Under an unfamiliarly euphoric Talen Energy Stadium Friday night, Philadelphia Union manager Jim Curtin let the media peer behind the wall at the club’s free-kick methodology.

Tranquillo Barnetta provided the visual aid, his stunner of a free kick curling around the wall, past a stupefied Joe Bendik, off the underside of the bar and in to give the Union a 2-1 win over Orlando City. But more intriguing was the approach that may have contributed to the beauty.

Here’s the video. Notice the extra line of players set up by the Union two strides behind Orlando City’s wall at 10 yards:



Barnetta didn’t have much to say on the free-kick strategy:

“Actually I don’t know. I wasn’t at the free kicks (design). You saw the keeper, he had no view to the ball and it was a little bit confusing for them because they saw the wall was like offsides, but they stepped two yards forward when I shoot it. I think that’s a really good idea to take the view off the keeper.”

Here’s Curtin:

“Our entire staff works very hard on restarts. (Assistant coach) BJ Callaghan specifically has been the point man. We have a good catalog of things. We’ve spent a lot more time and have been working on them a lot more. The second wall, if you will, the timing of that gives a little bit of a distraction. It’s something we picked up from another team that was successful with it. It provides a little bit of a different look. We checked with the linesman on the first time they did it when Tranquillo hit it way over, just to make sure the wall wasn’t offsides and there wouldn’t have been an issue. And the second time, they executed it well.”

It’s an unusual tactical design, one I’d never seen before. Sometimes you’ll see walls between the ball and the opposing wall, like this sliding-door approach from English club Brentford or AC Milan’s bulrush technique. Lining your players offsides hampers the goalie’s visibility and depth perception (not that Bendik has done particularly well under normal circumstances in the River End) but takes them out of the play for rebounds, unless they check up to be even with the last defender before the ball is struck so as not to be offsides.

So what’s that mystery team that Curtin got his design from? It looks like Danish club Midtjylland, which has used it plenty. You may remember Midtjylland as the former club of Danny Califf, and it’s a regular fixture in Champions League or Europa League, for devotees of those.

They also get creative with free kicks. A few examples. There's two in the first two minutes of this highlight tape:

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Rene Meulensteen, seen here with Fulham last year,
is happy to be working with the Union. (AP)

It’s possible that Friday could be looked at as a seminal moment for the Philadelphia Union, a watershed day in which their structures and hierarchy begins to take the shape required by the rigors of the new MLS (2.0 or 3.0 or whatever.0).

Announcements of such gravity –the contracting of Rene Meulensteen as a consultant, the formal declaration that a sporting director will be sought and the first public comments made by majority owner Jay Sugarman – provided plenty of food for thought and a lot of information to sift through.

So let’s distill it into a few important points from today’s press conference.

1. Jay Sugarman is not a silent owner.

It’s easy to have thought differently given his muted public presence, which fostered the notion among some fans that Sugarman was just the money and little else. There’s no doubt the enormity of investment that he’s put into this club, but his involvement (which I’m going to explore in a little more detail later) doesn’t entail writing checks and then ignoring how the funds are spent. Through co-owner Richie Graham, he’s had a hand in the creation of the Union Academy. Sugarman is an enormously successful businessman, and he got that way by identifying talent and allowing those people to do their jobs. And now, being less than satisfied by how those jobs have been done, he’s stepping in to put into practice his time learning about the team, the league and the American sports market.

2. Nick Sakiewicz is no longer involved in football operations.

In the assignment of duties Friday, one of the first was that Sakiewicz “and his team will focus on building the business and have the resources to compete as our league gets stronger and stronger,” according to Sugarman. Implicit in that statement, which Sugarman repeated later in the press conference, is that Sakiewicz will have limited to no hand in soccer operational decisions moving forward. That follows with Sakiewicz’s public statements of late (and depending on your perspective, has been the paradigm all along), and it dispels any misinformation to the contrary in concrete terms.

3. Rene Meulensteen is a temporary remedy.
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