Philadelphia Union Season Preview Part 4: 2024 Expectations

The Philadelphia Union begins this week! Philly takes the field Tuesday night in Costa Rica taking on Saprissa in Concacaf Champions Cup (CCC) action; then they return home to kick off MLS play this Saturday evening vs Chicago Fire! Now that the season is upon us, it’s time to finish up our season previews, this time looking at the club’s expectations for 2024!

Union plan to run it back again?

From 2019 to 2022, the club had an era of constant success. The team kept getting better year after year. These four years saw Philly win their first playoff game, win their first trophy, and also go on runs to the semifinals of Concacaf competition and in the MLS Cup playoffs. This run of form, culminated with their bitter loss in the MLS Cup at the end of a record-setting 2022 season. After that season, Philadelphia seemed to have a clear vision of how to continue that upward trajectory, adding one-to-two more difference-makers to help the team with depth to help them get over the hump to win the league.

This did not happen last year, the club kept its core players and tried to add depth pieces from around MLS. These signings did not help Philly continue that upward trajectory. The team was able to make another deep run in Concacaf competition and made it to the Eastern Conference semifinals, but failed to win anything of importance. The 2023 was successful, but the club fell short of its goal of keeping the trajectory going up. It seems like 2024 may be similar.

Philly has moved on from two of the three players they brought in last season and has brought in young unknowns as reinforcements for the team (the Ernst Tanner special). It looks like Jim Curtin and the Boys in Blue are going to run it back once again in 2024. Can this group push themselves to win a trophy?

Is it trophy or bust?

We saw last year that the Union set their goal of winning a trophy, mainly the MLS Cup. They had tasted that Cup Final in 2022 and wanted to get back once again. The club failed to do that and because of that it made a relatively successful season feel like a bust. The expectation was trophy or bust last year, is it the same this upcoming season?

Philly is playing in a stacked Eastern Conference, making their path to the playoffs, MLS Cup, and the Supporters Shield difficult. There’s no doubt Philadelphia is a playoff-caliber team, but will they get a high playoff seed in the east when so many other teams got “better” this offseason? Could this team find a way to stay at the top of the entire league and go on a Supporters Shield run? Right now it feels like the answer is no.

The club will also have to manage tournaments like CCC, and Leagues Cup. They made the semifinals of both these competitions last season, but couldn’t get past LAFC or Messi’s Miami. This year, it’s essentially the same team looking to do better than they did last year. They will be hungry to do so, but that hunger will need to withstand the test of time that a 50+ game season will bring.

One last chance…

Speaking of this being virtually the same team as last year, this seems like it could be the last chance for this core of Union players. The core of this team, players like Andre Blake, Jakob Glesnes, Jack Elliot, Kai Wagner, Jose Martinez, Alejandro Bedoya, and Daniel Gazdag, have been part of this team since at least the 2021 season. This is likely the last hurrah for this group; they may not all leave/retire after this season, as most have contracts/options for next year. However, the window for this current team to “win now” seems to be closing.

This brings us to the actual expectation for the 2024 version of the Philadelphia Union. It’s hard to think that the way this team is constructed they will win a trophy. However, Philly has a fight in them that a lot of other teams don’t. This club is elite defensively, but not offensively when it matters most. That could all change in the summer transfer window, where change is likely to happen on their forward line.

If Philly does something uncharacteristic and sells a starting striker and brings in another, while also adding more depth to the team, then we could see this team make a similar run to reigning MLS Cup champions Columbus. The Union is likely a borderline top-four team in the east/top-10 team in MLS as they are constructed right now. That would set expectations of having some sort of home-field advantage in the playoffs and then to see what happens. We’ll see if that changes at all in what will prove to be another crazy 11-month 2024 season.