A little over ten years ago – March 24th, 2016 to be precise – at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Brendan Burke led a squad out onto the pitch for the first time in a professional fixture. 90 minutes later, he also had his first win, courtesy of a first-half strike by Fabian Herbers.
Now, Burke has a hundred wins, with the most recent coming just under two weeks ago against Detroity City. It’s been a long journey, one made more challenging by the places Burke has manager.
“[I]t’s never easy to get there,” Burke told The Blazing Musket. “But it'd be a lot easier at Louisville, you know, or Charleston or Tampa or Sacramento.”
Instead, Burke has done it in Bethlehem, Colorado Springs, and Hartford; not exactly a who’s who of the USL’s biggest clubs. And Burke has done it in a changing league too: he’s the most experienced manager in the USL Championship, closing in on being only the third manager in league history to take charge of 300 games.
It wasn’t even called the USL Championship back then and more than a third of the league’s 29 teams were MLS reserve teams. And Burke was managing one of those teams, the first stop in a managerial journey that has seem him take on some serious challenges.
“There, it was all teenagers," he said. "You know, Matt [Real] started playing for me in this league when he was 16 years old. In the playoffs [in 2018] we had nine teenagers start the playoff game.”
Burke led that Union II team to two playoff appearances in four seasons, including a first-round win over Pittsburgh Riverhounds in 2018. But his charge there wasn’t always to win games, it was to develop the players in Philadelphia’s academy, something he took great pride in.
“Bethlehem was very special to me because Jim [Curtin] and Chris [Albright] trusted me to to bring through guys that are now going to play in the World Cup in two weeks," he said.
Chief among those players is USMNT and Leeds United winger Brenden Aaronson, who has made over 50 appearances for the national team, and is a virtual lock to make the roster for the upcoming World Cup. Matt Freese and Mark McKenzie are other former Burke players likely to join him, with Jack McGlynn on the bubble. And Burke had plenty of other internationals on those teams too, including Cameroonians Faris Moumbagna and Olivier Mbaizo and Jamaicans Chavany Willis and Corey Burke, although neither country qualified for World Cup.
In 2021, Burke departed Philadelphia to take over Colorado Springs Switchbacks, where he spent two seasons winning 32 of 71 matches in all competitions and taking the club to the Western Conference finals in 2022. After a brief stint as an assistant with MLS side Houston Dynamo, during which the club won the U.S. Open Cup, Burke came to Hartford, which was perhaps his toughest job yet.
“We came here and it was a four win team in a full professional soccer season. That's astonishingly bad. And it took a lot to turn this. So I take great pride and my staff take great pride in just changing the professional standards across the board here. And I think, you know, blood, sweat and tears went into that if I'm not lying. So really it means a lot to us. And we walked into the same situation at Colorado Springs. They were a two- win team the year before we walked in and by the time I left we were in the Western final and they won the whole thing a year after.”
For Burke, it’s satisfying to reach the 100-win milestone under these circumstances, telling The Blazing Musket that it means “so much more” to do it at smaller clubs.
"We want to leave an imprint on a city more than just turn the team around," Burke said. "That's how I view it. That's how seriously I take it. And so one hundred to me [at these clubs] is like one thousand somewhere else.”
And Burke isn’t done yet. After the 2025 season he emphasized that he wants silverware every year, and he feels like this year’s Hartford squad is one that can do that again, comparing it favorably to the Houston Dynamo side that won the U.S. Open Cup in 2023.
“We did win the Open Cup that year and were in the western finals. And the feeling was, we can walk in anywhere and take your environment away from you. I remember being in the locker room before that cup final and looking over at Héctor [Herrera] and feeling like, ‘oh, we got this.” We’ve got guys like that in our locker room now. Jordan, Michee, Samu, Augi.”
Burke is already the most successful manager in Hartford history; his 36 wins in all competitions are 20 more than Harry Watling in second place and he is of course the only manager to win any silverware. Later this season, he’ll reach 100 games in all competitions with the club, more than twice as many as any other manager.
And he’s not going anywhere. The journey to the next hundred wins begins in Hartford.
