Standing at the threshold of the playoffs inevitably brings on a wave of introspection. Despite 34 regular season games and however many more from other competitions each team may have played, there’s still some question about each remaining team’s identity. That feels especially applicable for the Seattle Sounders, but I think we know who this team is; it’s just that some notable blemishes have obscured the true picture.
There have been frustrating moments throughout the season, from late dropped points and coughed up results to lopsided losses on the road against several of the teams we all expect to make up at least part of the road the Sounders will have to travel if they want to lift another trophy this year. Even in some of the team’s better performances, individual errors of execution or judgement have left us frustrated or sighing a breath of relief.
This season has also included some phenomenal highs, and of late some much cleaner, sturdier performances, the types that tend to see a side through a knockout competition like the MLS playoffs.
I’ll try to stick to the stuff on the pitch here, but first allow me to lay out a bit of my own personal philosophy that I do believe applies here: no one is the person they are at their lowest moments, when they make their worst mistakes … or at least they don’t have to be. That is to say, mistakes of execution and judgement are also learning opportunities, provided you actually take the lessons. The same is true of the Sounders, as a team as a whole as well as the individual players.
It’s easy to write off many of Seattle’s best moments from this season for one reason or another. The run to lifting the Leagues Cup trophy took place almost entirely in the comfortable confines of Lumen Field, where the Sounders were the best home team in the West in league play. The 7-0 win over Cruz Azul in that competition doesn’t count nearly as much — at least in our psyche — as the pasting they took from that same team over two legs earlier in the year in CCC.
It’s particularly easy to dismiss the good of this season when you look at the team’s road record, where they’ll have to do most of their work in the playoffs. A record of 5-8-4, -8 GD isn’t something to get your blood pumping. Least of all when you see that the Sounders were shut out on six occasions on the road, lost by 2+ goals five times, and only beat two playoff teams away from home.
But soccer is a weird sport, and each game has a huge potential for variability based on one or two individual moments. That’s why there are so many different attempts to quantify various aspects of the game and make them understandable and describable beyond what shows up in a box score, and even to try to predict them. That’s why we’ve got xG and other “advanced statistics” to work with these days. Not everyone loves xG for various reasons, but we’ve found that with a large enough dataset xG can be both descriptive and predictive. Individual shot and individual game xG is more of a novelty than anything, but take for example that in actual goals in MLS the Sounders scored 56 and allowed 44, which averages out to 1.65 goals for per 90 minutes and 1.29 goals against per 90. Seattle’s xG/90 was 1.71, while their opponents’ xG/90 was 1.27. That’s pretty close. The point is to illustrate that xG actually does a good job of telling us who is more likely to score more goals.
So let’s take a look at Seattle’s road numbers, where many will tell you the team has been better than their results. You’ll notice that in the numbers mentioned above Seattle slightly under-performed their xG, while opponents slightly over-performed theirs. That’s especially true on the road, where the Sounders conceded 28 goals from 22.4 xG. Some of that can be chalked up to a couple of frustrating own goals and a particularly fluky goal on the road against Minnesota United. The Sounders also struggled to turn their own chances into goals, collecting just 20 goals from 24.8 xG in road games.
A slightly better expected goal difference isn’t much to hang your hat on, though, so let’s dig a little deeper. The Sounders have averaged about 13.5 shots/90 compared to 12.1 for their opponents with both averaging roughly 0.11 xG/shot. The problem has been that when Seattle hit the road they’ve converted their shots into goals at around 73% of the expected rate, while opponents have converted shots into goals at about 110% of the expected rate.
To lend some additional heft to the idea that Seattle’s opponents have been more likely to score low probability goals when they host the Sounders, Seattle’s average shot distance is over a yard closer to goal than their opponents. Seattle averages a shot distance of 17.5 yards from goal, with only five games featuring an average shot distance over 18 yards — coincidentally two of those games are the wins against FC Dallas and New York City FC. Meanwhile their opponents average a shot distance of 18.76 yards, and only four teams managed an average shot distance under 18 yards against the Sounders. The point is that Seattle have been good at forcing their opponents to hit and hope to a certain extent, but for a number of reasons they struggled to keep those shots out of the net.
At the end of the day, what matters is this: ball go in net. You want to make that happen more than your opponent, and if you can manage that then you win. Seattle’s ability to make ball go in net took a bit of a hit with Pedro de la Vega’s knee injury against NYCFC, as he’s arguably the team’s greatest magician, capable of pulling a goal from the ether. However they’ve also been given something of a boon by the injury deities. Jordan Morris is healthy, fit, and after the NYCFC game he’s scoring goals to go along with creating space for teammates and helping on defense in ways that none of the other forwards do. Ryan Kent could be available to provide a spark off of the bench, and for the first time in what feels like forever Seattle will have both Jackson Ragen and Yeimar available to start.
Ragen and Yeimar only started together in 7 of their 17 road games. The team hasn’t always performed great in those games, but that’s at least in part due to the constant rotation throughout the entire field as Seattle has navigated injuries and absences all season. Now the Sounders are as healthy as they’ve been all season, in their best run of form in the league, and they get to start against a team they’ve already seen twice who is struggling to find an identity of their own amidst absences.
This Sounders team is not their worst mistakes nor most frustrating results. When the chips are down we might not see the same 7-0 result that we had against Cruz Azul or the 3-0 win over Inter Miami, but those performances still stand as evidence of what this team is capable of. Add to that the fact that there’s no team or manager in the playoffs with more experience or a better track record in knockout competitions than the Seattle Sounders and Brian Schmetzer, and there’s plenty of cause to think that this is a team capable of lifting a second trophy this season, their third MLS Cup. You might not know who the Sounders are, but they do and they’re ready to show you.
