Sounders learn rest of regular season schedule

Major League Soccer has finally released the remainder of the 2020 regular season schedule. The schedule had been released in phases, with hopes of maybe expanding the teams that could enter each region in each phase. With the rest of the schedule now unveiled, the Seattle Sounders will end up playing two new opponents in the Vancouver Whitecaps and Colorado Rapids.

While the initial phases have been pretty kind to the Sounders, this final phase will be more challenging. The first five games of the new schedule are stacked on top of each other all with less than a week of rest. The first game in that series — Oct. 3 against Vancouver — comes six days after the previous game, and the next four games have no breaks longer than four days between them. The Sounders will have at least five days between games for three of the four final games in the new schedule. The schedule is as follows:

By the end of the regular season the Sounders will have played a handful of opponents multiple times. We have the pleasure of playing the Portland Timbers a total of four times before the end of the season. Having already played San Jose once inside the bubble in Orlando during the group stage and once outside of it, four total matches against the Earthquakes will count towards the regular season.

Vancouver and Colorado are the new additions to the Sounders schedule. Both teams are at the bottom of the Western Conference and should be viewed as four matches from which the Sounders should collect maximum points. Vancouver was also in Seattle’s MLS is Back Tournament group, so the Sounders will have three total matches against them count towards the regular season standings.

The only national TV match on the remainder of the schedule is the Oct. 11 match against LAFC, which will feature on ESPN.

What’s unexpected is that there’s not more than one match against the LA Galaxy on the schedule. If you remember, the Sounders were originally scheduled to play the Galaxy on Aug. 26, but protests broke out nationwide over the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officers in Wisconsin, which resulted in the match being postponed. As it’s currently scheduled, the Sounders and Galaxy will only face each other once. That game — as well as the one remaining FC Dallas-Nashville SC match — leaves those four teams with one fewer game on the schedule than everyone else. It is assumed that if those games are deemed important to the playoff seedings that they would be played, but the league may also choose to use points per game as a stand-in.

The Sounders will not play fellow Western Conference opponents Houston Dynamo, Sporting KC, FC Dallas, and Minnesota United until the playoffs at the earliest.