Seattle isn’t lacking talent, talent has lacked in Seattle

The Sounders are, indisputably, fine. Sitting sixth in the West, both in fact and in the xG table, they’re doing OK. However, after years of setting high expectations this period of “pretty good” has become a point of constant consternation, and the failure to make a big splash competitively and financially for the Club World Cup has been a letdown for some.

Looking back at the last three years, we can see a worrying trend of attackers moving to the Sounders and regressing significantly. Even the team’s tactical overhaul in 2022 couldn’t correct it. While the coaching staff has shown the ability to make tweaks that have a measurable impact on the team’s attacking output, a tendency to revert to the familiar has resulted in a treadmill of attacking malaise and a pool of half-tapped talent.

To be clear: One player moving to a new team and struggling could have a number of explanations. But when all new players seem to flounder, it suggests an underlying team issue.

Talent deficit

Since they failed to qualify for the playoffs in 2022, it’s become a familiar refrain that the Sounders have a talent deficit. This season, however, I think it’s time we look deeper into a worrying trend:

Attackers come to the Sounders and get worse – especially if they don’t fit the mold of a traditional striker. I was excited about this roster to start the season. I still am. The signing of Jesús Ferreira seemed like an easy win-win. If he could return to his pre-injury form, you’d have one of the best goal scorers in the league on a sub-DP contract for at least a few years. If he couldn’t return to form, his post-injury output in Dallas still justifies his current TAM contract. Yet, what seemed like a “good or great” proposition has somehow ended with his production dramatically declining.

Commentary on Jesús’ drop-off has largely focused on the injuries he suffered during his last 18 months at Dallas. Still, it’s worth noting how much further his metrics have fallen since his Seattle move – even when compared to his post-injury metrics. He played the majority of 2024 in a deeper 10 role – similar to where he’s mostly played in Seattle. Yet his non-penalty expected goals have nearly halved, falling from .24 to .13 per 90 minutes. Most conspicuously, he isn’t shooting. His shots per 90 have dropped from 1.77 during his last season in Dallas to just .99 this year.

Jesús’ other metrics have also cratered. His shot-creating actions per 90 are at the lowest point of his career – and that’s compared to seasons when he played at least 1,000 minutes. This might be the most concerning drop yet. Injuries simply didn’t affect Ferreira’s creativity so dramatically before his Seattle trade. Last season, he was producing 4.2 shots per game either for himself or others. That’s now down to 2.79.

You don’t need stats to pick up on these differences. Fans can see Ferreira is unusually uninvolved. Despite the Sounders having more possession than most of his previous teams, he’s hitting fewer passes per match than at almost any point in his career. To put it into context: Seattle sits 3rd in the league this season for passes attempted per 90 minutes at 555. For every 90 minutes he’s played, Jesús has averaged just 37 passes. That paints quite a picture. Only 6.6% of passes run through a player tasked with being one of the team’s primary opportunity creators. This 22% reduction in passes is likely to blame for his drop off in chance creation. Again, this is compared to his post-injury time at Dallas, when he wasn’t fully fit.

To be clear, this isn’t a “Ferreira problem.” Other Sounders players have experienced similar issues. Take Pedro De La Vega.

While at first glance, his raw attacking and creation metrics appear to be holding steady or improving since his ACL tear at Lanus, a closer look reveals that the quality of his actions has declined. His xG per shot – a measure of the quality of shots he takes – has dropped 22%, taking him from a roughly average shooter to being well below standard. This lapse isn’t a mystery – it’s the distance from which he’s taking shots. Over the last two seasons, his average shot is three yards further from the goal than where he shot at Lanus. If fans have taken note of his speculative attempts at goal, it’s worth saying this hasn’t always been a habit. Either he’s been coached to play this way or he’s simply adjusted to the Sounders’ style.

Chance creation has seen a similar decline in quality. Despite going from just 24 passes per game at Lanus to over 38 this season, his per 90 expected assists has dipped – albeit slightly. After his ACL tear, he crossed the ball an average of 1.89 times per 90 minutes in Argentina. Since his Pacific Northwest debut, he has averaged more than three crosses per game. You could interpret this career high as a win – after all, his raw expected numbers look the same or even marginally improved. In reality, however, he’s replaced a fewer number of better chances with a greater volume of bad ones.

One thing De La Vega and Ferreira have in common is a drop off in through-ball passes – one of the most effective ways players generate scoring opportunities. Since last season, Ferreira has hit almost 25% fewer through-balls, going from .61 per 90 minutes to just .45. For his part, De La Vega’s numbers are roughly equal to his final year at Lanus. He’s actually increased a smidge – from .23 to .26 through-balls per 90. As with his other metrics, however, his real performance is revealed when we adjust for the Sounders’ possession-oriented style. Given how much less time Lanus has the ball, he’s actually doing less with each touch now than he was in Argentina. In fact, proportionate to his overall passes, he’s hitting roughly half as many though-balls. Instead, he’s consistently opting for less-aggressive passing options than he did at Lanus.

