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Bradley Carnell has been fired.
In 2025 the former Bundesliga left back from South Africa proved he was highly successful as a team “re-motivator.” In 2026 his skills as an instructor, a teacher of new ways of playing and an integrator of players new to a culture, have proved less successful.
He was judged on his results, as managers always are, and he led the Philadelphia Union to become a leading candidate for the MLS Wooden Spoon as of the 59-day World Cup break.
MLS’s wooden spoon unofficially signifies the worst team in the league.
What happened? What changed the fundamental nature of his assignment?
The departures
In 2025 Carnell took a team of high-quality veterans who had noticeably underachieved the previous year and re-inspired, reinvigorated, and returned them to success.
- He executed that assignment so well that Major League Soccer recognized him as coach of the year.
- In addition to Carnell’s honor, the club received purchase offers for two key veterans: striker Tai Baribo who was an in the box shooter to use Sporting Director Jon Scheer’s recent phrase, and center back and alternate team captain Jakob Glesnes. Given their ages and the club’s roster intentions, those purchase offers were not refused.
- A third offer came for another high quality veteran to whom the club allegedly had previously promised departure for Europe should the numbers work for all parties. He was left back Kai Wagner. The numbers apparently worked.
- A fourth departure had been expected because a pending free agent, striker Mikael Uhre, achieved his free agency and returned to Denmark with his family even though he himself was visibly emotional about leaving Philadelphia after his final home game.
- A fifth current absence from last year’s squad is much younger, attacking midfielder Quinn Sullivan who late last September suffered a season-ending knee injury that required surgical repair. Barring setbacks he can be expected to return after 2026’s World Cup hiatus. August would be the eleventh month, since he was hurt September 27th, 2025. Once fully fit for practice he will begin to rebuild himself back towards the player he had become before the injury.
Wagner and Glesnes were all-star caliber defenders. Baribo was an all-star striker. Uhre’s arrival had crystallized the club’s run to MLS Cup in 2022. And in 2025 attacking midfielder Sullivan had almost always been the third or fourth member of that veteran attack group.
The only 2025 position groups that returned intact to Carnell for 2026 were the goalkeepers and the defensive midfielders. He had to rework the defenders, the attacking midfielders and the strikers.
The changed task
For 2026 Carnell’s assignment had changed from motivator to instructor.
He had to take 2025’s remaining starters and returning reserves, add to them six new acquisitions, discern how best to fit them together, and teach them all how to play together as a coherent, cohesive whole.
- The newcomers came from entirely outside the club and its culture. The six were young striker Ezekiel Alladoh, veteran center back Japhet Sery, young center back Finn Sundstrom, veteran attacking midfielder Agustin Anello, young center back Geiner Martinez, and young left back Phillippe Ndinga.
- Only Alladoh, Sundstrom, and Sery were on hand from preseason’s day one.
- The side faced severe schedule congestion from day one of its season. That schedule began four days sooner than in 2025, and immediately included substantial onerous travel.
Carnell’s 2025 veterans had had the advantage over his 2026 newcomers from both the shared experience of already having played a pressing defensive system and the baseline conditioning that system required. 2025’s preseason in Spain and Clearwater created a squad that was uniformly capable of outworking opponents. Particularly in the first two games of the 2025 season, the Union clearly outworked both Orlando City and FC Cincinnati. They won both games, in no small part because they emerged from preseason in better shape than their opponents.
There was no such uniform knowledge and early physical baseline in mid-January of 2026. Carnell had to teach new things to new people, not the least of which was his system of high pressure defending and its demand for aggressive ground coverage. He spoke constantly of bravery when speaking in public. Being on the front foot and stepping forward were two other catch phrases. And he was saying all this without the all-league free safety whose physical tools and reads of the game had saved disaster time and again the previous year and in years before.
Early schedule congestion and injury potential
The increased frequency of 2026’s earliest games threatened soft-tissue injury through overwork. Carnell avoided that reasonably well.
That the nine games in the first 32 days created so few such injuries is a credit to the knowledge, mutual cooperation, and skill of both the club’s technical and sports medicine staffs. Only Eddy Davis and Augustin Anello have missed substantial numbers of consecutive days, Davis more than Anello.
- Davis first missed 60 days with a quad injury that dated to before February 21st. More recently Davis has injured the hamstring muscle of the other leg. We estimate he has missed 74 of the 95 days of the first team season that preceded the World Cup break.
- Anello, clearly a first team starter or primary reserve when healthy, was out with a grade 2 hamstring strain probably experienced during the Atlanta game March 14th. He was out until the game at Columbus April 25th. That totals 42 days. And he is being rehabilitated cautiously, reflecting both his value to the club and — probably — the severity of the muscle tear. As of the World Cup break, Anello had not yet played a full 90 minute match, including his one preseason appearance against Montreal.
