One word best describes the Seattle Sounders’ recent form: Painful.
Sure, the team snapped their record-breaking losing streak by beating Querétaro FC 3-0 on Sunday, and that’s great. But the fact that they even had a seven-game losing streak at all is painful. They were outscored 17–3 in that stretch and looked downright bad doing it.
It’s symptomatic of some very real problems that didn’t magically resolve themselves this weekend. I won’t try to list them all, but the most obvious problem is pain itself.
I don’t mean the kind of psychological pain we experience when we lose 5–1 to Portland at home, and the front office makes no effort to publicly address it. That did hurt, but I’m talking about the literal, physical injuries that nine – yes nine – players are nursing right now.
The past few weeks, the injury list could almost fill a starting 11. Here was the list on matchday 19:
- Pedro de la Vega - Knee (Out)
- Yeimar Gómez Andrade - Calf (Out)
- Jordan Morris - Quad (Out)
- Nikola Petkovic - Knee (Out)
- Cristian Roldan - Quad (Out)
- Hassani Dotson - Hamstring (Questionable)
- Kim Kee-hee - Hamstring (Questionable)
- Alex Roldan - Hip (Questionable)
- Ryan Sailor - Knee (Questionable)
Pedro de la Vega managed to come off this list on Sunday, only to return with a new injury a matter of minutes later!
It’s bad. And when things are bad, it’s easy to jump to conclusions. One such conclusion I’ve heard is that something’s uniquely wrong with the Sounders, and that no other team has to deal with so many injuries. In fact, Brian Schmetzer even said that they’re going to look into whether they’re “overcooking” the players in training, and if that’s leading to abnormal injury rates.
It makes you wonder: Is our injury list abnormal?
It’s a testable hypothesis. There are data just sitting there to analyze. Someone just had to do it.
Perhaps to ease my own pain, I reminded myself how much fun I’d had doing data analysis for this website years ago, dusted off my instance of R, and wrote a new webscraper.
I was able to pull together every matchday injury report from the MLS website since the start of 2024. Excluding suspensions and call-ups, I counted up injuries by team through August 1st of this year. The dataset includes 7,676 unique player injuries across all teams and regular season games.
The results? The Sounders are in the upper end of MLS’s injury rankings, but not off the charts.
Perhaps it’s cold comfort, but over the past 2.5 seasons, the Sounders averaged 4.3 injury-related absences per game. That’s tied for 5th worst in the league with Miami and Nashville, but only a little bit above the league average (3.6). The most-injured team is RSL, averaging 5.1 injury absences per game since 2024. The healthiest is Austin with 2.1.
