The Union’s Jakob Glesnes problem might be bigger than their goalkeeper problem

Not one individual is solely accountable for the awful state of the Union right now.

Everyone has some amount of responsibility: players, manager Jim Curtin, sporting director Ernst Tanner, and the team’s ownership whom fans protested during Saturday’s 2-0 loss to Charlotte FC at Subaru Park.

But it’s hard to avoid thinking that one player bears an especially large portion of blame — and it’s not goalkeeper Oliver Semmle.

In the 11 games since the Union’s first loss of the regular season — they now have seven — centerback Jakob Glesnes has been beaten four times for in counter-attacking situations that led directly to opponents’ goals. That includes Miami’s late winner a week ago despite the Union’s two-man advantage, and Charlotte’s second goal.

That is a shocking problem for a player who was MLS’s defender of the year in 2022 and was a stalwart for much of 2023, and he knows it.

» READ MORE: Union falls to Charlotte FC with young goalie, fans cascade with chants of ‘Sell the team!’ at Subaru Park

“I haven’t been good enough for me as well,” he said. “I should be one of the leaders out there. Now I just have to move forward and do something with what I can do, and that’s the next situation.”

Glesnes’ drop in form raises the specter that the Union haven’t had to deal with for a while. When a centerback goes over the top of the hill, he or she usually does not climb back up it.

There are exceptions, and one soccer fans have heard of is U.S. men’s national team centerback Tim Ream at age 36. But there aren’t too many others, so most veteran soccer observers default to worrying.

“He’s had some tough moments individually, but at the same time I know Jakob is defender of the year recently, so I always will believe in him,” Curtin said. “He wore the captain’s armband again. He’s a leader and it’s just it’s just harder to defend when we’re all not confident, we’re all not here, we’re all not on the same page.”

» READ MORE: Jim Curtin is feeling the pressure as the Union’s struggles continue

Should Glesnes be on the downside three months after turning 30? Not solely on age grounds. But is it a coincidence that he hasn’t been as athletic since his surgery to repair a sports hernia injury last October? If it isn’t, that would really be a concern.

It’s hard to avoid wondering if Brandan Craig is paying attention while away on loan with El Paso Locomotive of the second-division USL Championship. The Union sent him there to get playing time they didn’t think he’d get this year, and didn’t include the recall-in-case-of-emergency clause that loans often have.

Until Damion Lowe gets back from playing for Jamaica at the Copa América, the Union’s only options for playing someone else at centerback are shifting Nathan Harriel over from outside back, or playing still-raw 20-year-old Olwethu Makhanya. And the ability to shift Harriel could drop if the hamstring tweak that forced Kai Wagner out of Saturday’s game in the 77th minute proves serious.

Another short-term fix, one that seems more feasible, would be for Glesnes to stop pushing so high up the field. His ability to do so and get back fast has been a big part of the Union’s high-pressing game for years, but it obviously doesn’t work as well if he can’t get back as fast.

» READ MORE: The Union might not have much of a season left, but they have a striker in Tai Baribo

Glesnes acknowledged this when asked about it Saturday.

“We have to come back [to] where we are sitting a little bit more, work our [rears] off, and then we get our chances when in the counter-attack, because that’s what has been making us is a strong team now for years,” he said, later adding, “When we are playing away, it’s a lot of games where we have been sitting back, and then it’s more open for us to take the counter-attacks where we have Mikael [Uhre] with his speed up front.”

Curtin had no choice but to acknowledge why he benched goalkeeper Oliver Semmle for 18-year-old academy product Andrew Rick.

“Oliver’s had some really good games, good moments, good saves,” Curtin said, “but also when we analyzed it, there were some goals that we conceded that were, I’d say, unorthodox or unacceptable. So we made a change.”

It was quite a gamble, and had things gone really badly, it could have easily blown up in Curtin’s face.

Things did not get that bad. But while Rick made some nice saves, it’s hard to say he did enough to fully overtake Semmle until Andre Blake returns.

» READ MORE: Andre Blake had surgery to clean up his injured knee

“We still believe in Oliver,” Curtin said, adding that he wanted to give Semmle “kind of a break physically and mentally. And I thought that Rick stepped in and did a decent job.”

But Curtin also admitted that “We made a decision to make a change to try to give a spark, and we didn’t get it.”

When the Keystone Ultras supporters’ club started chanting “Sell the team!” after Charlotte’s second goal, it was frankly unexpected.

Protests against the Union’s ownership are common on social media — especially in my mentions — but they’ve long been non-existent on game nights at Subaru Park. You have to go back nine years to find the last one, which until Saturday stood as one of only two in the Union’s 15-year history.

In May 2015, the Sons of Ben supporters’ club paraded a coffin outside the gates bearing the name of then-CEO (and Union co-founder) Nick Sakiewicz and the moniker “SERIAL FRANCHISE KILLER.” They also had a banner with the message “UNION FANS DESERVE BETTER.”

» READ MORE: Kai Wagner calls out Union ownership as the season threatens to go off the rails

The first major protest was also against Sakiewicz. In October 2014, fans in the River End raised a big banner during a game that depicted Sakiewicz as the grim reaper, with three tombstones: one each for the previous teams he’d run poorly, the New York/New Jersey MetroStars (now Red Bulls) and the defunct Tampa Bay Mutiny, and one for the Union.

It rattled the brass so much that a team staffer went into the stands and ordered the banner removed. (I still vividly remember racing downstairs from the press box to try to get pictures of the scene.)

In early October 2015, Sakiewicz was fired. At the end of that month, Earnie Stewart agreed to become the team’s new sporting director, and he took the job fully in January. Tim McDermott was hired as chief business officer that same month, and he was promoted to team president in 2019.

Union fans have had far fewer reasons to protest since then, but there’s also been ample chatter in the stands that the supporters’ clubs lacked a willingness to raise their voices. That seems to have now changed.

It wasn’t lost on anyone that the fans aimed their ire not at Curtin or Tanner, but at the owner’s box. And it mattered just as much when the chant rose again a few minutes later, much more of the crowd — what was left of it — joined in.