Delaware County’s professional soccer team is the can’t-help-but-root-for union of a rough and gritty work ethic with Major League Soccer talent.

“Embodying Philadelphia – or Chester, as it may be – is about embracing that hard-working, blue-collar identity,” Jeff Kassouf writes for FourFourTwo, an international soccer magazine.

“It means pressing every team, whether at home or on the road. It means finding center backs who are destroyers, not wannabe playmakers stuck in deeper-than-desired roles. Working harder is the foundation for everything else.”

Everything about the Philadelphia Union and its new facilities personify the host city. With the raw strength of the Commodore Barry Bridge as a backdrop to Talen Energy Stadium, a former-power-plant-turned-team-headquarters and an industrious new Power Training Complex, the team’s facilities provide “a spectacular and fitting pun. Power. Energy. Union. This is a blue-collar place. And this is unapologetically a blue-collar club.”

The aesthetic doesn’t diminish the fact that the new state-of-the-art training ground “rivals anything in North America, and gives us a unique environment to continue to strive toward excellence in MLS,” Sporting Director Earnie Stewart said.

Yet “these are the facilities of a team still coming into its own,” chip on its shoulder and all: tough, energetic, powerful, and direct.

And that team is led by coach Jim Curtin, a mix of old school and modern in the body of a towering nine-year MLS defender.

Appearing in the playoffs for the first time since 2011, the Union, seeded sixth in the Eastern Conference, travel to Toronto FC for tomorrow night’s first-round match at 7:30 PM.

Read more about the molding of a team and the making of a first-class home in Chester in FourFourTwo here, and check out previous DELCO Today coverage of the Union here.