We have McDonald’s at home

It’s hard to appreciate what you already have. There’s a reason we have so many cliches like “the grass is always greener on the other side,” or in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” Closeness and familiarity can breed fatigue, frustration and a wandering eye at the best of times.

For fans of the Seattle Sounders that seems to be the case. While fans around the league get Big Macs, McRibs, 20-pieces, and McFlurries, Sounders supporters just seem to hear “we’ve got McDonalds at home” on repeat.

Brian Schmetzer has guided the Sounders to three of the greatest in-season turnarounds in the league’s history, starting with his first half-season in charge when he took the reins from Sigi Schmid just as Nico Lodeiro joined the club on the way to Seattle’s first MLS Cup victory in 2016. He did it again along with the addition of another iconic Sounders Designated Player in 2018 when Raúl Ruidíaz joined the side. Most recently he performed some genuine magic in 2024.

This time it wasn’t an addition from outside that changed Seattle’s fortunes but rather giving Paul Rothrock an increased role and returning to the team’s DNA that saw the Sounders recover from the worst start in franchise history to go on one hell of a run that saw them finish a game shy of both the U.S. Open Cup and MLS Cup finals. He’s helped to add two MLS Cup trophies and a Concacaf Champions League trophy to the silverware collection, and took the Sounders to four MLS Cup finals in five years. He’s done all that while feeding Seattle’s impressive talent development pipeline not only into the first team but into the starting lineup.

Schmetzer has performed when the pressure’s been highest and at a level few other coaches can touch. This season he’ll almost certainly push his way into the top-10 for most regular season wins in league history — he’s currently on 125, five behind No. 10 Frank Yallop and 12 behind currently-jobless Jim Curtin at No. 9 — and he’s already got the third most post-season wins with 20; only Sigi Schmid (26) and Bruce Arena (35) have more. He’s also one of only seven MLS coaches to win multiple MLS Cups, to go along with being the only MLS coach to lead a team to CCL glory. Just for good measure, he’s also got two USL championships under his belt.

Despite the accomplishments, Schmetzer’s never won the Sigi Schmid MLS Coach of the Year award. He’s shown off impressive tactical chops, built a team significantly filled with players from Seattle’s academy and development system, overcome significant injuries in his teams throughout his tenure, and bounced back from bad starts to accomplish what he has — all things that typically point to potential award winners — but end-of-year awards tend to be narrative driven, and while those narratives tend to be carried by the national media they start at home. Schmetzer is a humble guy. He doesn’t tend to wax poetic about his tactics or his system; he passes the credit and praise along to his players, assistant coaches and the staff around him; and he doesn’t even have an iconic look (maybe if he wore a monocle?)

We as fans love him for these things, but in our celebration of the local legend who leads our Sounders we have a tendency to cast him as something less than he is. He gets portrayed as an “everyman” and when people talk about him as a coach there is an overemphasis on him as a man-manager, ignoring the decades of experience as a player and a coach that preceded his step into the head coach role he occupies now. In an effort to contrast him with the coaches who do get the love and adoration of national pundits, Schmetzer gets sold short for what he actually does in order to get his teams to play to the level that they do. It’s not a fluke that Schmetzer is so high up the win charts, but if the hometown fans don’t seem to rate him with how he gets discussed, why should pundits consider him when they cast their ballots?

It’s not just Schmetzer who suffers from this sort of perception. Rothrock’s breakout campaign in MLS was appreciated by Seattle fans as well as around the league, but even as his performances were being praised he was still dogged by the same kinds of under-appreciation and backhanded compliments — intentional or not — that had followed him since his academy days. Despite consistent production at every level at which he’d been tested — always showing a blend of skill, effort, and intelligence with frequent flashes of something special — Rothrock was often written off as little more than a hard worker who only had a limited time before the league figured him out.

Jordan Morris has been similarly undervalued and at times discredited by one group or another since the day he chose the Sounders and MLS over Werder Bremen and the Bundesliga. Most recently for Morris, it’s come in the shape of doubts over how deserving he may be of a Designated Player spot. Despite the fact that Morris’ 2024 goal contributions across all competitions (18 goals, 5 primary assists) beats any single season from Raúl Ruidíaz’s time in Seattle, and his running total over the last two seasons (32 goals, 5 assists) was only bested by Ruidíaz in one two-season stretch (2019-2020: 29 goals, 9 primary assists), he doesn’t seem like a DP-caliber player to some. No one would honestly argue that Ruidíaz wasn’t deserving of that designation when he was at his best, and at times was in the conversation of the best strikers in the league, but he only scored more goals in a season than JMo’s 2024 total of 18 once (2021, 19 goals).

The feeling is understandable. The experience of riding in the car with our parents as kids and asking for McDonalds, only to be answered with “we have McDonalds at home,” is a nearly universal one. The McDonalds at home obviously isn’t literally McDonalds; there’s no Happy Meal, the toys are the same ones we had when we left the house earlier, and we’re definitely not going to have the option of getting our order Supersized. But that doesn’t mean that what’s at home isn’t good.

It can take a little distance or separation to appreciate the things that are familiar to us. Maybe it’s a trip to the East coast or Europe to fully understand how great it is to have easy access to Pacific salmon, or a move away to know just how good that Seattle Teriyaki you took for granted was. That doesn’t have to be the case, though. A little bit of perspective can go a long way to help us to appreciate what we’ve got. This version of the Seattle Sounders might not come with the glitz of Golden Arches, but it’s ours and it’s damn good.