The success or failure of the Seattle Sounders’ brief tenure in the 2025 Club World Cup likely depends a bit on your perspective.
In a very literal sense, there’s not much to celebrate. The Sounders played the minimum number of games, lost all three of them and never even had a lead.
In a broader sense, I think there was a lot to be proud of and even to build on.
Here’s what I think we learned during these past couple of weeks:
Cristian Roldan deserves another shot at the USMNT
Let’s start with what I think is the most exciting and profound takeaway from the Sounders’ stint in the Club World Cup. Cristian Roldan was almost certainly the Sounders’ best player in all three games, and I think you could probably make the case that he was one of the best Concacaf players in the entire tournament.
This is obviously encouraging for the Sounders moving forward, but I’m not sure it’s entirely new information either. Roldan has been one of their best players all year and I think there’s a valid case to be made that he’s been the best No. 6 in the entire league. I know I gave serious consideration to putting him on my MLS All-Star Game ballot.
The knock against Roldan, though, has always been that while he may be a good or even great MLS player, there’s been a belief that he couldn’t rise to the next level. I think he definitively showed that’s not the case. Roldan went up against some of the best midfielders in the world and didn’t just hold his own, he won a lot of those battles. Roldan was arguably the biggest reason the Sounders never got run over in any of their matches and seemed to be popping up all over the field whenever he was needed msot.
While Roldan has gotten plenty of looks with the United States national team — he made the last World Cup roster, even! — he’s never really gotten a serious look as a No. 6. At a time when seemingly every position in the USMNT has a massive question mark next to it, I think Roldan at least deserves a look from Mauricio Pochettino.
Unsurprisingly, Roldan agrees!
“I think I made my case,” Roldan said following Monday’s loss to PSG. “The door is always open. I always feel like I have a lot to give, whether it’s on the field, off the field. I’m a competitor.
“I’m going to make the guys around me better, I’m going to compete at a very high level. I felt like I showed that this tournament. If Poch wants to send the invite, it’s always welcome here.”
Young guys can hang at this level
There was a lot of attention given to Obed Vargas coming into this tournament, for good reason. He’s generally considered one of the top prospects in MLS, there’s been rumors circling around him going abroad forever and he’s even a big Atlético Madrid supporter.
I don’t know if he raised his profile through his play, but I think he at least justified the attention he got. Paired with Roldan in the defensive midfield, Vargas more than did his part. He showed he has the physicality to hang with some of the best players in the world and the kind of escapability that coaches love. If there’s a play I’m sure he wishes he had back, it was his dribble into the box against PSG in which he decided to cut it back instead of take a crack at the near post. The ball turned over and PSG scored on the ensuing counter.
I don’t think many will hold that against the 19-year-old for too long, though. If talent evaluators were mostly skeptical at how well his game would transition to Europe, I think he answered those questions.
More surprising, I think, was the play of Reed Baker-Whiting and Kalani Kossa-Rienzi. Given the opportunity to both start against Atlético Madrid, I thought they very much looked the part of starting caliber fullbacks. Baker-Whiting was tasked with mostly replicating Nouhou’s role and took a more defensive posture, while Kossa-Rienzi was given a bit more freedom to get into the attack. Neither looked out of place.
Baker-Whiting finished the tournament 6/6 on tackles, which put him at the top of the leaderboard in terms of tackles per 90 minutes in the group stage. In the Botafogo game, I also appreciated the attacking spark he helped provide in the second half.
Kossa-Rienzi’s performance was a little harder to illustrate with stats, but for a player who started the season with Tacoma Defiance I was impressed at how fearless he seemed to be. That Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer turned to him to help shore up the midfield late in the PSG game illustrates just how much he’s impressed coaches.
Events are fun!
The Sounders have mostly been pretty entertaining at home this year. Even in the loss to Minnesota United a couple of games before the Club World Cup, they’ve played up-tempo and fun matches while going 5-1-2 in league play at Lumen Field. Attendance is also up slightly from last year, potentially reversing a trend that goes back even before Covid.
But maybe the best part about these past three games is that they served as a reminder of how much fun an event can be. It used to be that almost every home game felt that way, with a sizable rally at Occidental Square kicking off the March to the Match.
Since Covid, however, matches have mostly lacked that “event” vibe. Sure, there was the Concacaf Champions League final and the PNW Experience had a bit of that, too. But it’s been all-too-rare.
The Sounders are now in their 16th MLS season and it’s probably a little unrealistic to make every home game feel special after having played upwards of 300 of them, but I’d like to think that some of the energy generated outside the stadium during the past few weeks can be translated into the regular season.
I also found myself getting more excited about what this will look like when it’s dialed up to 11 next summer for the Men’s World Cup. There's going to be plenty of headaches that come with FIFA’s multi-month residency at Lumen Field, but I’m now much more confident that they know how to put on a show.
