It’s hard to envision how much worse an outcome can get than the one the Seattle Sounders endured on Tuesday.
The 4-1 loss to Cruz Azul that eliminated them from Concacaf Champions Cup and ended their 13-match unbeaten run in the tournament was obviously bad enough. The Sounders had some decent looks and kept it competitive through 85 minutes or so, but ultimately it’s hard to take much issue with the final result. Cruz Azul showed themselves to be better and deeper than the Sounders and are rightfully moving on.
That’s a blow to the ego, but not necessarily a debilitating one.
What makes the outcome so much worse and sting so much more is the two injuries the Sounders suffered during the match. First, and likely more serious, was Paul Arriola. Just before halftime, Arriola went into a challenge on the sideline, landed awkwardly and immediately reacted like he knew something bad had happened. Reports from people on site said it looked like he was in tears when he was stretchered off the field.
The Sounders likely won’t be able to confirm for a few more days, but the obvious fear is that Arriola tore his left ACL. If he did, that likely means he’ll miss the rest of the season. It also marks the second time he’s suffered that injury, having missed virtually all of 2020 when he tore his right ACL.
As if to make the situation just a little worse, Jordan Morris pulled out of a run around the 65th minute and immediately grabbed his right leg. The severity of the injury remains unknown, but Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer called it a muscle injury in the postgame press conference.
Combined with an injury to Pedro de la Vega on Saturday, the Sounders will be without three likely starters for at least another game or two.
This was always sort of the tacit risk of starting the season the way the Sounders did, playing seven matches inside the first 21 days. That included three matches at altitude and nearly 15,000 miles of air travel. I think Schmetzer did an admirable job of trying to rotate the lineup — he has averaged more than six lineup changes from game to game and made eight in each of the past two — but there’s no way to fully eliminate the risk of injury.
Arriola’s injury feels especially freak. This was only his fourth start of the season and he didn’t even play against LAFC on the weekend.
Morris has been one of the heavier-use players — starting 6 of 7 matches and playing at least a half in all of them — but he’s also been one of the Sounders’ most durable players over the past few seasons. Since coming back from his second ACL injury in 2021, Morris has only missed two games to injury.
Frustrating as all this is, though, part of the reason the Sounders felt it was so important to build a deep roster was to withstand these kinds of situations. Ideally, that depth was going to be used to juggle multiple competitions, but it should come in equally handy now that several key pieces will be missing.
One of the small silver linings to come out of the Cruz Azul loss was Danny Musovski scoring his first goal in about 10 months. The backup forward has struggled to get on the pitch since then and has done precious little with the time he’s been afforded. But against Cruz Azul, he gave the Sounders at least some hope when he put away a rebound that made it 2-1 with 16 minutes to play. For about 10 minutes, it actually seemed like the Sounders might be able to pull off a miracle result despite having been significantly outplayed up to that point.
It will be interesting to see how the Sounders manage this next stretch of games. Assuming both de la Vega and Morris are out, one of Musovski or Jesús Ferreira will almost certainly be starting at the No. 9. If it’s Musovski, that allows Ferreira to stay in more of a withdrawn position that the Sounders seem to favor him in. If it’s Ferreira, that opens the door for someone like Georgi Minoungou or Danny Leyva to get a lot more playing time.
The longer-term question is how the Sounders manage without Arriola, who was shaping up to be a particularly important part of their setup. Paul Rothrock stepped into Arriola’s shoes admirably against LAFC, but it’s also a spot where Reed Baker-Whiting has been used, and he is expected to return to training this week.
While clearly not a first choice, these options don’t strike me as leading to anything like the string of results the Sounders had at the beginning of last year when injuries ravaged the roster.
Tuesday’s loss takes some air out of the season, but there’s still plenty to play for and this actually simplifies a lot of things. What was looking like a spring full of fixture congestion will now be nine straight games of playing on full rest and there will only be two midweek matches between Saturday and the start of the Club World Cup on June 15.
The last time the Sounders got an uninterrupted run of league play like that, they reeled off 10 straight unbeaten games that carried them into the Western Conference finals. Injuries are obviously going to complicate that somewhat, but there’s every reason to think the Sounders can still rebound.
