Sometimes you have to laugh to stop yourself from crying
The Philadelphia Union are the only team in MLS still looking for their first win of the season. In fact, they haven’t won since August of last year and they’re closing in on the league’s all-time record for consecutive matches without a win (19 games, held by the 1999 New York/New Jersey MetroStars). In the face of such abject misery, the club could fall into a collective depression and trudge through extra-long training sessions while listening to Joy Division in the fleeting hope of turning things around. Instead, they’re making parody videos of ’90s sitcom opening credit sequences.
To promote their upcoming “throwback night,” the Union had striker CJ Sapong (who, for the record, was born and raised in Virginia) star as “The Fresh Prince of Chest-Air”—a play on the club’s home in Chester, Pennsylvania, about 17 miles away from Will Smith’s playground in West Philadelphia. And the result is pretty great.
It’s always interesting when a club that’s less than 10 years old does a throwback thing — I mean, what do you throw back to? For the Union, it’s a TV show that ended 14 years before they played their first match and the original Bethlehem Steel FC, which was disbanded in 1930 and played in a different city more than 60 miles away (a USL club affiliated with the Union using the Bethlehem Steel name was founded in 2015).
In other words, the club is throwing it back to when they weren’t around to lose all the time. Smart.