Hope springs eternal for soccer fans the world over as summer dawns, months of labor bearing the fruit of new signings and new possibilities as the global deck of soccer talent shuffles itself to the hands of the highest bidders. The silly season is the habitat of boundless hope, where even the unlikeliest of dance partners can pair up like gawky teens in the last hazy, desperate moments of a high school dance.

Sheanon Williams is one of only two players
on the Union's active roster acquired during a summer transfer window.
(AP)

For the Philadelphia Union, though, there should be no delusions of grandeur as to the summer harvest. If history is any indication, the Union’s dealings this summer will trade in equal measures perplexing, unjustifiably optimistic and downright futile. The past missteps, many borne of fits of midsummer pique, have backed the club into a tight logistical corner ahead of this window, the curtain on which officially rose Wednesday. That should temper already low expectations, the chances of appreciably improving a squad in dire need of reinforcements looking modest.

Presented below is the ignominious track record of the Union’s front office in transfer windows gone by. It reads like a carnage of misfits, mysteries and mirages that define the organization’s half-decade struggle to find the playoffs, and more elusively, a consistent direction through the world of MLS.

Hyperbole aside, the most damning indictment of the Union’s blithering transfer ideology resides in a single number. The club enters its sixth summer transfer window, the period of movement that owns primary status in the world’s most affluent leagues but is rendered secondary to the winter window by MLS’ peculiar schedule. But when the club resumed training from its July 4 weekend break, only two players (Fabinho and Sheanon Williams) signed during a summer window were physically present in the group assembled at PPL Park. It’s a staggeringly low number.

(Since transfer window openings vary, this appraisal considers any player movement into the Union from June on. That includes free-agent signings of players new to MLS in September.)

2014 

If you look five years down the road, this could be the set of transactions that dooms the Union to prolonged mediocrity. All the rhetoric, in hindsight, seemed too rose-colored, blinded by afterglow of a little tournament in Brazil. To compete in MLS, read the script from which the media was often regaled, the Union required World Cup talent. So they splashed out for Rais M’Bolhi, oblivious of the risk that 120 minutes of glory in Porto Alegre against Germany could be overshadowed by a decade tracing a nomadic path across Europe’s club scene, and fought to return Carlos Valdes from loan, the defender strong-arming his way out of Argentina’s San Lorenzo through a daily soap opera broadcast 140 characters at a time. Fast-forward 12 months, and the Union can’t ship M’Bolhi out of town quickly enough while the combination of Valdes’ worn-down body and outsize salary have the Union presumably hoping that the another suitor will step in where Uruguayan club Nacional has reportedly soured on the Colombian. The odds of either ever returning to supplement their total of 17 combined matches in a Union kit since the latest jersey unveiling is slightly less remote than MLS Cup making an appearance on the banks of the Delaware in the near future, but not by much.

The third, less heralded (read: retrospectively reviled) addition was Brian Brown, on loan from Jamaican club Harbour View FC. It was a little too much, too soon for the 22-year-old, who notched two goals and one assist in eight games (one start). He’s got two goals in 11 matches with NASL side Indy Eleven this season, a level more aligned with his talents. But you have to wonder if the Union would’ve had greater latitude to take a chance on Brown when his loan ended had they not squandered two international spots and undisclosed piles of money in concocting their post-World Cup recipe for disaster.

2013 

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