Only two longer-term soft tissue injuries is a credit to the club’s and Carnell’s squad management, especially since the physical nature of play in North America usually takes newcomers quite by surprise. The downside was that sometimes the strongest possible lineup could not be sent out for first tap.
During the nine-in-32 opening season gauntlet, Carnell had only one six-day recovery spell for his squad and a second one of five days. All seven other intervals between games were three or four days long.
And those first nine games had to be used to evaluate the six newcomers. All of them got several opportunities to experience MLS, ever since Earnie Stewart mandated that the club always allow its players several games to adjust, assimilate, and become comfortable. Only then should it decide what they can be expected to do.
Only after Club America had eliminated the Union from the Concacaf Champions Cup on Wednesday the 18th of March did coach Carnell begin to have time to teach philosophy and principles to everybody together in any systematic rational comprehensive way using a soccer pitch.
For the previous month such instruction as he had managed occurred amidst the confusion of what probably felt like chaotic ad hoc crisis management.
Carnell had been trying to change the way his newcomers understood the game and played it. When teaching, ideas that are entirely new to the students are harder to communicate and slower to achieve assimilation. To use a non-soccer example, teachers of first-year foreign languages dream of two class meetings a day, if not continuous full immersion. Until Concacaf Champions Cup was over Carnell had nothing like such a good teaching opportunity available.
The difficulty of Carnell’s challenge and such success as he achieved applies acutely to all six of Anello, Alladoh, Sery, Martinez, Sundstrom, and Ndinga, but is best illustrated through a deep-dive about Martinez.
The Colombian center back who previously played in Uruguay’s topflight arrived late to the Union, although his was not the latest arrival. (Ndinga arrived after regular season play had begun.) Martinez’s signing was announced 24 days after most of his new teammates had taken their medicals, performed their physical evaluation tests including “the beep test”, and begun actual training. He missed over 60% of preseason. He did not go to Spain, he joined in Clearwater . For Martinez meaningful catching up was necessary.
That catch-up factor showed brutally the first time Martinez played meaningful regular season minutes. He started against Club America at Subaru Park on March 10th only 35 days after arriving and seemed still to not know what he was doing. The trip to the Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca a week later was not much better.
But 35 days after the Azteca, on May 2nd against Nashville at Subaru Park Japhet Sery’s shoulder did not allow the Dane to continue and Martinez replaced him at right center back. Martinez showed great improvement. He helped sustain a shutout against the team that leads all of MLS at the World Cup break, to say nothing of having been the first MLS team ever to win a competitive match at Estadio Azteca. His improvement continued to show throughout the subsequent three match sequence against New England, Orlando, and Columbus.
His understanding of the system and his role in it now holds together. He coheres to and cooperates with his new teammates. Coach Carnell and his staff had successfully integrated him into their group. Martinez is now an MLS-ready Philadelphia defender.
Defensive progress
Overall Carnell’s staff had identified its defense, and sometimes they had made it gel. Hopefully giving up six goals to Miami’s league-leading attack was an outlier, like the 7-0 loss in Vancouver was last summer.
The new defense does not equal Jim Curtin’s best sides, nor does it match Carnell’s side from last year.
- No free safety has emerged to match Glesnes’s consistent disaster prevention.
- Frank Westfield’s hip pointer has been an unfortunate recent glitch. But the Union’s 59-day world cup break should heal both Westfield and Sery.
- Neil Pierre should return from Denmark between May 31st and June 15th to begin his search for first-team minutes. Lyngby Boldklub’s last game is the earlier of those two dates and league permission to restart practice is the latter.
- Finn Sundstrom will continue to practice with the first team and get game experience through minutes with the second, since center back is comparatively new to him and he needs games minutes playing it.
- The unchanged defensive midfield quartet of Danley Jean Jacques, Jovan Lukic, Jesus Bueno, and Jeremy Rafanello should round out the defensive group that protects the goalkeeping trio of Andre Blake, Andrew Rick, and George Marks.
By July 22 at Subaru Park at 7:30 PM against Red Bull New York, a competent MLS defensive group should exist on the pitch. We expect it to look like the chart below.
| DefensiveMIdfield | DefensiveMidfield | ||
| DanleyJeanJacques | Jovan Lukic | ||
| Jesus Bueno | Jeremy Rafanello | ||
| Left Back | Left Center Back | Right Center Back | RightBack |
| FrankWestfield | Olwethu Makhanya | Japhet Sery | NathanHarriel |
| PhilippeNdinga | Neil Pierre | Geiner Martinez | OlivierMbaizo |
| Finn Sundstrom | |||
| Goalkepers | |||
| Andre Blake | |||
| Andrew Rick | |||
| George Marks | |||
Discovering how Neil Pierre’s Danish sojourn has improved him will be of great interest to both technical staff and fans alike. And Jon Scheer’s comments about acquiring a left-footed center back during his recent joint press conference with Jay Sugarman may change our chart.
