HELLO!
Welcome back to our ongoing series previewing the 2026 season for Marquette men’s soccer! We’ve already gone through the guys who are returning from the 2025 campaign and are back on the roster for head coach David Korn’s third season in charge in the Valley. If you haven’t seen that yet, run over and check it out. As you would expect, there’s a lot of context for this entry in our series, talking about the new faces on the roster for this fall, that you’re going to need to have to understand
what exactly I’m going on about.
We’ll go with the same format we did for the returning players: Forwards, Midfielders, Defenders, and Goalkeepers, in that order. Marquette is a little spotty on building out official team bios for all of the new guys on the roster, so we’re leaning a little bit extra on this press release from late July that runs down the entirety of the 2026 signing class. Ready?
FORWARD
I’ve said it before in various places: I get a little bit of an eye twitch when I read an official Marquette team bio for a soccer or lacrosse recruit that’s going to play forward/attack and it doesn’t mention a single thing about their ability to create points. Specifically: When it doesn’t come straight out and tell me “oh, they scored X and Y with their high school and/or club team.” It’s a simple equation: If Marquette can’t praise these guys up by telling me how productive they were against teenagers, why should I start thinking good things about how they can produce against players in their early 20s?
I offer this disclaimer because all three Marquette freshman forwards have nary a single mention about how many goals they’ve scored or how many assists they distributed. Dominic Firs (#15, 6’0” freshman, Park Ridge, Illinois) won a national club championship with Sockers FC…. but nothing about how much he literally helped that cause. [ASIDE: This is going to come up later.] Tomiwa Adewumi (#21, 6’2” freshman, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) played 115 minutes for Sporting KC II across seven different matches in MLS Next Pro this past spring…. but I can see for a fact that he didn’t chip in points. This is made worse by the fact that I can see that Sporting KC has 27 total goals scored in 20 matches this season right now. Chidube Nwankwo (#26, 5’10” freshman, St. Louis, Missouri) debuted for St. Louis CITY2 in 2025 and made six appearances with three starts in 2026…. and didn’t tally a point in 274 minutes. Is MLS Next Pro a more difficult league than Division 1 men’s soccer? If it is, then maybe it’s not a big deal that these guys don’t have anything to show for their starts in that league. If it’s really more of a teen academy league…. well, I have questions, that’s all I’m saying, seeing as Marquette averaged 0.31 goals per match in Big East play last season. Marquette needs to find new ways to score this year, and at a glance, I’m not seeing it from the three freshman forwards.
MIDFIELD
We have a clear cut Name To Know here, as Liam Cahill (#28, 6’4” freshman, Madison, Wisconsin) comes to Marquette after being named the WIAA Player of the Year and Gatorade Player of the Year for Wisconsin after his 2025 campaign that led to a state title for Madison West. In his career, he recorded 37 goals and 24 assists, and sure, that’s not blow away numbers, but we’re talking about a midfielder here. Specifically, Marquette lists Cahill as a Central Midfielder in that press release, so if his abilities lean towards gaining and maintaining possession in the middle of the field and turning the ball away from his net and towards his forwards, then it’s a little bit harder for him to be the one doing the scoring. Of course, the team bio doesn’t actually say how many years of varsity soccer it took to get the 37 & 24, so that plays a part in trying to figure out how much of an obvious impact Cahill could have right away. In any case, I presume there’s an immediate role for the guy who was the best high school player in all of Wisconsin last fall.
Rio Pehar (#3, 6’0” freshman, Glenview, Illinois) might have a slightly better chance than his position mates in finding a role. There’s nothing about “played for Chicago FC United for seven years” that makes you immediately enthused, but we can’t ignore the fact that Pehar did enroll for spring semester and was training with the team. 1) Korn was interested in having him do that and 2) Korn has gotten a chance to see how Pehar fits in with everyone else more than some of the other freshmen and transfers we’re talking about here.
