I want MLS to be the best there is in the world,” he said. “And I know a lot of people probably hear me when I say that and probably say, ‘When and how?’ and all that type of stuff, but that’s my mindset.”

Can he change the skeptics’ minds over time?

“I don’t think anybody here is satisfied with just being where we are today. We want to be better, bigger, and I think that drives a lot of us — I know it drives me.”

» READ MORE: As a league, MLS says it has global ambition, but too often acts like it doesn’t. That needs to change.