Soccer
EDITOR’S NOTE: In celebration of Major League Soccer’s 30th season, MLSsoccer.com is exploring untold stories about all 30 clubs. “30 Clubs, 30 Stories” will be unveiled throughout 2025.
Twelve years ago, the Philadelphia Union overhauled and relaunched their youth development system, with a mission that sounded boldly ambitious, perhaps even to a fault.
“We believe that the US is a future powerhouse in the sport of soccer,” minority owner Richie Graham told MLSsoccer.com at the time. “We have all these ingredients, and we’d like the Philadelphia Union to be a contributor to that process. We are going to be a ‘build’ and not ‘buy’ club.”
More than a decade later, it’s safe to say Graham’s vision has been vindicated.
Developmental powerhouse
The Union Academy is widely regarded as the gold standard in MLS, with 29 players and counting signed to homegrown contracts, many of them eventually moving on via transfers or trades that have reaped somewhere north of $30 million in fees and other compensation. Most prominent among them are Brenden Aaronson, his younger brother Paxten and defenders Mark McKenzie and Auston Trusty, who currently compete in top European leagues.
Philly’s current roster contains a dozen homegrowns, including 15-year-old prodigy Cavan Sullivan, widely rated as one of the top prospects in the world in his age group, and myriad other academy products have moved on to successful professional or college soccer careers elsewhere. No club in the United States sees as many national team call-ups, across all age levels, as the Union.
Thanks to the high-powered offerings at YSC Academy, the affiliated college prep school for its student-athletes, every kid gains a cutting-edge education for wherever life takes them, be it soccer or otherwise, led by Dr. Nooha Ahmed-Lee, a head of school with a specialization in the neuroscience of learning.
“As we’ve seen in other parts of the world, the real winning formula is when you join together young, talented players who are very motivated to improve, and then you give them the tools and the training facilities to succeed,” Union chairman and principal owner Jay Sugarman told MLSsoccer.com. “But then the last piece is you have to put them in a highly competitive environment, and you really have to challenge them to raise their game at every level.
“We started with a strong viewpoint that combining the educational piece with the soccer piece was going to be a really powerful thing. But how do you actually, logistically, pull that off? How do you give kids the chance to train in the morning, then go to school, then train in the afternoon or go play? It’s a complicated process.”
Schooling and soccer
The project kicked into another gear when Ernst Tanner was recruited from Austria’s RB Salzburg to take up the sporting director post in 2018, the German overseeing the implementation of a high-tempo, Red Bull-influenced pressing game model tailored to reflect both Philly’s blue-collar roots and the modern game’s rapid evolution.
Over time, each Union homegrown has become not just a success story, but a case study, analyzed by club staff for lessons that can be applied to future crops. Academy director Jon Scheer points to Jack McGlynn, the central midfielder sold to Houston Dynamo FC over the winter in one of MLS’s first cash-for-player trades, as an example.
“When we brought Jack in, he wasn’t a player that fit our position profiles, really, in most ways, because of some of the things he lacked. But Ernst has talked about ‘rule breakers,’ and rule breakers having a special quality or weapon that, they’re so good at what they do that you’ll live with what they don’t have,” said Scheer. “Jack is probably one of the first ones that came that we started to plan a little bit around him, and ultimately, yeah, he’s in a place now where it values more possession, but he had a really successful career here.
“We like players that have learning ability,” Scheer added. “Players that might be able to play up. Jack McGlynn, Paxten Aaronson, Brenden Aaronson, they were physically very slight when they were growing up, and they had to figure things out with their brain and their feet. And we think that translates really well to the next level, because as athletic as MLS is, if you just dominate the youth level with your physical attributes, it becomes really hard at the next level, when everything has caught up.”
Schooling and soccer are always intertwined here. Through experience, Union leaders have concluded that the learning processes run parallel.
“I had to learn how important education is in the country,” said Tanner, “and this is where our school plays in. But the good news is that what we are doing in the school is pretty much aligned with what we want to do on the field. So in the school and on the field, we talk about decision-making and finding the right solutions. And in school, they talk about self-determined learning.
“So Nooha and myself, we found out that we are basically, in the way we think football as well as we think development, we have a lot of overlapping ideas and thoughts, and basically the philosophy is pretty much the same.”
Vision come to life
Tanner, who helped identify and/or develop elite talents like Roberto Firmino, David Alaba and Sadio Mane at his previous stops, laid the foundations for a 2020 Supporters’ Shield triumph, the club’s first major honor, a run to the 2022 MLS Cup final and league-leading levels of consistent regular-season competitiveness across the past half-decade.
Yet from day one, he saw that something was missing in Philly’s otherwise best-in-class setup.
“It was clear that I’m overseeing the total of the sporting department, and the academy always played a big role. But it was 45 minutes away from here, which was not ideal,” Tanner told MLSsoccer.com this week at the Independence Blue Cross Training Center, the day-to-day home of Philly’s first team, located in a repurposed machine shop near the Union Power Plant, an 86-year-old remodeled beaux-arts industrial building a few long balls south of Subaru Park on the west bank of the Delaware River in Chester, Pennsylvania.