Next topic
Two questions would have remained had Carnell stayed in charge. Could he teach offense, particularly the poise in the box so necessary for shooting success? And could he have combined his emerging defense with his less well-developed offense into a competent team, capable of playing as an MLS competitor again? We will never know.
In the 6-4 goal fest loss to Miami on Sunday May 24th, there were hints of offensive improvement. But no fully developed, totally integrated competent side of eleven starters and their key reserves had yet taken flight. After all, in their most recent game the defense gave up six. Until last year’s record defensive collapse in Vancouver, Miami’s six would have tied for the most goals Philadelphia had ever conceded in a game.
All who saw the match would agree that Miami’s is not the stiffest defense in the league. They gave up the Union’s four goals.
- But Carnell’s side executed a good game plan. They did an excellent job of ambushing Miami early, anticipating their game plan, and taking them by surprise.
- The eyeball evidence of the first hour demands that for effective offense striker Milan Iloski and attacking mids Cavan Sullivan and Agustin Anello be on the pitch together as much as possible.
- And there was one solitary datum that Bruno Damiani might be making progress. The man who is second on the team in shots taken put his the first one of his 30 on frame, his first shot on target of the season. When drowning all straws are candidates to be grasped. New interim head coach Ryan Richter’s greatest immediate offensive task will be to restore poise and confidence to the big Uruguayan.
Teaching offense is harder than defense. Timings must be inch perfect. So must positionings, reads, and deliveries. And Carnell deliberately chose to try to teach how to turn full-blown chaos in goals, a task his that his results suggest can be especially difficult.
In Carnell’s – and Scheer’s – adopted system the offensive players first must learn to defend. Pressing defense cannot be an analytical thought process. Analysis is too slow. Pressing must be instinctive. It must be an instant mental reaction. The press creates chaos. And that chaos must then be read instantly, faster than the opponent has read it, so its offensive opportunities can be exploited.
When the system has worked well, it has triggered the firings of two opposing coaches. One was by D. C. in midsummer last year and one was this May by Columbus.
Lucid analysis by PSP’s talented tactical specialists has pointed out that the Union’s pressing system works spectacularly against weaker sides that possess poor ability to survive its pressure. It works less well against good sides with the skill and poise to play through such pressure.
Carnell had recently said these offensive principles were coming along within his side, and had provided statistical references that gave some support his arguments. We mention some of them in the offensive data we chart below.
Data
But the bottom line for Carnell and his offense was goals scored. To date – Wednesday, May 27th – Philadelphia lies sixth from last in the entire league with only 18. League leader Miami more than doubles that with 39.
Philly has taken 227 shots, which ranks third in the league (one of Carnell’s arguments supporting offensive progress). But the Union’s on-target percentage for those shots remains abysmal. It is 29th league wide. Until the Miami game Philly had been the only team in the league whose shots-on-target percentage had been below 30%, at 28.6%. To exaggerate the point slightly, Philadelphia has not hit the broadest side of a farmer’s barn with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from less than six feet away.
Here is how the Philadelphia data charted immediately below this one ranks in comparison to the 29 other MLS teams.
