The Seattle Sounders have fallen from grace this season, and they’ve fallen hard. Just two seasons ago, they captured the Supporters’ Shield by finishing the regular season with the best record in MLS, and they’ve been a regular fixture in the playoffs, qualifying every year they’ve been a member of the league. This season, though, they’ve been terrible, and they sit just one point off the bottom of the Western Conference. Those struggles have cost manager Sigi Schmid his job.
What went wrong between Sigi Schmid and the Seattle Sounders?
The only manager the MLS iteration of the Seattle Sounders have ever known is gone. How on earth did we get here?
Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images
The firing — pardon, “mutual agreement to part ways” — comes in the wake of last weekend’s horrifying performance in a 3-0 loss to Sporting Kansas City. The team appeared to quit during the match, with some players visibly refusing to chase loose balls. Seattle nearly became the first in MLS history to finish a match with zero shots, eventually registering one shot attempt that was well off target in the 87th minute. It was, in the opinion of many fans, the single worst performance the Sounders have ever had, one worthy of a firing in the context of the rest of this season.
But how did the Sounders get there? How did they go from being the crowned jewel of the league to a team that can barely buy a win?
The squad and Sigi didn’t mesh, tactically or personally
A big part of that is down to the way the squad has evolved away from something that fits Schmid. With player sales and the age- and injury-induced loss of quality in the likes of Clint Dempsey, Osvaldo Alonso and Brad Evans, the core of the team that Sigi relied on just can’t be relied on the way it was before.
Obafemi Martins was sold in the offseason when Chinese teams went spend-happy and Shanghai Shenhua made the Sounders an offer they couldn’t refuse. His departure was never adequately dealt with by the Sounders, however, and between that gaping hole, a lack of real wide players and some major flaws on the back line -- Evans and Zach Scott have many wonderful qualities, but neither should be relied on to play significant minutes at center back at this point in their careers — left Sigi with a lot of work to do. Whether it was an unreasonable ask or not, he couldn't do it.
A combination of cap complexities and an organizational desire to make the most of a high-quality academy system has created a large injection of youth into the side — youth that Schmid has struggled to meaningfully integrate into the side outside of Jordan Morris. A handful of others like Oalex Anderson have forged a place as rotational types or players to come off the bench, but by and large they struggle to find a place under Schmid, despite the resources the Sounders have put into them and despite Schmid’s history as a successful collegiate and youth national team coach.
But it’s more than just the fit between squad and manager. It’s also about the relationship, one that appears to have been growing increasingly toxic of late, as illustrated in the deeply concerning piece written by Charles Boehm at SoccerWire. It describes an icy relationship between Schmid and Dempsey, and says that multiple veterans have been walking out of practices lately because of how broken the attitudes are between the squad and staff. Once a player-manager relationship gets that bad, it’s past saving — and it’s much easier to remove the manager from that equation than it is half the roster.
But the roster is a problem, and he’s not the only guy who built it
In the seven and a half years that he was in charge, the Sounders have been through several iterations of their team, but Schmid’s influence was stamped on those teams in a big way. More recently, though, that influence has slipped, especially since Adrian Hanauer left his front office role to take over an active role as majority owner while ex-Real Salt Lake general manager Garth Lagerwey took his place.
Schmid can’t take the blame for this season alone because he’s ultimately not the one who assembles the squad. Currently, that’s Lagerwey, who also deserves some share of the blame for the things that aren’t working for the Sounders and hey look how did Sigi get under that bus?
Lagerwey: "I did my best to be deferential, if anything, over the past 18 months."
— Matt Pentz (@mattpentz) July 26, 2016
That kind of quote is a big sign that the rift between Schmid and his players wasn’t the only one, that there were problems between manager and front office as well. That can make it difficult at best to build a team and have success with it, which could easily have led to some of the problems with the squad that we see now.
Lagerwey’s hiring in 2014 also suggested that the Sounders were preparing themselves for a big change already. Even though they were fresh off a Supporters’ Shield triumph and only got knocked out of the MLS Cup playoffs by the eventual winners on away goals, they were also only a year removed from being utterly embarrassed in the 2013 playoffs by their arch rivals, the Portland Timbers.
It was widely reported that the Sounders considered firing Schmid in 2013, but decided to give him another chance, which was rewarded by their Shield triumph. It’s hard to call that a second chance, though — Schmid had taken plenty of lumps over the years, thanks to mediocre playoff performances and failures to adequately replace departing stars. Schmid weathered each storm as it came and kept finding ways to make his teams successful, but after so many storms, the Sounders started to consider the future — a future without Sigi Schmid.
It’s not at all unreasonable that the Sounders would consider such a future, and bringing in a high-powered GM like Lagerwey to replace Hanauer is a sure sign that such considerations were being made. With a feeling among fans (and perhaps among owners) that the Sounders had reached their potential with Schmid and could go no further, bringing in Lagerwey allowed the Sounders to lay the groundwork for whatever comes next. This season’s struggles have forced their timetable to be pushed up, though, and now the Sounders will be scrambling a bit to figure out the next step.
So what’s next?
Should the Sounders sell off their bigger assets to clear room for a new wave of younger stars? Should they dump their older, established players in order to make room for a new vision and a new squad, or find a way to get more quality out of them for just a little bit longer while the team rebuilds around them? Should they seek out a high-profile manager right now, or keep popular interim boss Brian Schmetzer at the helm and see what happens while they conduct a more in-depth search?
The potential answers are many, and they’re immensely complicated. Right now, the only people who can do more than guess at the answers are the Sounders, and even they are likely only just starting to grasp the beginnings of their answers. This is a big moment in the history of the club -- the only manager they’ve known in MLS is gone, and they need to get this next step, their next manager, right. This season can already be written off, but the Sounders have the money and the good reputation to build an even better team than the ones that captured U.S. Open Cup and Supporters’ Shield titles.
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