The final three midfielders on the list here all fall into the group of “sure.” Enkido Hackaa (#10, 5’11” freshman, Sollentuna, Sweden) comes from Sweden and their youth development system. Emilio Maldonado Frei (#12, 6’2” sophomore, Geneva, Switzerland) is now on his third college team since enrolling at FIU for his freshman year last fall. He started the first three matches of the season for the Panthers, then played just seven more times the rest of the year as FIU went 7-9-3. That’s not encouraging, but he left for Campbell at semester break, and after a spring semester with the Camels, he’s in Milwaukee now. Is that because Campbell relieved their head coach of his duties in late June? Maybe! After all, Marquette didn’t announce Frei joining the team until July 24th! Finally, there’s David Siemionko (#14, 5’10” junior, Mount Prospect, Illinois), who has started 16 times in 20 appearances across two seasons for Loyola Chicago. That’s neat, up until the point where you realize 1) The Ramblers played 16 matches in both campaigns for a total of 32, giving Siemionko 12 matches he missed for whatever reason and 2) Loyola went 9-14-9 in those two seasons. 11 guys on the field, etc., etc., but that’s not exactly filling me with optimism that he can either stay healthy for a whole season or make a notable contribution towards a winning record.
DEFENDER
Do you remember when we mentioned Dominic Firs and I said the lack of information about how much scoring the forward was doing for Sockers FC was going to come up again later? Well, it’s later. Aiden Goldberg (#16, 5’8” freshman, Lake Zurich, Illinois) was on that same Sockers FC squad that won a national club championship, and well, would you look at that: The official team release says that Goldberg had 11 goals and 19 assists during that club season. He’s going to play defense for Marquette! Sure, he’s listed in the release as a left back/left wing, so obviously playing a position that slides up and down the sideline could have more of an opportunity to score than a more centralized defensive player, but the point is that if there were scoring totals for Firs that the team wanted to tell us about, they would be telling us about them. It’s hard to say for certain how this puts Goldberg in a position to contribute for Marquette right away, of course. It’s unclear exactly how he went about doing all that scoring, and if MU’s system isn’t going to put him in positions to recreate those opportunities, then knowing about his points isn’t useful information in evaluating him. But also Joey Buchanan did a bunch of scoring while listed as a defender, so who knows?
We don’t have any hard data from the spring exhibition season to tell us how Edvard Liljedahl (#2, 6’2” freshman, Stockholm, Sweden) and Peyton Hoard (#8, 6’3” freshman, Racine, Wisconsin) are fitting in after enrolling back in January. They have been around for an entire semester though, so that gives the coaching staff a bit of a head start towards finding a role for them on the team this season. Hoard won a Wisconsin state title with Union Grove, but that was back in 2023 when he was a sophomore, so it’s unclear exactly how much of an impact he had on that drive to the title.
Rounding out the new guys in the position group are Gabe Watkins (#13, 6’1” freshman, Dallas, Texas) and Felix Masson (#19, 6’2” redshirt freshman, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada). Watkins brings experience from the FC Dallas academy team, while Masson was on the Louisville roster last fall but had to sit out last fall due to injury. The Cardinals went 5-7-5 overall and 1-5-2 without him and then he moved on anyway, so we’ll see if he’s able to find playing time here.
GOALKEEPER
It’s safe to say that Marquette could stand to have a little bit of competition in the goalie room, as Cameron Simpson wasn’t a runaway success last season. Viktor Engh (#30, 6’2” junior, Billingstad, Norway) arrives at Marquette after two seasons with UNC Wilmington, but there’s a bit of an asterisk there. Nine of his appearances came as a freshman, where he posted a goals-against average of 1.88 and a save percentage of .700. He ended up losing his starting spot to a redshirt freshman on the roster that year, and then in 2025, that guy kept the starting spot except for 10 minutes that Engh played last fall. To be clear: Engh couldn’t take minutes from a guy with a goals-against of 1.95 and a save percentage of .652. That certainly explains why he bounced from Wilmington and was with Marquette in the spring… but I don’t think it exactly lends itself towards thinking he’s going to challenge for playing time this fall.
Will Slawinski (#32, 6’0” freshman, Brookfield, Wisconsin), on the other hand, could do that. At the very least, the team release makes him sound very impressive with a 0.21 goals-against average for Brookfield East as they went to the Wisconsin Division 1 Final Four three times. I can’t track down career stats anywhere to tell you how honest that information is, but I do know for sure it was Slawinski in net against Liam Cahill’s Madison West team in the semifinals last fall and that Cahill scored in the sixth minute of West’s 2-1 win.