| Rankings | ||||||||||||
| Goals | Shots | Shots on Target | Shots on Target % | |||||||||
| Raw total | 18 | 227 | 69 | 30.4% | ||||||||
| Rank in MLS | 25th | 3rd | 18th | 29th | ||||||||
|
Raw data – leaders in bold |
||||||||||||
| Player | Shots | Shots on Target | % on target | Goals | XG | % Shots scored | % SoT scored | Mins played | ||||
| 1 | Iloski | 53 | 19 | 35.8% | 7 | 5.99 | 13.2% | 36.8% | 1,208 | |||
| 2 | Damiani | 30 | 5 | 16.6% | 1 | 3.56 | 3.3% | 20% | 1,114 | |||
| 3 | Harriel | 16 | 6 | 37.5% | 1 | 1.9 | 6.2% | 16.6% | 1,350 | |||
| 4 | Anello | 15 | 6 | 40% | 1 | 2.25 | 6.6% | 16.6% | 370 | |||
| 5 | Westfield | 14 | 2 | 14.2% | 0 | 0.74 | 0% | 0% | 893 | |||
| 6 | JeanJacques | 13 | 2 | 15.3% | 2 | 1.17 | 15.3% | 100% | 1,151 | |||
| 7 | Sullivan | 13 | 7 | 53.8% | 1 | 0.96 | 7.6% | 14.2% | 548 | |||
| 8 | Vassilev | 11 | 4 | 36.3% | 1 | 1.67 | 9% | 25% | 958 | |||
| 9 | Bueno | 9 | 5 | 55.5% | 1 | 0.69 | 11.1% | 20% | 467 | |||
| 10 | Alladoh | 9 | 2 | 22.2% | 0 | 1.2 | 0% | 0% | 558 | |||
| 11 | Lukic | 8 | 0 | 0% | 0 | 0.57 | 0% | 0% | 1,042 | |||
| 12 | Korzeniowski | 7 | 2 | 28.5% | 0 | 0.77 | 0% | 0% | 136 | |||
| 13 | Makhanya | 7 | 1 | 14.2% | 0 | 0.64 | 0% | 0% | 1,169 | |||
| 14 | Bender | 6 | 2 | 33.3% | 1 | 0.20 | 16.6% | 50% | 434 | |||
| 15 | Bedoya | 5 | 2 | 40% | 0 | 0.72 | 0% | 0% | 197 | |||
| 16 | Ndingha | 3 | 1 | 33.3% | 0 | 0.15 | 0% | 0% | 220 | |||
| 17 | Rafanello | 3 | 1 | 33.3% | 0 | 0.07 | 0% | 0% | 203 | |||
| 18 | Sery | 2 | 2 | 100% | 1 | 0.28 | 100% | 50% | 732 | |||
| 19 | Martinez | 2 | 0 | 0% | 0 | 0.86 | 0% | 0% | 458 | |||
| 20 | Sequera | 1 | 0 | 0% | 0 | 0.02 | 0% | 0% | 82 | |||
| No other Union player has been credited with a shot. | ||||||||||||
| For comparison purposes, here are the league-wide totals | ||||||||||||
| A. | All of MLS | 5,706 | 2,191 | 38.3 | 720 | —– | 12.5 | 32.7 | —– | |||
| The League totals data presented for comparison immediately above is unofficial: It was complied by PSP on 5/26/26. | ||||||||||||
Verbal observations:
- The Cavan Sullivan data given above uphold the qualitative descriptions that classify his mentality as well beyond that of an ordinary 16-year-old. He has a mature shooter’s poise in the box.
- As sample sizes shrink statistics provide poorer and poorer arguments, hence we do not highlight Japhet Sery, Ben Bender, and even Danley Jean Jacques.
- Damiani is second on the team in total shots behind Iloski, but ranks abysmally when it comes to putting those shots on frame. For him the word “pressing” has had two separate meanings for 2026. It accurately describes his defensive habits as a Union player. It also describes his poise so far this season when shooting.
- Damiani will probablypose Philadelphia’s greatest challenge to Ryan Richter’s individual person-management skills.
- The data above reinforce our eyeball observation from the Miami game that Anello, Iloski and Cavan Sullivan must be on the field together as much as possible.
Current depth chart
Here is PSP’s estimation of the Philadelphia Union depth chart before any announcement of Jon Scheer’s future roster developments, the left footed center back and the in-the-box shooter. Players in [brackets] are rehabilitating from injury at this writing.
| Striker | Striker | ||||||
| Iloski | Damiani | ||||||
| Jakupovic | Alladoh | ||||||
| [Korzeniowski] | Olivas | ||||||
| Davis | |||||||
| AttckngMd | AttckngMd | ||||||
| Anello | C Sullivan | ||||||
| Vassilev | Bedoya | ||||||
| Bender | [Q Sullivan] | ||||||
| DefnsveMd | DefnsveMd | ||||||
| Jean Jaques | Lukic | ||||||
| Bueno | Rafanello | ||||||
| Left Back | Lft Cn Back | Rght Cn Back | Right Back | ||||
| Westfield | Makhanya | [Sery] | Harriel | ||||
| Ndinga | Martinez | Mbaizo | |||||
| Pierre | Sundstrom | ||||||
| Goalkeeper | |||||||
| Blake | |||||||
| Rick | |||||||
| Marks | |||||||
| Total players including loan outs 31 | |||||||
| Striker – 7 | AttkngMd 6 | Dfnsv Md 4 | Otsd Bck 4 | Cntr Bck 5 | |||
| Goalkpr – 3 | |||||||
| Loanaways – 2 | |||||||
| Olney | |||||||
| Anderson | |||||||
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