The sadness of being a selling team

In every sport your favorites move on. The greats leave. The cult favorites leave.

For soccer clubs that become known as selling clubs, that 'feature' of sports accelerates. Maybe that's one of the curses of The Pipeline. Over the past year+ Seattle's pipeline is turning into a money generator. This is wonderful for the team, especially for Craig Waibel as he builds towards trophies.

It can be good for the players – Obed Vargas is making a lot more money on one the largest stages possible. Josh Atencio is playing more minutes and starting more games for a squad that seems likely to make the playoffs. We're barely into the 2026 competitions and Reed Baker-Whiting is one-third of the way to the starts he had in Seattle last year. Danny Leyva will set a personal first-team minutes and starts record in April.

Now Georgi Minoungou has moved on. He'll go from sixth best winger to third or fourth. He'll move from a team with trophy ambitions to a team competing for home playoff games (and maybe a trophy, if things break well).

In Seattle, outside of Obed, these were valuable but underutilized talents. Each showed at times the makings of greatness.

They were one of us.

And now they're not (at least in the kit they wear).

This curse of losing the talents you love, adore and want to see succeed is part of the process of becoming a serious developer of soccer talent. I hate it. I love it.

These are wonderful men who grew up in front of us. Their absence will hurt. Some will come back, because the Sounders do a solid job of returning talents. They'll be different when they do return.

Losing five in 13 months is probably not the pace of the future. It was an intense wave of movement unlikely to be replicated.

Selling clubs will do this, regularly and frequently. At times these will be your favorite prospect – it will always be someone's favorite prospect. These men will have wonderful stories, beautiful tales of challenges they've overcome.

Puget Sound will be part of their family forever. A thread will always connect them to their home here, even as they build homes in other places.

Georgi is one of us – forever.

And the curse is that we have to watch from afar now.