Major League Soccer’s 28th season has taken a league famed for its frequent changes and Americanized innovations and changed its format once again.
With the first Leagues Cup stuck in the middle of a long, difficult season, the 29 teams of the MLS entered the postseason already quite tired. Upon arrival, they would find an expanded playoff format that allowed nearly two-thirds of the league’s teams to compete in a postseason race that began with drawn-out best-of-three series. The winners in that round were then treated to an international break – with their star talent further targeted – before the conference semi-finals arrived last weekend.
During that break, I followed Dániel Gazdag to Hungary to observe how the Philadelphia Union’s integral designated player balanced Major League Soccer’s strange playoffs with qualifying for the 2024 European Championship in Budapest.
Among the festive din of 59,600 Hungarians gathering their national team at the Puskás Aréna last Sunday, a name familiar to both Philadelphia and Budapest floated through the midfield, delivering high and sharp passes. Gazdag, like many of his peers in the MLS, spent the past week traveling more than 4,000 miles away from his club team, tasked with competing for qualification in the middle of the postseason.
“Luckily I didn’t get injured,” he told me after the match with a smile, later adding that the flights are long, but spending time with his Hungarian teammates is always a good thing. They had a job to do and they did it. “Oh, it’s amazing. We have achieved our goal. We are so happy and we are trying to prepare for next year.” As he said this, I heard music blaring from the dressing room, where celebrations continued an hour after the final whistle as Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai celebrated his support in the 3-1 win over Montenegro by firing in a shot. take with fans.
That aura of elation peaked at the final whistle, but for the supporters who gathered and sang, it started long before the match started and continued throughout the game. But if you were to somehow focus on Gazdag’s fast work and scare the crowd, you might confuse the match in Budapest with a match in Chester, Pennsylvania, where the 27-year-old from Nyíregyháza has a name made. with the Union. His moves would be familiar to fans watching from Philadelphia’s River End: connecting the lines, firing quick passes, creating chances, luring defenders out of place.
Since signing with Jim Curtin in 2021, Gazdag has gone from an exciting young talent to an irreplaceable creative force whose attack has often been at the center of what has been an often dominant MLS club in recent years. Plucked from the ranks of his boyhood club Budapest Honvéd two years ago, Gazdag had a breakout year in 2022, ending a record-setting season for Philadelphia with 22 goals and 10 assists, good enough to earn MLS Best XI honors.
That turnout has caught the attention of the Hungarian football-watching public. One fan I spoke to rattled off not just Gazdag’s club achievements, but every Hungarian who has played in the US, with a special nod to Kansas City. The MLS isn’t the top league in the world, some said, but it’s a good league that could lead to even bigger opportunities for talented players like Gazdag.
Gazdag started Hungary’s second match of the window against Montenegro, marking his 23rd appearance for the Magyars against the team he played with in his first cap. Since that debut in 2019, Gazdag’s time with the national team has produced four goals, including one that was sent past England in a Nations League match last June.
But there were also disappointments, including an ill-timed injury in 2021 that saw the new Hungarian from Philadelphia miss out on that summer’s European Championship after initially being included in the squad.
When I spoke to Gazdag, he noted how much it meant to him to qualify with his team in November, offering him another opportunity to play in one of the highlights of international football next summer: “I was invited. I was in the squad for the last European Championships, but got injured just before the tournament, so it was really bad luck for me. I’m so happy that we qualified for the next one and that I can play.”
Hungary was placed in a difficult group last time. Despite taking two points, they placed last behind France, Germany and Portugal, and failed to progress from the group stage.
With a view to a more favorable fate next summer, Gazdag also emphasized how important the match with Montenegro was for them. They had already qualified for their third European Championship in a row a few nights earlier in Bulgaria, but a win could determine who they face when the draw takes place on Saturday: “It was really important. We needed a win to be in the second group of the draft in December.”
Flying across the Atlantic in the middle of the MLS play-offs to compete for European glory in Bulgaria and Hungary hadn’t exactly been ideal for Curtin’s No. 10. Doing so at the long, drawn-out end of a difficult season was taxing: “It is not easy. You know, Hungary is so far from the US.”
Gazdag wasn’t the only MLS player (or Union player) to travel in that window. Across the league, teams risked even more injury or fatigue to the rosters that were already plaguing them in a bloated season.
Perhaps nowhere was the resulting fatigue more evident than among the Union’s players and staff. After a stellar year in 2022, when they fell just short of the Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup trophies, the Union played more than 50 games in all competitions in 2023. They entered the postseason with injuries to key players and just barely came out on top. without anything to show it.
Gazdag said: “It’s obviously a good thing that we have a lot of players going to their national team. But we had important injuries in the last few games, which made us a bit weaker, I would say.”
Despite the fatigue, he emphasized his faith: “But our team is deep enough. So I think we can also go to the extreme this year.”
For Gazdag, despite the exhaustion, there was also rejuvenation in the period he spent with Hungary. There was hope that the winning curve of redemption with his national team could follow him to Cincinnati, where Philly would meet the 2023 Supporters’ Shield winning club in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
“I have a week to prepare for the game against Cincinnati, which is going to be a huge game for us,” he said. “You know, we would like to win there. And this year we would also like to go to the final of the MLS Cup.”
Coincidentally, Philly came close, but fell short in Ohio, 1-0. A controversial failure to call an arguably offside injury-time goal added a final dose of disappointment to a faltering year. Yerson Mosquera, who had battled Colombia for World Cup qualification the week before, sent the decisive death knell past Andre Blake – who himself had just returned from a two-legged joust with Canada to clinch Jamaica’s place in the Copa América next year. .
Gazdag’s hopes of lifting a trophy this season ended there. But for Major League Soccer, the bloated season continues.