Jay Sugarman calls the Union’s first 16 years ‘the warmup.’ Can he now deliver the trophies he wants?
"This is the beginning," the Union's principal owner said of finishing what the team has wanted to build in Chester. "There’s a hunger for winning at the highest level."
Jay Sugarman has a story to tell, not just as the Union’s principal owner but as one of the only people who’s been there since the beginning.
He knows, though, that he can’t tell it right now.
“I think there’s an amazing story that really hasn’t been told over the past five years,” he said, “that we really can’t tell until we win the [MLS] Cup. Success is great, but the ultimate success has still eluded us. We need to win some silverware.”
Yes, they do, and Sugarman is aware as ever of his role in how that can happen. The checkbook has been his since the Union were founded 17 years ago. The most recent of them have seen astonishing success for a team that perennially spends among the least on players leaguewide.
They’re at it again this year: the second-lowest payroll, a few average-size transfer fees, and the best record of any of MLS’s 30 teams at the All-Star break.
“We have such a clear, differentiated style of play that has been executed really well,” he said. “We know when we don’t execute it well, we’re actually not great. But when we execute it well, it has led to a lot of success.”
There have been a lot of wins, among the most in the league since the start of 2019. The trophy case still has just one item in it, though, the 2020 Supporters’ Shield.
“One of the lowest payrolls [with] some of the top performances over a consistent period of time just doesn’t exist,” Sugarman said. “Our guys work incredibly hard, and they should be recognized for what they’ve achieved. But we haven’t achieved the thing we really all set out to do, which is not just to be a consistently good team, but put ourselves in that position and then ultimately win.”
‘No, this is the beginning’
The responses from the stands at Subaru Park will come fast and loud, and he knows what they’ll be: spend more money on the top-end talent that will deliver trophies, instead of going short and ending up short. More than one thing can be possible at a time, even in a league with MLS’s limitations.
In the Union’s context, no one is saying to reduce spending on the team’s vaunted youth academy. Many players who’ve come through there, ones that are on the way, are genuinely great talents — and the envy of a lot of other MLS teams.
Sugarman knows how many rival owners and executives ask, as he put it, “Can’t you replicate what Philadelphia’s doing?” The answer is always the same: It takes time and willingness to do a whole lot of work that doesn’t pay off right away.
Now the Union have a new tool in the arsenal, with their expanded sports complex in Chester. The dedicated spaces for the club’s reserve and academy teams are meant to keep that pipeline flowing and make it even better.
Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony capped off many years of developing land from the Commodore Barry Bridge past the old Delaware County power plant, to make a Union campus along the waterfront. At times, acquiring the many small parcels that the land was divided into was harder than the construction itself.
The end of construction feels like the end of a chapter in the Union’s history, for outside observers and even for Sugarman. But he insisted that it is not the end of his ambitions, even though the next chapter might not be so tangible.
“A lot of people today, they said, ”Congratulations, you’re finished,’” Sugarman said after the event. “I said, ’No, no, this is the beginning. This is the starting gate.’ This complex now is what we said we wanted to build. Now let’s see what we can do.”
Will a stadium in Philly ever happen?
Sugarman knows there might come a day, and perhaps not too far in the future, when the Union have done the most they can with what now exists. They’ve talked about expanding Subaru Park before, but that also has potential limits on matching parking spaces with more seats. (At least as long as public transit access doesn’t improve, and that seems especially unlikely right now.)
Could the next big step be a turn toward a future stadium in Philadelphia, instead of 20 miles into the suburbs?
At one point, Sugarman unlocked the door before being asked.
“We can’t have a downtown stadium right now, but I don’t think those downtown stadiums can do this,” he said, looking out a window at the Union’s complex stretching from Subaru Park past the old Delaware County power station. “They can’t put it all in one campus: a school, the stadium, the training facilities, the fields. So we’re taking that and making it our strength.”
Then he was asked, as he expected.
“You have to take these steps one at a time to get to the next step, and we’ve done that consistently,” Sugarman said. “We got the stadium built, then we got the fields built, then we took over the power plant, then we took over buildings over there so we could build Union Yards [a game day bar], then we brought the [team-run high] school down here. … If we had jumped straight to a downtown stadium, there would have been, definitely, pros and cons, but I always felt like we have to build the culture of the club.”
The pros of building in Chester in the late 2000s included $87 million in state funding, for the record. Whether pursuing a downtown stadium would include pursuing more public money wasn’t even asked, because Sugarman signaled leaving Subaru Park would still be a long ways off.
“Right now, this is the right place for us,” he said. “This is the community. This is the building block that we think really does bring everything together. I don’t think we could replicate that downtown, but I’m not going to say never.”
‘We can really think big’
Sugarman’s focus remains on fulfilling what he wanted to see in Chester, and in particular what sporting director Ernst Tanner wanted to see when he arrived seven years ago.
“We had a long conversation about what it would take to be a top team — not once in a while, but every year,” Sugarman said. “And he was so clear on so many things, but the one that relates to this project was where he said: ‘You have to bring all this together. You cannot have this here and the school there and the academy here and the second team there and the first team. And if you do that, if you give people a chance to see what that future can be for them, that ’s going to differentiate you.’”
He also recalled when he first surveyed an empty Chester waterfront with MLS commissioner Don Garber 16 years ago, at the start of the Union’s existence.
“The commissioner called me and said, ‘Would you get involved?’” Sugarman said. “And I said, ‘Only if I think I can build something really special.’ They were looking at a site that was never going to be special, and when I saw this site, I was like, ‘Man, this is going to take a lot of work, but this could be special — with the bridge, with the river, with the old power plant, with some of the other buildings.’ I was like, ‘I can actually see what this could be.’”
Now it’s reality.
“Call the first 16 years sort of the warmup,” Sugarman said. “We’ve gotten to where I think is a really good place, and some people have done amazing work. Now let’s see what we can do.”
Especially if that includes the trophy he wants.
“There’s a hunger right now for the Cup,” he said. “There’s a hunger for winning at the highest level. We’ve gotten to semifinals, we’ve gotten to finals. The elements are all here, and I think this [complex] may be one of the pieces that pushes us over the top. But I know everybody here is committed to getting us there.”
If they do, that story he wants to tell will be an all-timer.
“I am excited, I am exhausted,” Sugarman said, “but I really do think that now we can really think big.”