TUKWILA — For the fourth time this season, the Seattle Sounders faced LAFC. For the fourth time this season — and sixth straight time overall — the Sounders lost.
This time it was a 1-0 loss in the U.S. Open Cup semifinals on Wednesday. It marked the third straight tournament — dating back to last year’s MLS Cup playoffs — that LAFC had eliminated the Sounders.
Amplifying the sting of those three eliminations is that the Sounders were at home in all of them.
That Wednesday’s was at Starfire Soccer Complex — a place the Sounders had previously never lost an Open Cup game in regulation and had only failed to advance twice in 29 attempts — only made it worse.
Asked if this game represented some level of progress — the Sounders had lost their two previous encounters with LAFC by 3-0 scorelines — head coach Brian Schmetzer was succinct.
“No. No. No progress,” he said. “We haven’t won.”
To be fair, Schmetzer’s assessment was likely born more of frustration than serious analysis. Unlike the two previous meetings, the Sounders were at least competitive in this one. They finally managed to hold LAFC scoreless for a half — something they’d failed to do in their last three meetings — and kept them from scoring from open play for the first time in their last six matches.
Even while using a very virtually identical lineup as last time, Schmetzer did change the tactics. They allowed LAFC far more possession in this game and played far more direct. On the physical side, they out-dueled LAFC 59-51 and won 22 tackles to LAFC’s 11. The effort was undeniably there. If not for a somewhat questionable penalty and a tight offside call, the Sounders could have pulled off a result.
But these are, admittedly, exceptionally low bars for progress.
In a broader sense, Schmetzer’s absolutely right. The Sounders had about as many advantages as they could hope in this game — they were at home in a facility at which they’ve been virtually unbeatable and had an extra day of rest, while LAFC were rotating some of their starters and coming off an emotional loss — and still couldn’t do any better than get the game to a point where the referee could have a major impact. For the third straight game against LAFC, the Sounders failed to score. It was eight games ago that the Sounders score a goal for themselves from open play.
While I do think both calls were tight, I’m also not totally convinced they were objectively wrong either. Although I’m inclined to believe that both Pedro de la Vega and Alex Roldan had their arms against their bodies on the penalty, any time a shot strikes a player on the arm there’s a good chance it will be called. Similarly, I think plenty of assistant referees would have kept their flags down on Jordan Morris’ potential equalizer, but I also have to admit that it does look like he was about a step offside.
Debating those calls also misses the point. After six straight defeats, it’s impossible to deny that LAFC are simply a better team than the Sounders.
While the Sounders aren’t necessarily a bad team — I think there’s a pretty good chance that they could finish as high as third in the Western Conference — being objectively worse than the team you’ll invariably need to beat to win a trophy is a problem. It’s an especially acute problem when you’re a team that has built its reputation on winning trophies and maintains that doing so is a primary objective.
The worst part is that people inside the Sounders organization saw this coming, at least to a degree. Back in the summer of 2022 — before the Sounders had missed the playoffs — Garth Lagerwey did an interview with the team’s official podcast. Toward the end of the interview, he was asked to look ahead and project how long he saw the Sounders’ championship window remaining open. He figured it had at least another year or two, but he also cautioned that LAFC already had a younger core and was on the verge of passing the Sounders. He made a comparison to how it took the Chicago Bulls a few years of running into the Detroit Pistons before ultimately passing them. Lagerwey’s concern was that once LAFC passed the Sounders, they could stay there for quite some time.
At that point, he felt the Sounders would “have to change and we have to adapt and we have to tweak the model.”
A little more than two years later, Lagerwey looks very prescient and we’re now firmly at the point where the Sounders must adapt or risk being left behind for even longer.
Since Lagerwey left, the Sounders have been mostly defined by how little they’ve changed. Just one starter and only three of the seven players on the bench were signed after Lagerwey left. Regardless of how the last few months of this season play out, this offseason is going to be absolutely massive. The Sounders must humble themselves. They must adapt. They must change.
