Hartford Athletic earned a point via a scoreless draw with Birmingham Legion last Wednesday, giving them four points from their season-opening southern swing.
With the Latics prepared for another roadtrip through the NYC metro area in the coming days, here are three thoughts on their draw with Birmingham.
In their season-opening win over Sporting JAX, Hartford looked like it was already back in the swing of things, at least in attack. Against Birmingham last Wednesday, it scuffled in a performance that was far too reminiscent of 2025’s early-season struggles. When both teams were at full strength, the Latics looked very much second best. In the first half, for example, they were outshot 9-3 and struggled to get a sniff of the Birmingham box, managing just two touches there.
To drive the point home, look at Augustine Williams. In the win over Sporting Jax, he was all over the pitch, taking 28 touches, with seven of those coming in the opposition box. Against Birmingham, just 13 touches, with only one coming in the Legion box. Most of those touches came in no-man’s land, well outside the box, where Williams was receiving long balls - but the Latics were unable to get their number nine into the box in dangerous situations.
The most obvious difference here was the absence of Michee Ngalina, held out via an abundance of caution after taking a minor knock the previous Saturday. Adewale Obalola, who started in his stead, was simply anonymous, getting just 18 touches while attempting a mere seven passes, no dribbles, and no crosses.
Birmingham is obviously not Jacksonville, so it’s impossible to say exactly how Ngalina would have fared had he been fit, but his performance in Florida was simply more dynamic. Burke was also unable to utilize Careaga, who transformed the game in limited minutes at Jacksonville. After that performance, the Hartford manager simply said "he makes us different" and his loss was apparent last Wednesday. Even 20 minutes from Careaga – particularly when Birmingham went down to 10 men – might have been enough to let Hartford walk away with all three points.
Barry Coffey has looked promising filling in for the Argentine, but he's clearly not quite on the same page as his teammates, completing just under 50 percent of his passes so far on the season. Against Birmingham, he sometimes looked caught between two minds, and one of Hartford's best chances went begging when Coffey didn't seem quite able to decide between shooting or crossing, and ended up doing neither. Hopefully, he'll settle in better as the weeks go by, but for now, there appears to be a huge dropoff from Careaga, and the number ten's absence in Birmingham certainly helps to explain the lackluster performance.
2 - Disjointed offseason has the team operating at a deficit
Now, it’s fair to fully contextualize the on-field performance. Any team that is missing three nailed-on starters – in addition to Ngalina and Careaga, Hartford are still without Emmanuel Samadia – is bound to look less than its best. And an early-season road trip that brought two games in four days certainly pressured an already-depleted squad even more, but it’s also fair to ask if, once again, Hartford’s offseason simply wasn’t enough.
Brendan Burke has, nominally, 20 professional players available for selection at this point. If everyone is healthy and available, that’s probably just about enough but as in 2025, everyone isn’t healthy and available. Neither Samadia nor Baboucarr Njie is yet ready to play – Samadia might be unavailable for another month, due to visa issues – and Ngalina and Careaga were also unavailable for minutes, despite being named to the eighteen. That gave Burke a mere 14 outfield players to work with at Birmingham, three of whom (Sadat Anaku, Andres Hernandez, and Christos Hadjipaschalis) are still largely untested at the Championship level.
It's not quite as bad as 2025, but it's close, and it's a reminder that as much as Burke has been able to manufacture on-field success, there's more to this game than what the technical staff can manage. Hartford’s schedule will continue to be busy. They’ll play Wednesday-Saturday of this week, and then, assuming they advance in the U.S. Open Cup, Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday of the week that closes March and begins the month of April.
Was 20 players truly enough to navigate this? No club wants bodies just for the sake of it, but it certainly seems like Hartford could use two more full professionals so that Burke is able to properly manage the health of his squad without seriously compromising the on-field performance.
It’s also fair to note that Hartford’s preseason preparations were less than ideal, with the club simply unable to get access to its practice facilities for much of the preseason. Additionally, Hartford opted not to take a preseason training trip, which further curtailed their preparations for the season. These have explanatory value when it comes to assessing why things might be inconsistent on the pitch, but they also raise further questions about the operations of the club, above and beyond what Burke and his staff can control. While there is absolutely no doubt that the infrastructure to support the players has improved over the last few seasons, there’s still a long way to go: professional clubs simply need to be confident that their players can get in their full preseason.
3 - The USL Championship compounds, rather than eases, the challenges faced by the players
While some of Hartford’s problems on Wednesday were likely of their own making, there is blame elsewhere as well. Before that game, Brendan Burke called the 11 am local time kickoff dumb and it’s an indication of how far the USL Championship still has to go that it continues to throw up these kinds of scheduling problems for its clubs.
It may very well be that Birmingham preferred the school-day kickoff for other reasons: in 2025, ‘Education Day’ brought out the largest crowd of the season, and the community partnerships that these events support are extremely valuable for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, they also cut against the idea of a fully professional league operating with professional standards.
This tension – that the USL wants to brand the Championship, and, ultimately, its top-tier Premier Division, as a fully professional alternative to MLS while at the same time failing to deliver a fully professional operation on and off the pitch – is also at the heart of the ongoing labor dispute. Scheduling is simply one example of the inconsistencies across a league that – according to current and former players – sees clubs operating without appropriate medical support and with subpar training facilities, delayed compensation, and substandard housing.
As league headquarters collects millions of dollars in expansion fees – as well as a $100,000 per-club ‘vetting fee’ for the forthcoming top-tier USL league that seems like a superfluous cash grab -- the failure to put the basic operations of the league on a professional footing is all the more grating. In the scheme of the failures of the league that, within just the last six months, includes the ‘hiatus’ of both North Carolina FC and South Georgia Tormenta, a midweek morning kickoff does not loom particularly large. It simply underscores the inability of this league to do the basic things right, let alone the hard things.
On the one hand, the USL is engaging in increasingly ham-fisted attempts to pressure the USLPA into accepting less than the players deserve. On the other, it seems clear that professionalizing their operations is not, in fact, a priority.
The players and the fans don't benefit from midweek morning games, and there are other avenues to engage community that don't make a mockery of the game. If the league cannot get the schedule to a place that manages basic competitive balance and prioritizes the game, it's hard to imagine that dreams of promotion and relegation or a first-tier league will come to fruition in a way that does either.
