It has now been about five days since the Seattle Sounders hit what we can only hope is rock bottom. The 5–1 loss to the Portland Timbers at home wasn’t just humiliating; it was so bad that it has forced a lot of conversations about prior assumptions among folks like myself who have normally been staunch defenders of this roster build.
I’ve covered this team for all but one of the Sounders’ 17 MLS seasons and I’m not sure I remember the reaction to a result being more frustrated and fed up than this one. I don’t think it’s just because it was arguably the worst performance in club history. I think it’s more that there’s an encroaching sense of doom around this team, one that has been building for several years.
I’m sure some will see this as a sense of entitlement. How can a team that has made the playoffs in all but one season, has won more trophies than any MLS team in that time, and remains on pace to finish with one of its highest point totals ever, have such negativity around it?
Given all that, there’s going to be a tendency inside club leadership to diminish this by saying it’s a temporary overreaction or the complaints of a vocal minority. I think that would be a gross miscalculation.
Yes, there are the usual naysayers who have been quick to point out “I told you so.” But what has struck me is how many of the otherwise supportive fans have thrown up their hands in disgust. Thursday wasn’t the first complaint, but it feels like the final straw for many. These are people who have stuck through this team in the face of real adversity, who have believed in the long-term vision, who almost blindly renew their season tickets. This feels different than previous stretches of struggle in part because I hear a growing volume of people saying they feel as if their support has been taken for granted.
While it would be impossible to perfectly synthesize exactly what fans want to see happen, I do think it’s fair to sum it up as “change.”
As luck would have it, we are currently in a period of the season where that is entirely possible. The summer transfer window opened a week ago and won’t close until Sept. 2. That gives the front office about six weeks to make something happen.
Even if results improve, this is not a window the Sounders can afford to sit out. It’s not just because the team could use an infusion of talent right now, it’s that it’s been far too long since they last made a big move. As many fans are only too aware, the Sounders have not made a summer addition from outside the organization since 2021. That’s four straight summers.
It is, of course, true that summer is not the only time a team can add players. But what makes this more than a frustrating factoid is that the Sounders haven’t exactly been active in recent winter windows, either. The only significant transfer fee they’ve paid since the summer of 2021 is when they bought Pedro de la Vega in early 2024. They did make a pair of moves to add Jesús Ferreira and Paul Arriola prior to last season, but those were both trades that involved the Sounders sending General Allocation Money to FC Dallas.
What’s remarkable is that even including trades like those ones, the Sounders have spent easily the least amount of any MLS team on the transfer market since the start of 2022. Yes, that includes two teams who haven’t even been in operation for all of those seasons.
Based on Transfermarkt's accounting, the Sounders have spent about 40% less on transfers than the next lowest-spending team (the Vancouver Whitecaps). They’ve spent a little more than half as much as the 28th highest-spending team and about a third as much as No. 20 Philadelphia Union. Sounders owner Adrian Hanauer has often told me he’s among the least wealthy owners in MLS. I have no reason to doubt that, but the Sounders’ revenue is ranked somewhere between sixth and eighth depending on which source is compiling the data (that's without controlling their own stadium, which we’ve been told they desperately need, by the way). The Sounders would need to quintuple transfer spending — putting them roughly on par with the Portland Timbers — to even come close to getting into that range.
Spending in MLS notoriously has very little correlation to success and there are other ways to spend money, but this is a level of disparity that simply doesn’t seem sustainable.
But it’s not just about how spending may or may not translate to success. The problem here, I believe, is that it creates a perception that ownership and the front office don’t care. Of course, fans want to see the Sounders win, ideally while playing exciting soccer. Following a team isn’t just about watching the games, though, it’s everything that goes on outside of them. Fans love reading about transfer rumors and want to see some new faces on the field. They want to imagine what their team could look like without it being a complete fantasy.
It’s this part of the story that the Sounders have done the worst job of telling.
I’ve written similar things before, but I think this may be reaching a boiling point. It has gotten bad enough that I think there’s a real chance that fans might vote “no confidence” when GM Craig Waibel is up for election later this year. Judging Waibel explicitly on how much activity he’s been able to generate on the transfer market probably isn’t fair — he doesn’t make the budget or benefit from saving money — but I suspect a lot of fans will use this vote as a rebuke of ownership as much as a referendum on his performance.
That might not be the most productive thing to do – there’s certainly no guarantee that another GM would have any more success raising the transfer budget – but it’s one of the only tools fans have at their disposal. Moments like this are exactly what Drew Carey had in mind when he envisioned this mechanism in the first place: To deliver a wake-up call to ownership that seems to have gotten its priorities a little mixed up.