Again, these guys have proven their capacity to create more and better chances. So, why are they less meaningfully involved in the game as Sounders? And, if this is a coaching decision, what might be the goal of them playing a style that's preventing them from performing at their previous levels?

When told by the numbers, the trend seems obvious. Still, it’s newcomer Ryan Kent who’s seen the most dramatic change. Granted, his stats should be taken with a grain of salt. Of our examples, he commands the smallest sample size. Not to mention, Scotland and Türkiye have less publicly available statistics than MLS. Yet even with these caveats, it’s still evident that Kent has come down with whatever seems to afflict the Sounders’ new arrivals.

Let’s look at his crosses per 90. Though they’ve skyrocketed to career highs – jumping from 2.45 per 90 in his last full Scottish season to an astonishing 3.6 per 90 – his expected assists are essentially flat. Since his move to Seattle, he’s gone from .19 xA per game in his last full season to .22.

And shooting? It almost seems as though Kent has given up. In the span of his career, he’s never averaged less than two shots per game – and that’s in seasons where he played more than 1,000 minutes. Typically, he’s averaged far more. Yet, as a Sounder, he’s taken just four shots in roughly 550 minutes on the pitch. That translates into .80 shots per 90 in MLS and an abysmal .65 shots per 90 minutes in all competitions.

It isn’t just the quantity that’s lapsed. Just as we saw with De La Vega and Ferreira, the quality of those few shots has also declined. In Scotland, Kent averaged .2 xG per game. That impressive record has gone up in smoke since donning Rave Green. Nowadays, his average rests at just .02 xG per game.

Oddly enough, tall, traditional strikers have seemingly side-stepped this rule. Heber and Danny Musovski both managed to bring their performance metrics with them to Seattle. While neither could meet those underlying numbers during their debut season, they both bounced back the next year (Moose here and Heber in China). This implies that the drop-off was mostly the result of variance.

The Heber-Moose exception makes more sense when you look at the Sounders’ system. Other attackers appear to struggle because they’re asked to play to their striker rather than for themselves. Wide players either don’t shoot or do so from too far to be effective – lobbing crosses from outside the box or reaching the end-line only to cut back for a crashing Albert Rusnák.

It isn’t just an impulse to seemingly curtail attackers’ killer instincts. Since Léo Chú briefly held the starting position on Seattle’s left in 2023, the Sounders have mostly placed left footers on the left and right footers on the right. Playing with two “classic” wingers is a setup rarely seen in modern soccer, and one seemingly done to maximize these patterns of play. Notably, the only player to largely play inverted – maintaining the freedom to cut inside on their strong foot – is Paul Rothrock. Is it any wonder that he’s arguably been the team’s most effective wide attacker?

It’s a common belief that Seattle plays better with a true 9. I’d like to add an asterisk. Seattle plays everything with the assumption of a true 9. If anything, they’re so attached to this belief, the team adapts poorly to playing without one.

This isn’t just my conjecture.

Despite pumping in the third-most crosses in MLS, they generate very little actual danger. Of the 21 non-penalty “great” chances they’ve created, four have been cutbacks to Rusnák, two on the same play at home against Dallas when he failed to convert a rebound twice in the 6-yard box, one was De La Vega off a deflection against Saint Louis. The other 14? They were all Morris, Musovski or De Rosario. Yup. Two-thirds of the Sounders’ great chances have come from their traditional strikers. Unsurprisingly, most of them have been the kind of chances you need a profile striker to make something of.

Without an aerially dominant center forward to get on the crosses, Seattle has few alternatives. Either the one or two good cutbacks per game need to be scored, otherwise they are almost totally reliant on moments of individual magic.

What about progressive passing? Looking at similar possession-dominant sides, progressive passing sequences make up the single largest source of xG for teams like San Diego and Vancouver. Seattle generates less threat from progressive passes than any other form of passing, ranking them among the worst in the league in the category. When they do, their effort often comes across quite meek. And though they rate 5th for progressive passing distance in MLS – as I laid out on Bluesky – the heft of this mileage is owed to Jackson Ragen. Among outfield players, he’s the single most progressive passer in MLS. The issue is further up the pitch. The Sounders are below average for progressive passing attempts in almost every section of the opposing team’s half – where the team could use it most.

Seattle doesn’t lack talent. They actually generate among the most scoring chances from individual play in the league, but they lack attacking direction. It’s hard not to see a system that underperforms the sum of its players. The Sounders’ strategy isn’t improving attackers. It’s taking promising attacking players and making them worse.

This doesn’t have to be terminal. This coaching staff has demonstrated their ability to adjust and improve the team’s attack. We already saw that at the start of this year.

It’s not all wrong

I’m going to preface this last section with my normal disclaimer: Formations are fake and positions are a lie. What you see on the team sheet means very little, especially once subs and adjustments are implemented.

At the beginning of the season, the team’s 3-4-3 formation and accompanying tactical shift proved it could sharpen a dull attack. The team must be healthy enough to return to it, make signings this summer to fill the gaps left by injury, or figure out a way to adapt its principles to the players available.