How Cristian Roldan became the next Sounders club icon
Heading into his 12th season with the Sounders, Roldan already has more appearances that any field player in club history. Now, he’s looking poised to make a name for himself on the international stage.
‘Mr. Sounder.’
This article originally appeared in IV: The Sounder at Heart magazine. Issue 1 serves as a preview of the 2026 soccer season with a profile on Andrew Thomas, a statistical deep dive on the Sounders 2025 season, a feature about Cristian Roldan, a Q&A with Brian Schmetzer, a look at how women’s soccer has become big business and a column by G. Willow Wilson. Issues are still available in print ($15) and digital download ($5).
It’s the ultimate Rave Green honorific, a title awarded not just to long and loyal servants of the Seattle Sounders but the most beloved and successful as well. The names and faces you associate with the term tend to reflect your age and era, though some transcend.
Like Zach Scott, the workmanlike defender who against all odds bridged the USL and MLS eras before bowing out after the club’s 2016 MLS Cup triumph.
“He embodies what I think the Sounders are about, which is hard work, grit, determination,” majority owner Adrian Hanauer said about Scott in 2014. “He’s won championships, he’s persevered and he’s an unbelievable character off the field.”
Or Brian Schmetzer, a Sounders player in the NASL days and longtime assistant before his decade-and-counting stint as head coach.
“I always say that the Seattle Sounders is the relationship between the players and the fans,” Schmetzer explained in a November interview with striker turned pundit Herculez Gomez, “and that started way back in 1974. And there's a bunch of old highlights, black-and-white things of guys handing out carnations, and guys that played for the team in the ‘70s, stayed in this area and built lives and families and kids that grew up being a Sounder.”
Half a century on, with a generation’s worth of MLS memories in the books, a World Cup headed for the Emerald City and perennial championship expectations even as the club’s roster spending tails off, another contender has joined the reckoning – one of the figures most responsible for the modern Sounders’ relentless competitiveness: Cristian Roldan.
During his tenure, the Rave Green have hoisted two MLS Cups, made two more trips to the final, pulled off an unprecedented Concacaf Champions League capture, claimed last year’s Leagues Cup – which Roldan celebrated by plunking his baby daughter Mia into the oversized trophy – and produced a thoroughly respectable showing against three members of the global elite at the FIFA Club World Cup. He’s been dogged and durable, classy and committed, and most of all, successful.
Scott himself concurs.
“You look at someone like Cristian,” Scott told IV, “who came in as a young guy fresh out of college, and has built not only a Sounders career but an international career just based on him being a solid, no-nonsense type of player -- yeah, I mean, in my opinion, 100%.
“You don't get that name by being a schmuck -- you're also a winner, right?”
Roldan’s individual honors include two Gold Cup titles and a 2022 World Cup adventure with the US men’s national team, a 2021 MLS All-Star nod and a place in last season’s MLS Best XI which also reflects a superb run of form that rocketed him back into the USMNT reckoning after some two years on the outs. He pulled that off at age 30, to boot, in the wake of a positional shift back into central midfield after several seasons as a sort of luxurious utility player asked to fill multiple roles.
Notably, the player himself starts there when asked to contextualize the current state of his career.
“I feel like I've solidified myself in the midfield a little bit more,” Roldan noted in a recent conversation with IV while at Seattle’s preseason camp in Portugal. “So now I can work on the nuances of playing in one position and stamp my place with the Sounders. It had been a long time where I was bouncing around.
“Being back with the U.S. men’s national team, from being completely out of the picture to now having a chance to go to a second World Cup, is something that I've been dreaming about over the last two years. Not being called up, making sure that I was ready if I did get that call-up, treating it like my last – it was really important for me to just get a chance. And I did everything in my power here with the Sounders, played really hard, played as well as I could to get a look.”
But why did Roldan remain a one-club man – his 392 appearances across all competitions are an organizational record for outfield players – after all these years? That part of this conversation requires us to travel back in time to January 2015.
It feels inconsequential today, as he enters his 12th season, hunting down a second World Cup. But Cristian Roldan’s first week as a professional soccer player did not go well. At all.
Roldan had turned heads across two stellar NCAA seasons at the University of Washington, enough that Major League Soccer (eventually) offered him one of its “Generation adidas” contracts, an initiative designed to lure top prospects to turn pro earlier than was the norm at that time – though the then-teenager’s negotiations with the league were difficult enough that he nearly walked away and returned to school the weekend before signing, telling American Soccer Now, “I think [MLS] is frustrated with me and doesn’t want to negotiate with me anymore.”
