State Of The Sounders' Roster: T-Minus 4 Weeks, 35 Players Still In Camp

Cato the Sounders chose to sign.
Banton was signed by the league.

he was being held out of games back home for a while (presumably so he wouldn’t get injured before a trade could be arranged), but he’s back to playing with his team now. That may indicate the Sounders decided to pass for the time being.

any link to an analysis of the MLS rights system? I know a player at the end of a contract has to turn down a “reasonable” contract for the team to retain rights to him. How does it work for players whose contracts are dropped?

But the whole situation still begs the question – to train with the Sounders to what end? Will he have a realistic shot at making the first team squad (I agree, doesn’t seem like a great incentive for him to come to u-23, unless Sounders somehow pay for him to maybe go to school or something). If not, why not just send him back? Or maybe he is being used as a body during training, then can he play in USL and we still hold an MLS discovery claim? And does Alvarado’s return to Honduras categorically rule out him signing a deal with us, or was it always intended as a 10 day trial and he may put pen to paper down the road?

Not expecting answers to all these questions, as the likelihood is (like you said) nobody really knows but Sigi and a few others. Just posing the questions.

Wouldn’t be a matter of Weber pushing a guy making (around, but at least) $42k off the 20-man roster? Ford would be in roster spot 21-30, I’m guessing. Same with Meredith. It’s probably around $20k we could shave off our cap hit if we don’t pick him up, but that’s less than 1% of our cap space. Might be worth it, even if he’s level with Meredith. And that’s assuming we pay him what he was making, when he obviously is expecting a drop in pay after not being picked up in the expansion draft. He’ll probably be signed for the league minimum for a 3 year veteran, if he gets a contract.

There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Many draftees making the transition from college to the pros, approach the transition with a willingness to learn. They have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth and they use them proportionately. Tetteh came out of college early as a GA and then proceeded to drop into the 2nd round. Yet, when he showed up in Seattle he talked like he went in the first 10. OK if you can back it up, but he hasn’t yet. The physical skills are there, but the mental work isn’t. He appears to have relied on his physical skills to get him out of trouble and never learned how to play positionally. The pace of the MLS has exposed the flaw in his development. Fine, he’s young and a GA. He will be given the space to learn, if he shows the work ethic. But he hasn’t shown that he gets it yet.

Now it appears from the outside as if he was one of the players who showed up to camp physically a bit behind his team mates. It feels as if he thought his GA status was a shield. Then he got hurt and missed all of the team’s conditioning work in Arizona. Not auspicious on a roster with this little room for error.

Much of this is inference on my part listening to Sigi, watching Tetteh and then processing it through years of working as an educator. But it feels like he’s headed for a cliff and isn’t listening to the people who are trying to tell him the cliff is there. I hope I’m wrong. But experience makes me leery.

Last year he contributed essentially nothing. While he’s young, I haven’t heard many deny his talent, and yet he was barely able to earn a few Reserve League minutes. Sure his salary didn’t count against the cap, but he was still occupying a valuable roster spot.

This year’s camp, with the trade of Wahl, should have been a golden opportunity for Tetteh. Yet he seems to have been easily passed by Marc Burch, who was rated as expendable by defensively-challenged DC United. On top of that, most of his Seattle draft peers have advanced, while he appears to be stuck, at best, in neutral.

Perhaps he is having trouble adjusting to playing defender. But if he is, the Sounders can’t wait too much longer. Perhaps he would be better at left midfielder, but that’s not going to happen in Seattle with Fernandez, Neagle and Zakuani ahead of him. It seems to me that anyway you look at it, his time in Seattle may be coming to an end. I’m not saying Tetteh is a bad kid or a bad player, he may just need a different set of circumstances to flourish.