Photo courtesy Philadelphia Union

Now that the weekend’s games have been played and reported, it is time to finish PSP’s midseason Union II roster analysis. Strikers were discussed July 2^nd, goalkeepers were considered July 3^rd, and defenders were presented July 4^th.

We reiterate some generalities about the organization’s process.

• eight to ten games are minimal for evaluation purposes.
• age
• foregoing an athletic scholarship is a major decision
• other less publicized pathways to the pros do exist

Illustrating the last bullet, Jeremy Rafanello left Penn State after one season to trial and earn a contract in Denmark, and Nick Pariano spent four years at Duke. Both are now first team Homegrown players.

Player by player

This year we divide the 23 players we will discuss by positions: Strikers, Midfielders, Defenders, and Goalkeepers.

Midfielders – 8

 We divide the midfielders into those who are returning Union II players and those who are newer this year.

 The veterans

 Cavan Sullivan: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 15.8. Union MLS matches: 7 appearances. 1 start. 157 minutes played.  Union Open Cup matches: 2 appearances. 2 starts. 210 minutes played. Union II matches: 8 appearances. 7 starts. 498 minutes played. 3 goals. 1 assist. First team contract, active roster.

14 months ago on May 9^th, 2024, Sullivan turned professional with the Philadelphia Union. He spent the games of his first two months making initial forays into MLS NEXT Pro. But primarily he was finishing his career with the Academy. His academy career culminated in the run to the 2024 semi-finals at MLS NEXT Cup. He began accumulating development minutes in quantity with Union II after the U17 run was over.

He spent the twelve months from July 2024 to July 2025 growing into MLS NEXT Pro, Philadelphia Union II’s league. He has become a game changer at that level, and is ready to move up.

The next step up is a large one, directly from U.S. Soccer’s Division III to Division I.

He has had only two games of exposure to professional division two, USL Championship sides Indy Eleven and Pittsburgh Riverhounds. They were the Union’s first two matches in the 2025 U. S. Open Cup. He played full matches against both: 120 minutes versus Indy, 90 versus Pittsburgh.

During the last four months of 2025’s season Sullivan will be used as a first team primary reserve alongside Ben Bender and behind his older brother and Indiana Vassilev. He will be the best option off the bench to add offensive creativity.

He will also get occasional starts, as he did for 60 minutes last Saturday night in Nashville.

The most basic development process remains giving a mid-teenager the physical endurance of an adult.

At the beginning of the coming twelve months, he will take some lumps physically and psychologically, as we suspect he may have just done in Tennessee. He and his coaches will assess what he needs to improve, make plans to achieve the improvements, and then execute them.

The question only time will answer for certain is whether he becomes a dominant game changer in MLS itself. All indications are positive. If he does, once he becomes eligible to work in England–age 18–he will go there.

Since signing with Philadelphia, It has taken him one year, eight weeks, and two days to earn his first Major League Soccer start . On the day he was 85 days short of his 16^th birthday.

 David Vazquez: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 19.4. Union MLS matches: 1 appearance. 0 starts. 19 minutes played. Union U. S. Open Cup matches: 1 appearance. 1 start. 57 minutes played. Union II matches: 13 appearances. 13 starts. 1113 minutes played (3rd on the team).  2 goals. 1 assist. First team contract, active roster.

Vazquez has always been a ball winner. This season he is surviving those clashes with fewer injuries. Also, most frequently he is playing alongside Nick Pariano as a defensive midfielder. The partnership has proven highly successful.

In a first team emergency during the Open Cup he started at left back, doing so not without some credibility, although there was plenty of inexperience on display.

He remains a striker with the USYNT U-19s and will almost certainly go to the FIFA U20s World Cup in Chile with the USYNT U-20s at the very end of September and the beginning of October.

The longer-term impact of his play as a defensive midfielder will be to improve his midfield adaptability within first team head coach Bradley Carnell’s principles of play. Defensive mid is preparing him to become a first team primary reserve by the end of this season. By early October it would not be impossible late in a first team game to see a midfield of the Sullivan brothers, Vazquez, and either Jovan Lukic or Danley Jean Jacques.

Gio Sequera: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 19.4. Union II matches: 10 appearances. 4 starts. 434 minutes played. 3 goals. 1 assist. Union II friendlies: 1 appearance. 0 starts. 45 minutes played. He is a Union II loan player from Metropolitanos FC of Venezuela’s LigaFUTVE, whose loan was extended for this season.

Sequera remains listed as a midfielder. But Union II head coach Ryan Richter has thrice consecutively started him as at right back. Prior to those starts, Richter had begun to play Sequera as a defensive midfielder next to Nick Pariano.

The coach had earlier said in so many words that he needed to find the diminutive Venezuelan more game minutes.

Sequera has shown himself to be a ball winner. He is also fearless, pacey and quick, and a solid reader of the game. The earliest glimpses at right back have been encouraging but are many too few as yet to provide solid conclusions. It takes time to prove reliability. And reliability was why Gavin Wetzel finished 2024 as the starting U II right back.

Sequera did not have enough time as a defensive mid to show whether he could modify his tendency to push forward offensively over-aggressively. His mental discipline as a right back suggests he might have.

Stay tuned. Depth at outside back is always an asset.

Nick Pariano: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 22.3. Union MLS matches: 3 short-term agreements for which he dressed but did not play. Union friendlies: 1 appearance. 0 starts. 45 minutes played. Union II matches: All 14 matches. 13 starts. 1,140 minutes played (team leader). 12 captain’s armbands. 2 goals. Union II friendlies: 1 appearance. 1 start. 45 minutes played. First team contract, active roster but loaned out for the full 2025 season to Union II.

