Photo: Marjorie Elzey

Now that MLS NEXT Pro roster compliance day has passed, a roster has appeared on the league’s website, and an official game with a starting lineup and an enumerated bench has been played, it is time for first estimates of the 2023 Philadelphia Union II rosters for practice, for a game, and for its role within the professional organization as a whole.

Practice roster

The practice roster includes only one player on a first-team contract. And to reflect practice’s positional interchangeability, it is not fully differentiated that way.

On game day

A game-day roster includes two categories of Union reserves, those who are expected to get most or all of their game minutes with Union II, and those who are not. The latter are in parentheses and are not counted towards the game-day roster limit of 20. if the name is followed by a number from one through nine, the player was on the bench for game one.

The only guarantee about this game-day roster is that it will almost certainly never be repeated.

Pro organization depth chart

Now that MLS NEXT Pro has begun play for 2023, it is time for a professional-level, organization-wide  depth chart estimate.

• The ages given next to each name are rounded to the nearest tenth of a year on the given date.
• Since reaching the first-team is the goal, positioning reflects its most usual tactical shape, even though that is not yet the more appropriate developmental approach for younger second-team players, especially defensive midfielders.
• Classifying by position suggests greater rigidity than the positional flexibility displayed in actual play, especially in the midfield and the attack. Only the keeper and the four defenders, particularly the center backs, really “stay home.”
• The organization assumes that defensive mids can also play as attacking ones, although the reciprocal is not as likely to be true.
• This season Union II attacking midfield depth comes from amateurs who are former strikers moving back a line. Ian Abbey exemplified the concept in the first several months of 2022.

The chart reveals disciplined adherence to Ernst Tanner’s age parameters.

In only a few of the three and a half dozen comparisons below is the lower ranked player nearly a year older than the higher ranked one. The extreme case is the three years separating Gino Portella from Brandan Craig, which probably reflects Portella’s several injuries while playing in the United States.

Amateurs are italicized, first-team professionals are at the top, and ages date from Saturday, March 18, 2023.