The Union’s worst-ever loss could easily end up being for the better

The theory came from an editor, one who’s a casual soccer follower but has come to appreciate the Union’s success of recent years. And it came, as it would in Philadelphia, from American football.

“Nothing good comes from losing,” said editor wrote to me on X, as the Union’s loss at Pachuca on Tuesday went from bad to worse to 6-0 — the heaviest defeat in the team’s 15-year history.

It’s a good theory, and not just because it came from an editor. But it’s not always good practice.

No football coach, not even the sport’s all-time greats, has ever had to put up with a 51-game season across four competitions like the Union played last year.

Don Shula, the NFL’s winningest coach of all time, coached 15 years of 14 regular-season games and a strike year with nine before the league went to 16 for the rest of his career. He never had to put up with the 17 there are now, or the 18 that seem on the horizon.

The Union would have been staring down the barrel of another 50-plus-game year had they overcome Pachuca. Their quarterfinal series would have been far easier, with Costa Rica’s Herediano likely next in the bracket.

» READ MORE: Union routed by Mexico’s Pachuca, 6-0, the biggest loss in team history

MLS’s endless calendar is too much for any team, not just the Union. The league’s rule book makes it hard for even MLS’s wealthiest clubs to legitimately compete in the regular season, playoffs, Concacaf Champions Cup, U.S. Open Cup, and Leagues Cup all in the same year.

That doesn’t excuse Tuesday’s final score. Union manager Jim Curtin didn’t hold back afterward when he said Pachuca “outcompeted us [and] outworked us, which is uncharacteristic of our group.”

But any clear-eyed assessment of this moment must see other honest truths.

First, Pachuca was always the favorite to win this series. It’s not just an elite Mexican team, but perhaps the second-best team the Union have ever played in official competition. Only the Club América squad that beat the Union in 2021 has more top-to-bottom talent.

Second, the Estadio Hidalgo’s 7,843-foot altitude was clearly a factor. A team that only ventures above sea level once every few years can try all it wants to prepare, and everyone watching can try to ignore it. But there was ample evidence that it socked the Union soon after kickoff, and there was no recovering.

Third, and so important that it bears repeating: The Union are going to be better off for being done with Concacaf play for the year.

» READ MORE: The Union hoped to repeat last year's Concacaf heroics in Mexico

If they truly end up crashing for the rest of the year, then perhaps the above sentence ends up wrong. None of what you just read excuses the team’s perennial refusal to truly go big on the kind of attacking talent that so many of their opponents have, from MLS rivals to Pachuca’s Salomon Rondón and Ousamma Idrissi.

But you can be sure that the rest of the Eastern Conference wasn’t rooting for the Union to make a deep run just to make the league look good on the continent’s biggest stage. No, they’d all rather face a squad that’s worn down like last year’s was, when a dead-on-its-feet group miraculously stole a 1-1 tie in Columbus in October.

That won’t happen now, with three spring midweeks cleared on the calendar. Step off the gas in the Leagues Cup, as any MLS team with real playoff aspirations should, and the autumn will go even better.

Curtin and his players might not say it out loud, but they know it. (Especially the Leagues Cup part.)

Could the Union win the Champions Cup some day? Perhaps. It may be, though, that their best chance was last year. They lost an all-MLS semifinal against Los Angeles FC, and the team on the other side was Mexico’s León — a very good team that ultimately beat LAFC, but not one of Liga MX’s elites.

This season, the elites are all there: América, Tigres, and Monterrey, plus this Pachuca team that’s running even with them in the current Mexican season.

» READ MORE: Union game vs. Seattle postponed because of waterlogged field at Subaru Park

In this round, América poleaxed its biggest rival, Chivas of Guadalajara, 3-0 in the first leg on Chivas’ turf. The second game is set for late Wednesday in Mexico City.

Right before then, Monterrey will be at home against a FC Cincinnati team it beat, 1-0, to open the series, with a goal from former Cincinnati striker Brandon Vazquez.

Tigres was held to a scoreless tie at Orlando in that series opener, similar to what the Union did to Pachuca in Chester. But the Mexican team that has long been Concacaf’s toughest to beat cruised in Tuesday’s series finale at home, 4-2.

América is likely to play the New England Revolution next, as the Revs routed Costa Rica’s Alajuelense, 4-0, at home to start that series. The finale is Wednesday.

Tigres will play Columbus, MLS’s reigning champion, and perhaps the league’s only team right now that plays with real style. But the Crew are still alive in part because they faced another MLS team, the Houston Dynamo, in the round of 16.

Should Monterrey advance, it will play Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami or Nashville, which tied, 2-2, in Nashville in their opener. The finale is Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

A Monterrey-Miami series would tell us more about MLS’s Messi obsession than any regular-season game ever could. Or the Leagues Cup, which many Mexican teams didn’t take seriously last year — and it will be no surprise if that happens again this year.

» READ MORE: Think refs are out to get Philly? A lockout replacement’s big mistake gave a game to the Union.

If Monterrey plays at its best, Los Rayados might finally break MLS’s fever, and show that a collection of old, famous names is exactly that.

The point of saying so many words about teams other than Union is to show their situation isn’t unique. And despite the ugly score, it’s not catastrophic.

“There’s nights that humble you, and this is the reality of football,” Curtin said. “The second you think that you’ve made it — and it applies to our team tonight — the second you think that you are having a good season or a good start to the season, if you don’t bring it every night, the game tells the truth.”

Everyone in the organization is due for a lot of thinking right now: Curtin, the players, sporting director Ernst Tanner, and the ownership that sets Tanner’s budget.

The bet here is that by Saturday night, Curtin’s team will have dusted itself off, returned to work, and will be ready to show it will be fine in this year’s long run.

If fans can see that, they should also be fine.