It has been nearly seven weeks since the Seattle Sounders last played a competitive game. Quick: Tell me the score and opponent in that match!
Even as someone who covers the team for a living, I had to look that one up (they lost 1–0 on the road against LAFC). I’m guessing you did, too.
With the Sounders returning to action tonight against the Portland Timbers, I figured it was worth doing a bit of a refresher on where things stand. (For a player-specific rundown, check out Realio's story.)
The Sounders play … the Timbers … tonight?!?
Yeah, that kinda snuck up on me, too. But, yeah, the Sounders start the unofficial second half of the season with quite a doozy. As you hopefully remember, they snapped their ungodly winless run against the Timbers in the regular-season finale last year and are now riding a three-game unbeaten streak against their biggest rivals.
Remind me, how are the Timbers doing?
Not great! They are currently 4–8–2 and sit tied on points with Austin FC in second-to-last place in the Western Conference. That was bad enough to get Phil Neville – we’ll miss ya, Fizzer – fired one game before the World Cup break, under the auspice they’d have a little more time to hire a new permanent head coach. Well, we’re now starting the second half of the season and Jack Cassidy – who got promoted from Timbers 2 – is still the interim coach.
That said, the Timbers have some talent and have been annoyingly good at Lumen Field over the past decade, so we probably shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves.
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We expecting a big crowd?
I mean, it will surely be the biggest crowd of the season but that's not really saying as much as it used to. Rather than opening up the whole stadium like they used to do, the Sounders are instead focusing on trying to get every seat in the lower bowl filled. That does include the 3,000 or so seats in the Green Zone, aka the Hawks’ Nest, so attendance could possibly sneak past 36,000. If that happens, it would be the first time since 2024 that they’ve topped 33,000 for a regular-season game. Baby steps, I guess.
Kidding aside, I am a little bummed that the Sounders didn’t think this was a game worth trying to ride that World Cup momentum on. I know it’s a Thursday and the World Cup probably limited how long you could really run a marketing campaign around this, but Sounders fans love a big crowd. Show some ambition, damnit!
How have the Sounders been doing?
Not bad, but you’d be forgiven for feeling a little different even if you couldn’t exactly remember why. The Sounders are 7–3–3 in league play, which only has them sixth in the West. But their 1.85 points per game is actually fourth best in the West and puts them on pace for their second-highest points total ever.
If that’s all better than you thought, it’s probably because the Sounders lost their last two games going into the break (including a 2–0 loss to the LA Galaxy that snapped a 22-game home unbeaten run). It could also be because they’ve not been very good offensively, scoring just 17 goals in 13 league games.
Their defense must be pretty good, then?
You got it! The Sounders have allowed just 11 goals, tied for the fewest in MLS. They’ve managed that despite injuries and other absences forcing them to rotate their backline and defensive midfield quite a lot. Tino Lopez, for instance, wasn’t even signed to a first-team contract at the start of the year and has played nearly three times as many minutes as Yeimar Gomez Andrade.
Andrew Thomas has also been excellent in his first year as a full-time starter, is among the league leaders in virtually every category and probably deserves to be in the All-Star Game (but, you know, two goalkeepers having barely even mediocre MLS campaigns got the nod presumably because they were World Cup starters).
Defense is great, but what are they doing to fix the offense?
Sounders GM Craig Waibel has said that they are well aware of their offensive deficiencies, but said he wants to give some of the current players a bit more time before making any drastic moves. I suspect that could be a bit of window-dressing. If the Sounders are serious about trying to make some changes to the roster, how their current players perform over the next few games shouldn’t be a particularly decisive factor.
I’ve been told that the Sounders are confident they’ll be able to make some moves this summer – ideally ending a four-summer stretch in which they’ve not acquired anyone from outside the organization. But I don’t blame anyone who is reserving the right to be skeptical until a move actually gets made. I’ll also add that it doesn’t sound as if there’s a ton of money in the budget to make a transfer, so we might be looking more at intra-MLS moves than a big swing on an international player. Temper expectations accordingly.
Jeremiah Oshan
What position would they target?
Waibel suggested they are looking to improve the No. 9 spot, which frankly makes a lot of sense. Jordan Morris, Danny Musovski and Osaze De Rosario have just four goals between them and amazingly, none of them have scored in a game where they were the starting No. 9. They aren’t the only players underwhelming, but I definitely get why Waibel is focused on improving that spot.
Is Pedro de la Vega almost back?
We had hoped that the Argentinian winger would be ready to go when the team returned, but he’s at least a few more weeks out. The good news is that he has started training, which is at least some reason for optimism. At his best, de la Vega was a true game-changer last year and the Sounders haven’t looked nearly as dynamic since he broke his kneecap in the regular-season finale.
Level with me: How optimistic are you?
My default position is to believe the Sounders are capable of putting it together. That’s not blind optimism, that’s just recognizing that they tend to be very good during the second half of seasons. Last year, for instance, they went 14–3–8 after the Club World Cup and won Leagues Cup. A year earlier, they were 14–3–5 from June 15 on. You get the point. Those teams, mind you, started much worse than this one. I’m not going to guarantee that this team has a similar run in them, but I don’t think it’s crazy either.