“It was always a vision of mine to have everything in the same place.”
When it first launched, YSC Academy was located in Wayne, some 23 miles north. It had an artificial-turf field and indoor training facilities of its own, but academy players were spending hours each week riding back and forth to Chester in vans – and in the Union’s detail-oriented outlook, that was precious time that was better spent in a classroom or on a pitch.
“I very quickly kind of focused on, we need to build the first super campus in MLS,” recalled Sugarman. “If we’re really going to do this, then we got to go all-in. And to be all-in, in my mind, meant we’re going to build a campus that has everything in one unified site.”
So he and the rest of the club’s leadership dived into the labor of making Philly a one-stop shop on their corner of the riverbank. That included not just acquiring land and arranging funding, but cultivating relationships with the local community and connecting with their fan base and the general public, which would have access to large swaths of the new facilities.
It’s unfolded in multiple painstaking phases. The school was relocated to the Union Power Plant, then seven outdoor grass and turf fields were constructed for the use of all Union teams as well as the general public.
“I think we did 180 transactions to assemble the land to actually be able to pull this off,” said Sugarman. “It has been step by step, piece by piece, but always with this vision in front of us, and sometimes frustratingly slower than we’d like. But it is really exciting now to be here, to now be at the point where, honestly, for the first time, we can say this is what we wanted to build when we started.”
Merging sport and community
‘This’ is collectively dubbed the WSFS Bank Sportsplex, a sprawling $55-million, 32-acre venue anchored by a 170,000-square foot building containing a full-size turf field, two multi-sport courts, an 8,000-square foot performance center, 5,000 square feet of flexible space for specialized athletic training and a café for athletes and guests.
While many of these facilities are available for the public to rent, hundreds of usage hours each year are set aside for the free use of community entities, like Chester High School’s football team and its newly-rebooted soccer team, which have been affected by gun violence and other dangers in a historically marginalized area.
“There’s something really unique about what we’re doing, which is kind of this merger, this mirroring of a sportsplex facility that certainly will be first of its kind, and certainly will be amazing for our first team, second team and the academy, but also for the Chester community,” said Union president Tim McDermott.
“These are organizations that don’t have a really a great place or a safe place to always be, to train, to practice, things that maybe a lot of us take for granted. So the ability to be in the community and do something like that, it’s a fantastic partnership that we have with the city of Chester.”
With the complex built on what used to be parking lots, Union fans who drive to home games at Subaru Park now have to walk a little bit further from their cars to the stadium than they used to. Club officials hope the supporters understand it’s for a very, very good reason.
“We have the best conditions now possible for development. And I think we are amongst the very few clubs who have everything, apart from a boarding facility for the boys, at the same place,” said Tanner. The Union have thus far elected to house academy prospects from outside the region in homestays and group houses to provide a warmer environment; “these are players that really need to be nurtured,” explained Scheer.
“We have the stadium. We have the academy,” said Tanner. “Second team is here. First team is here. The school is here, and also the front office building over there.”
Building the future
The Union are traditionally known as one of MLS’s more frugal clubs, rarely splashing out on high-priced Designated Players or hefty transfer fees. Instead, they’ve funneled their investments into the stars of tomorrow, sending their transfer-market profits back into the system.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the WSFS Bank Sportsplex is the house that McKenzie and the Aaronsons helped build – as will those who follow in their footsteps, like Cavan Sullivan, who will reportedly move to Manchester City in a multi-million-dollar deal when he turns 18. Sell-on fees, solidarity payments and the like will provide further fuel.
“That’s the normal, regular business aspect of it,” said Tanner, “and it’s not detrimental to what we’re doing here, because what we try to do is that we sell them at the right point of time, and that they contribute to the team’s success before we sell them. So that’s pretty important for us, to have them in the first team.
“[Eventually] we have to sell, and we are very aware to sell to the right place where they can shine, because if they do not continue their development at the club where they are going, then we might lose out on further revenue as well, because we all always have percentages in the boys.”
It’s been a long road, made more complex by an emphasis on sustainability, some inherent ups and downs and the patience required in any player development effort. But the proof of concept is inescapable.
“If I’d known now what we were entering in 10 years ago, there would have been some long pauses as I thought about it, because it really is the right way to do it. But it’s just not easy,” said Sugarman with a chuckle. “It was a mountain. It was not a hill, it was a mountain, and we’ve climbed 90% of the way there. We still got 10% to go.”
For all the leaps and bounds they’ve made since 2013, Philly believe they’re just getting started.
“Over periods of time, we are really in a good spot. And I mean, we are producing,” said Tanner. “In a couple of games we are starting with four homegrowns. We already sold a bunch of homegrowns. So the model is getting valuable right now, and I think we are not at the peak production right now. So there is quite something in the pipeline.”
Read MoreJohnathon Schewe