Sounders’ season feels like it’s at a crossroads tonight

Tonight could very well prove to be the crossroads match of the Seattle Sounders’ season. Hosting 14th-place Austin FC — a team that is 0–8–3 away from Q2 Stadium across all competitions — the Sounders should be favorites.

But if you’ve watched the Sounders at all over the past few months, you know it won’t feel that way. The Sounders come into this game having lost seven straight league games and 9 of 10 across all competitions. Their club-record 22-game home unbeaten streak is now a distant memory after three straight losses in league play at Lumen Field.

Even more concerning is that their list of injured would-be starters only continues to grow. With the news that Jesús Ferreira might be out for the rest of the season, the Sounders will take the field tonight without at least six players who would have been starters under ideal circumstances. Of the nine players who occupy Designated Player, TAM or U22 spots — effectively the players taking up most of the roster resources — only Albert Rusnák will be available.

And, yet, the season is not entirely lost; or at least, not yet.

With a win, the Sounders can get back to .500, potentially vault from 11th to 8th in the Western Conference and pull to within three points of 5th with a game in hand. They’d do this with the knowledge that a host of their injured starters are getting close to returning and with some hope that outside reinforcements may actually be on the way. Yes, it requires a bit of optimistic thinking, but it’s not all that hard to imagine the Sounders salvaging their season.

A loss, however, makes a far darker path look very realistic. If the Sounders can’t beat the league’s only winless road team — even in their current state — it’s hard to see where their next win might come. They’ll visit the über-talented FC Cincinnati on the weekend, host the red-hot Chicago Fire after that and won’t host a team currently outside playoff position again until Oct. 1. There’s a vaguely plausible nightmare scenario where they are sitting on a 15-game losing streak when they host league-worst Sporting KC.

I don’t much like entertaining such doomer vision boarding, but this is the type of projecting the Sounders’ current predicament has invited. Of course, they can put that all to bed by getting a result tonight. Let’s hope they do.

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