CONCACAF 2026 Slips Out of Sounders' Grasp as Tigres Take Round on Away Goals

It seemed like the Sounders might actually do the impossible when the 83rd minute rolled around and Albert Rusnák sunk an early candidate for goal of the year, spinning a rocket through two Tigres to put Seattle one goal away from advancing.

But the final cherry on top just wasn't quite there. It's a familiar feeling for the Sounders, who are always right in the thick of it, right there with the best of them. The 2024 MLS playoffs. The 2025 MLS playoffs. In all reality, it's a good problem to have. It's much better than not being there, and the Sounders are the only north American team with every possible trophy for a reason: when you're deep into as many competitions as possible, you're going to win a few.

On the other hand, there was another uncomfortable familiarity to the road goal loss on an aggregate tie.

Sometimes, you look at a match between a Liga MX team and an MLS team and see leagues of even skill. Other times, it appears that Liga MX still has a wide gulf between them and MLS.

A big part of this is the hex that still seems to exist when an MLS side travels south of the border to Mexico. Last year, it was a second leg against Cruz Azul in Mexico City when things fell apart for the Rave Green; this year, the Sounders dropped the first leg in Monterrey 2-0, with the good luck of a shanked Tigres penalty erased by a Jackson Ragen own goal (also incidentally an own goal for those like myself who think he should be on the USMNT. But I digress).

The real reason the Sounders lost the first leg and put themselves in such a deficit was that they played pretty badly on the road. Shots can be a really misleading metric, but when Tigres win the shots battle 22-4, you're bound to be in for a bad time.

In any case, Seattle had an uphill battle for the second leg. They needed to win 2-0 to force extra time; when Tigres scored their one goal in Seattle, the Sounders would need to win by three.

An early goal set a strong tone for the Sounders, but an early missed double-up showed shortcomings.

Naturally, aggression was in order for the hosts. Seattle brought it up the left side a couple of times in the first five minutes, with Cristian Roldan finding Kalani Kossa-Rienzi and Kalani bringing the ball up for a couple off crosses intended for Morris. Neither ended up working.

Tigres found some counter-aggression, too. Frei had to make a diving save in the fifth minute as Ángel Correa spun the ball around deep in Seattle's box and seemed to half-cross, half-shoot-for-the-far-post with a whole crowd of blue in pursuit. Whether it was on target or not was irrelevant; there were so many Tigres available that it would have easily become a killer road goal for Seattle's opponents.

The remainder of Tigres' early attacking phase was effectively axed by two gritty (and crowd-pleasing) Nouhou clearances, and Seattle began pushing forward with an attack.

A bunch of things happened at once around the 10th minute. Paul Rothrock fell to the ground after some hard contact, meanwhile Morris sent a ball to Cristian, who cooked up a perfect chip kick for Albert Rusnák with nobody to stop him but Tigres keeper Nahuel Guzmán. Albert knocked it in the net, but the offsides flag went up.

Play stopped as Rothrock was examined, giving time for VAR to be called for the offsides call. The decision came down that Rusnák was, in fact, not offsides, and Seattle had a 1-0 lead early on.

The Sounders had a chance to double this up in the 25th minute. Kalani once again soared up the right and delivered a cross towards the box, this time for a sliding Rothrock, but the latter's boot barely undercut the ball and it flew a few feet over the goal.

The field became a lot more uphill after Tigres knotted the score, and the ensuing attacks lacked finishing quality.

The 30th minute saw Tigres put together a slight transitional moment, though it became a major threat due to one mistake in the midfield. As the ball came into a contested zone between Snyder Brunell and his man, but Brunell got sidestepped and Tigres were able to create a big threat. Ragen booted it over the endline for a visitors' corner, and in their first set piece defense of the night, the Sounders faltered.

Tigres' Brunetta gave the service right to an underguarded Joaquim, and the center back knocked it well past Frei for the equalizer. The breakdown on set piece defense, as it turned out, was the difference in the round.

With road goals counting as the tiebreaker - and Tigres now up 1-0 in terms of road goals - the Sounders effectively had a two-and-a-half goal deficit, needing to score three to advance to the semifinals.

There was certainly heart in the ensuing moments. This is a team that knows it can put up crooked numbers. But in order to do so, they need to be on their full A-game, and they simply weren't during the rest of the first half. Well, at least until the very end, and that's when Guzmán stepped up massively for Tigres.

The second best chance for Seattle to strike back was in the 36th minute as Guzmán shanked a goal kick off Rusnák and Albert immediately regrouped around the left side before crossint to a Morris situated at basically point-blank range. But Morris couldn't get a handle on the ball in time to do something with it, so the score remained tied.

