Somewhat buried in the announcement about the new MLS calendar were some sneakily notable details about how this impacts the Seattle Sounders in the near future. Under the heading “Unchanged in 2026” is the seemingly innocuous line about “All 17 of our MLS home matches will be played at Lumen Field, including some on grass.”
In any other year, this would be a total nothingburger; of course all the Sounders’ MLS home games would be played at Lumen Field, they’ve never not been.
Unsaid in the blurb was that for a long time, 2026 looked like it was going to be different. As Sounder at Heart has reported many times, FIFA will be taking over Lumen Field as soon as the Seattle Seahawks’ season ends in order to lay the “permanent” grass surface ahead of the World Cup. It has been known that there would be a period after its installation where no events were to be held in order to allow it to settle. There will also be a period before the World Cup where the field needs to be left alone in order to ensure optimal conditions.
Until recently, there was a very real possibility that those two timeframes would converge in a way that effectively left Lumen Field unavailable to the Sounders and Reign until after the World Cup. With MLS taking off the entire World Cup next summer, that would have meant Lumen Field was unavailable until after July 19. In 2025, the Sounders played their 24th game of the season on July 26.
While it’s not unprecedented for MLS teams to start the season with long road trips for a variety of reasons — the longest being when the Portland Timbers opened 2019 with 12 consecutive road games — it would be literally impossible to backload the schedule enough to accommodate more than 17 road games. That would have required the Sounders to find an alternative venue for at least a few home games early in the year, which sources within the team told Sounder at Heart that they had been scrambling to find.
Now, it seems as though the Sounders will be able to play at least a handful of early-season games at Lumen Field during the stretch of time between the World Cup pitch being installed and FIFA taking over operations for the tournament.
That’s obviously good news, especially for the Sounders, who would have had to find creative ways to handle season-ticket holders if some games had been moved to another stadium.
What’s unsaid in the release, however, is what will happen to any Sounders home matches in Concacaf Champions Cup. Thanks to winning the Leagues Cup, the Sounders get a bye into the Round of 16 and are scheduled to host the second leg the week of March 17-19. That is almost certainly earlier than they will be allowed back into Lumen, meaning an alternate home venue will almost certainly be required.
A year ago, Lumen Field would have been unavailable if the Sounders had advanced to the CCC quarterfinals and they were planning to travel across the state to use One Spokane Stadium. March temperatures in Spokane often hover around freezing at night, possibly acting as a bit of a preview of the new MLS calendar if that’s where the Sounders end up playing and even providing the possibility of the first orange-ball home game in club history.
