SEATTLE — The thing about tournament soccer is that there aren’t really style points. Beating an opponent by, say, seven goals is nice and has some knock-on effect in terms of goal difference, but it’s still just three points. A big win can be undone by one bad result.
In that sense, the Seattle Sounders’ 2-1 win over Santos Laguna in their second Leagues Cup match got the job done.
“It’s a difficult game psychologically,” Sounders winger Paul Rothrock said after taking care of business against one of Liga MX’s weaker teams. “Coming off the Cruz Azul game — one of the best performances in franchise history — this felt a little like a trap game. I think we handled ourselves well in that regard, showed some grit in closing the game out when we had some adversity late in the game. We put ourselves in a great spot.”
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The adversity was mostly self-inflicted, it should be noted.
Through the first 74 minutes, the Sounders were well in control even if it wasn’t quite the dominant performance they had preferred. They had just gone up 2-0 on a spectacular strike from Georgi Minoungou and had allowed Santos Laguna just a single shot, none in the second half.
It was a breakthrough moment for Minoungou, who has found minutes hard to come by since a hot start to the season. Not only was this Minoungou’s first Sounders goal of the season — he had four assists — he hadn’t even played in the team’s previous seven games.
During Minoungou’s celebration, though, he pulled his shirt over his head. Referee Steffon Sean Dewar didn’t seem to immediately notice it, but the Santos Laguna players made sure he did. After presumably conferring with his assistant referees, Dewar issued a yellow card for what is effectively a black-and-white violation of Law 12.4, according to IFAB.
Making matters worse, this was Minoungou’s second yellow card since entering the match just 10 minutes earlier. What was one of the highlights of Minoungou’s career immediately became one of the lowlights, marking the first time he’d been ejected from any match since joining the Sounders organization in 2022.
Although teammate Osaze De Rosario had been yellow-carded for a nearly identical situation just a few days earlier, Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer struck an understanding tone.
“The first yellow card should have never been a yellow card,” Schmetzer said. “There’s no chance in a million years, I watched every angle, and there’s no foul on Georgi.
“Georgi needs to learn from that and he knows he’s on a yellow and he gets carried away because he’s a human being and he scored a really really good goal. I’ve been telling that team that we’ll need everybody. For me, it’s a positive. We’re learning from it and we’ll move forward.”
Given their penchant for blowing leads this year — the Sounders have failed to secure full points in five games they led, including two stoppage-time equalizers and one game in which they led 3-0 — the red card certainly felt a little ominous.
Predictably, Santos Laguna looked more dangerous after that. They were able to much more effectively control possession and generated some decent looks on goal. They even scored, albeit deep into stoppage time.
For the most part, though, the Sounders did what they had to do. They dropped their lines a little deeper, never seemed to panic and saw out the win to put themselves in strong position for the final match of Phase One.
No matter how results go elsewhere, the Sounders will almost surely advance as long as they can secure at least a point, and are virtually guaranteed to get the top qualifying spot if they win their match against Club Tijuana on Wednesday.
Asked for his takeaways from a match that was perhaps a bit tougher than expected, Schmetzer wasn’t particularly interested in being overly critical of his team on a day when the Sounders were the only MLS team to beat its Liga MX opponent.
“This is a hard tournament to win,” he said. “Games are never easy against Liga MX teams. They have a lot of quality. They might have had some down years, but I’ll give that team a lot of credit. They played hard, from minute 1 to minute 90.
“Could we have made the game easier? Sure. It’s MLS, it’s Concacaf, it’s competitiveness – look at some of the other games. Say what you want, whether you like this tournament or not, the games have been exciting.”
The win also pushed the Sounders’ record to 5-0-3 since the Club World Cup, a stretch in which they’ve scored 23 goals, with 10 different players scoring at least one and 13 different players providing at least one assist.
The are now just three positive results away from securing a spot in the 2026 Concacaf Champions Cup. As pleasing as it is to watch the Sounders thump a world-class opponent, the reality is they’ll likely need more results like this one in their quest for silverware.
“The team is playing with a lot of confidence and scoring a lot of goals,” Schmetzer said. “That was one of our Achilles’ heels last year. We worked hard on it. Right now, the guys are feeling it, everyone is contributing. Good on them.”