The best chance was another premier cross from the right side, this time by Albert. Rothrock positioned himself perfectly and headed the ball towards the near post, but Guzmán dove and barely managed to tap the ball away from the net. After all that, it was still 1-1 and the Sounders needed to score three goals in one half in order to advance.

"It made things more challenging," Schmetzer said of the visiting score. "Obviously, that wasn't the goal we wanted to give up. We had talked about keeping a clean sheet in this game, we had talked about giving up a set piece goal down there, we worked on it in training, so obviously it was disappointing to give up that goal."

The second half began well and the Sounders nearly managed to pull out the improbable victory, but they came up short.

Jordan Morris is quite the conundrum at striker. He's more of a natural winger, but seems to have a three-way split of the striker duties these days (after being the team's main striker for a bit in an experiment that didn't quite work out despite some strong showings) with Osaze de Rosario and Danny Musovski. The first half didn't look great for Morris as a striker, with him seeming slow on the uptake in that role.

It was clearly not quite his night at nine. There have been plenty of games where he has excelled at the position, but by halftime, it was the Sounders needed a new strategy. Head coach Brian Schmetzer put Danny Musovski in for Snyder Brunell, shifting to a four-forward formation where Morris could be a dual threat shading to the side and building up for Musovski.

The half started about as planned. With a far better flow on the wing, Morris connected with a stellar 49th minute ball up from Alex Roldan and sent it across for Moose, who punched it in to put Seattle up 2-1.

But that was the only notch the Sounders got until late in the half. Despite holding 75% of the possession in the second half - and a lot of it was good possession, creative and dynamic with a clear ability to break the Tigres apart - they couldn't quite get the final touch. Players would often get jittery in the box or hesitate to put in a quick touch, giving Tigres the chance to repel the ball again and again.

On the other side, the visitors managed some killer opportunities of their own, but Stefan Frei showed his mettle thrice in the half: in the 61st, as Rodrigo Aguirre took a long ball and shot to the net with nobody but Frei in front of him; in the 66th, as he leapt up to swat away Correa's point-blank header; and in the first minute of stoppage time, as he dove to grab a ball on Tigres' last true threat.

But time was winding down as the final 10 minutes of regulation dawned. Rusnák seemed to be losing his edge in the later second half, missing a chance in the 73rd to knock the ball in as he hesitated to play the ball any direction. But he made up for it with a truly incredible kick-of-the-year contender screamer from about a quarter of the way up the pitch, bouncing the ball off the far post to put the Sounders ever so close to advancement.

It was not to be. The team wasn't able to sink the final goal, and with CONCACAF's rule that the team with more road goals takes the tiebreaker, the Sounders fell in the quarterfinals.

Will the Sounders take an extra edge into MLS play?

It was impressive, however, that the team was able to so nearly execute the challenge in front of them. We've seen, in some years past, games where they needed to make up for a massive deficit that didn't get even close to where they wanted to be, even when the match started well (something something 2023 Leagues Cup group stage). The Sounders had a game plan and performed it quite well, all things considered, but that final step eluded their grasp.

MLS play resumes on Saturday for Seattle, in Lumen Field against St. Louis City FC. Cristian Roldan looked at the quick turnaround as a way for the team to get back on their feet after losing the chance for the 2026 CONCACAF trophy.

That kind of refinement upon facing great difficulty is what happened with the 2025 Sounders, too. After three very tough games in the Club World Cup, Seattle turned those lessons into the best run of form they had all year, culminating in a thunder run to a Leagues Cup victory against the eventual MLS champion Inter Miami.

"We weren't playing Paris Saint-Germain or Botafogo or Atletico, but Tigres is up there," Schmetzer said about his opponents. "I mean, that is a tremendous team, and I credit Guido (Pizarro, Tigres head coach) again."

The steep climb the team had to make was just as much of a factor in how the team performed. When good players have to do more to succeed, they can often find an extra inner force to rise to such an occasion.

Keeping up that form will be another beast. The MLS playoffs aren't for another six months and change, and gunning for a Supporter's Shield will be a grueling endeavor even if they find baller form coming off their toughest exit of the campaign.

And this exit was quite tough. The Sounders showed that they could rumble with Tigres on the whole, splitting three goals each and falling due to an away goals rule that UCL (for example) scrapped in the 2021-22 season. But the chance for a second CONCACAF trophy - oh what bragging rights that would be, to have two CONCACAF trophies before any other MLS team got one! - fell by the wayside, and the final four of CONCACAF 2026 is now LAFC, Toluca, Nashville SC, and Tigres.