Ship’s Log, June 2: What to make of Vancouver's CCC flop

Another Concacaf Champions Cup has come and gone, and the Seattle Sounders are still the only MLS club to win the modern iteration of the continental tournament.

That was emphatically decided on Sunday, as the Vancouver Whitecaps got absolutely destroyed 5-0 by Cruz Azul in the 2025 CCC Final in legitimately one of the most non-competitive soccer matches I've ever watched. As someone who's been fully bought-in on the 'Caps stock all season, I was surprised to see it go off the rails that badly.

I always find myself a little torn whenever the last MLS club crashes out of the tournament. On one hand, I sometimes find myself rooting for other clubs out of MLS solidarity. Other times, I do take a little schadenfreude at seeing others fall short of equaling Seattle's historic accomplishment of 2022.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I was actively rooting for the Whitecaps to do it, but I wasn't rooting against them either. No matter your feelings on them as regional rivals, you do have to respect the work they've done to bring themselves from a middling-at-best club into the discussion with the league's elite. It's been a fun story.

I won't lie, though. As Cruz Azul started to pour it on, I did feel a renewed appreciation for the novelty of the Sounders remaining the only MLS club to pull it off. For as good as this Whitecaps club has been this season, it looked clear from the opening whistle that they weren't ready for the moment.

When Seattle finished the job in 2022, the question became whether it would be the start of a trend or an outlier. In the years since, it looks like it's the latter.

The Seattle Sounders are the only MLS club to win the modern incarnation of Concacaf Champions Cup. Personally, I'm fine with it staying that way.

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