Bradley Carnell gets to celebrate the Union’s success for himself, too
Winning the Supporters' Shield is redemption not just for players who didn't make the playoffs last year, but for a manager who had to move on from two previous head coaching jobs.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect date changes in the timeline of Bradley Carnell’s coaching tenures.
Union manager Bradley Carnell has often said that the team’s success isn’t about him. He did so again Saturday night, amid the celebrations all over Subaru Park.
“I never do something for ‘I,’” he said. “I’m the bus driver. The guys need to tell me where they need to go, and that’s the journey that we’ve gone on.”
But that doesn’t mean he lacks for his own motivation. He has plenty, stemming from how his two previous MLS head coaching jobs ended.
At Carnell’s first stop, with the New York Red Bulls, he joined as an assistant in 2017 and became the interim boss in 2020 from September through mid-November. Amid the pandemic, he steered the team to a playoff berth. But he was replaced by the bosses’ desired long-term successor, Gerhard Struber, between the end of the regular season and the start of the postseason — and Struber promptly lost in the first round.
Two years later, in 2022, St. Louis City picked Carnell to help set the club up for its expansion season in 2023. It was a smashing success, as one of America’s historic soccer hotbeds saw the second-most points for an expansion team in league history.
But St. Louis lost a dramatic first-round playoff series to cross-state rival Kansas City, the No. 8 seed. And while Carnell got a contract extension in the offseason, 2024 was rocky: a first-round exit from the Concacaf Champions Cup, a 3-1-7 start to the regular season, followed by a 10-game winless streak into the end of June.
» READ MORE: How Alejandro Bedoya, Andre Blake and Mikael Uhre led the Union to a long-awaited second trophy
Carnell was fired, though not without some controversy over whether he was actually the problem. St. Louis missed the playoffs and will do so again this year, three managers and a sporting director change later.
Now Carnell is back at the top, having revitalized the Union and helped them win the Supporters’ Shield for the league’s best regular-season record.
In much of the soccer world, there are no playoffs, so the regular season title is the outright championship. America is understandably different, but the sport’s culture still gives MLS’s regular-season title more weight than hockey’s President’s Trophy, for example.
Not for nothing, then, did a few Union players sneak up on their boss with another American tradition. As Carnell wrapped up his postgame speech to the crowd on the field Saturday night, he was doused with a bucket of ice water, then surrounded by much of his team for an emotional celebration.
When he met with the media a few minutes later, Carnell noted at one point how motivated the players were to prove last year’s bad season was a one-off. And within those words, he let his guard down just long enough to let something escape.
“This is what we’ve seen from the guys all the way through the season — it’s this hunger and this desire just to, I don’t know, prove people wrong,” he said. “Last year, whatever happened, and you know, for me personally as well, whatever happened. So it was this combination of, I would say, two failures, right?”
There it was, finally. Admissions of deep feelings don’t always need to take many words, and Carnell didn’t use many. But he opened the door in a way he rarely has this year, and it didn’t take long for a reporter to wedge a doorstop under it.
» READ MORE: The Union had extra motivation with a trophy at stake: to win it for Quinn Sullivan
Did Carnell let himself take this moment to be happy — for himself?
“Yeah,” he answered, and he told a story from more of his history.
“I had a moment in 2018, winning the Supporters’ Shield” as a Red Bulls assistant, he said. “Never got to hold it. And I regretted that moment all the time. And to get to hold it today was really special.”
He knew that when the Union won the Shield in 2020, Alejandro Bedoya had to celebrate the team’s first trophy with a hastilymade fake version because the real thing got stuck in a shipping delay. That instantly became a moment of lore, and was always going to make winning the trophy a second time even bigger.
“To get the players to hold the real shield [after] 2020, the makeshift shield,” Carnell said, “I was like, before the [pregame] meeting, ‘Ale, I want you to hold the real one.’ This means something, right?”
Indeed it does.
“We’ve decided to go this way, and we try and find ways to reward them,” he concluded. “And they’ve done that much and then some more. So, yeah, it’s nice.”