Pariano occupies slot 31 of the supplemental roster subset of the first team’s roster. If a club is eligible to fill a 31^st slot – three rostered goalkeepers creates such eligibility – that player is required to be on season-long loan-away, typically to the organization’s professional farm team. In Philadelphia’s case that farm team is Union II.

For 2025 Pariano is Union II’s captain.

As we have written before, with a dozen or so games to go last season, then head coach Marlon LeBlanc moved Pariano to defensive center midfielder and the move triggered the stretch run that took Union II to the playoffs, the MLS NEXT Pro Eastern Conference championship, and the championship game appearance.

We judge Pariano sufficiently promising as a “six” that we assume the purpose of this season is to maximize his game experience there. Some team higher on the food chain than Philadelphia will become interested in Danley Jean Jacques’s capacity to be a “box-to-box” midfielder and will make an offer that cannot sensibly be refused. Grooming future replacements is only sensible.

Pariano has also filled in as an emergency right back, both for the first team in preseason and for his team in-season. But Nathan Harriel and Frank Westfield are not thought to be under serious threat by him, and Gio Sequera is promising.

2026 preseason will provide Pariano an opportunity to join the first team’s group of defensive sixes.

CJ Olney: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 18.6. Union MLS matches: 1 dressed but did not play. Union II matches: 13 appearances. 11 starts. 935 minutes played. 2 goals. 2 assists. Union II friendlies: 1 appearance. 0 starts. 45 minutes played. First team contract, active roster.

Olney’s 2025 season illustrates the importance of cooperative familiar teamwork. Last season, Olney in the midfield, Frank Westfield behind him, and Eddy Davis in front of him formed a lethal scoring combination for Philadelphia Union II. This year, Westfield has advanced to the first team and Ryan Richter is running practices.

Olney is beginning to show signs of coming out of his early season slump.

Earlier he said himself he was not playing well. But for about a quarter of an hour against Columbus Crew 2 at home, last year’s Union II midfield of Pariano, Vazquez, Olney and the younger Sullivan was reunited, and in that brief time the team produced two goals to tie the match. They subsequently won the shootout on Pierce Holbrook’s final round save and Jamir Johnson’s penalty kick.

We expect Olney to have a much stronger second half of the season. He will be more used to coach Richter’s ways. He will have gotten to know his new left back, Isaiah LeFlore, who did not grow up with him in the Union’s academy, unlike Westfield. And he will have had time to assimilate the basics of Bradley Carnell’s principles of play.

Three candidates to fill the Sullivan hole

Kellen LeBlanc: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 17.3. Union II matches: 11 appearances. 6 starts. 501 minutes played. 1 goal. 1 assist. Union II friendlies: 1 appearance. 1 start. 45 minutes played. 1 goal. 2 assists. Union II contract, so terms beyond 2025 unknown.

LeBlanc currently lies first among the candidates to replace Cavan Sullivan when Sullivan fully matriculates to the first team this summer and later to Manchester City. Of course he has the the most professional experience from last season. His free kick service and shooting are strong. His soccer IQ is high. His athleticism has improved noticeably in the last year and a half.

Whether he can make himself enough of an athlete to be more than adequate in Philadelphia’s pressing schemes is a key question for the future. We expect his individual development plan has a strong focus in that direction.

His determination to excel is excellent, and he has a uniquely strong support system.

Jamir Johnson: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 17.0. Union II matches: 7 appearances. 0 starts. 97 minutes played. 1 goal. Union II Friendlies: 1 appearance. 0 starts. 45 minutes played. As an amateur, he plays on game by game “zero dollar” contracts that preserve his amateur eligibility.

Johnson possesses an athletic attribute that cannot be easily coached or created. He has elite elite pace.

He remains physically slight. And the organization seems unsure of his position. He is primarily an attacking midfielder, although he has been deployed at striker at the professional level. We are unfamiliar with his positions for his academy teams.

His play reflects his academy training. He is highly skilled technically, but not an individual dribbler. He is “a combination play passer.” Defensively he is a counter-presser. His pace means he is a good one. His stature means opponents can body him. He has not yet learned to be a ball winner.

Willyam Ferreira: all data as of 7/7/25. Age = 16.4. Union II matches: 2 appearances. 0 starts. 39 minutes played. 1 assist. Union II contract, so terms beyond 2025 unknown.

Ferreira about to shoot against Orlando B at Subaru Park

Ferreira is the youngest current candidate to succeed Cavan Sullivan with Union II. Of those three he is the least seen, in part because of some type of soft tissue leg injury earlier this year.

He made a positive impression in a practice we watched on YSC Academy’s outdoor turf last January 29th. The next time we saw him he was rehabbing an injury on the sidelines at a WSFS Sportsplex practice in late March or perhaps April. We were later told that he was rehabilitating further by playing with the U-16s. We know he played for the academy during MLS NEXT Cup although we are not sure with which team. (He was too old for the champion U-15s.)

Ferreira and Malik Jakupovic are the two 16-year-old signed professionals on Union II’s roster. Only Academy Director Jon Scheer can say whether their signings reflect the earlier Marcos Zambrano experience.

Editorial P.S. Our late omissions

We have decided to omit Zach Mastrodimos and Henry Bernstein from the review process because as we compared their athleticism to that of Gavin Wetzel, they are not as close to the Union’s standards for a professional player as is he.

Late physical development is a possibility. But it is not frequent.

We are confident the organization will follow Mastrodimos at UCLA and Bernstein at Maryland. But we think Wetzel the most likely to have a professional career with someone, possibly the Union.