The Overall Analysis
I believe the first thing you have to do at a club is set yourself goals as without them you have nothing to aim for. So for me and the Philadelphia Union, I want to be making the Playoffs within the next 3 years. But how are we going to achieve this?
Well, the club is yet to have an identity, like you would be able to recognize Barcelona from their style of play, that's the kind of thing I want to achieve here. Most people look at the team they have and will build a style of play around that, I don't believe in that, I believe you should at you want the team to be playing in 5 years for example and start molding your team around that style of play.
But the problem is that Philadelphia Union aren't the richest team at the moment, while most teams in the league can go out and spend 5-10 million on a player, we lack that ability. However that doesn't mean we can't improve and mold a team. I believe our main focus should come from the Superdraft and getting as many picks as we can in it as this is how we'll get our star young players, but obviously we will still be looking towards our own academy as we have the facilities to really help young players progress and improve.
From looking at the team overall, I can see we're lacking in 3 main areas, Strength, Tackling and Marking which is the main reason Philadelphia Union haven't been successful since their formation in my opinion. Nowadays in football you need a player who strong and will win the ball back for you or you will get no where. An example of this being N'Golo Kante last year for Leicester, who was the main reason they won the Premier League last year as he had the strength and ability to go and win the ball back for his team and shut down the other team. However as I said, we aren't the richest team in the world, so going out and buying a player to solve our problem is not really an option so maybe we will have to look closer to home in the academy or rely on the march waiver draft to go and a really strong physical player.
However, what we lack in Strength, we make up for in technical ability as Ilsinho might just be the most skillful player in the league so he will be a big part of any success we have in the next 3 years.
So if we improve on these 4 points, I believe that we can become a top MLS club within the next 3 years and start qualifying for the playoffs on a consistent basis and then from their we will need to kick on and finally win the MLS cup, but there is a lot of work we need to first here to start The Rise of the Union.
