Seattle Sounders: They're Alive?

SEATTLE - For the first time since June 3, 2023, the Seattle Sounders passed 40,000 fans in attendance for an MLS game. It was Decision Day against LAFC, where the Sounders needed to win and hope some other results went their way in order to make the playoffs.

RSL beat LA Galaxy. Portland beat Austin. The Colorado Rapids lost to FC Dallas. None of that was known to the Sounders as they battled in Lumen, but what they did know was that they had to roar out of the gate and catch their opponents off-guard. LAFC, even with their sixth place spot assured, wasn't going to be an easy opponent.

Twice in the first half the Sounders struck the back of the net, and despite being outshot 24-5, losing the box tilt 45-14, and holding only 39% of the possession, it was enough. Andrew Thomas made seven saves and prevented 1.65 goals; Hassani Dotson and Cristian Roldan pressed the visitors enough in the midfield to prevent much of the damage from the team's rather uneasy penchant for giveaways, and they got enough contribution from their back line to keep a one-goal lead intact until the final whistle. As head coach Brian Schmetzer said, scoreboard watching came a distant second.

That crowd of four myriad erupted as fiercely as the goalpost flamethrowers upon that whistle. Through all the disappointment of 2026, the Sounders are now at least in the playoffs, set to host the eighth place play-in match against RSL on Nov. 19.

It wasn't pretty, but the Sounders made it to the postseason.

Forget all the team's awful struggles for the first 33 games and all their disappointment in tournament play; even just their performance against LAFC on Saturday was shaky.

Well, most of it was. Once they lost their initial momentum, the Sounders looked like a very drunk duck in very murky water. But oh what they did with that initial momentum.

The Sounders wasted no time getting ahead on Decision Day. And I mean no time. In the very first minute of play, Albert Rusnák pressed LAFC keeper Cabral Carter and forced him to make a desperate half-clearance, one intended for defensive midfielder Mathieu Choinière but that ended up gettable for Cristian Roldan. Cristian sent it over for a wide-open Rusnák, who simply tapped it in the net.

Seattle was gunning for the second goal in the ensuing minutes, but despite a few more high touches, it was LAFC who roared back with an ensuing flurry. Denis Bouanga and Armindo Sieb both got denied up front by Andrew Thomas, but those saves were a warning to the rest of the team that they had to keep the vise cinched on their opponents.

Multiple missed opportunities followed for Seattle, with Albert missing an attempted free kick goal in the ninth minute. Jordan Morris completely cooked his man along the right touchline in the 21st minute and sent it back into the box for Deki, but his header flew rightward and the best Seattle could do was a free kick just outside the box.

But Morris was on the ground. He got back up fairly quickly, yet he was limping along the touchline and Schmetzer took him out for Jesús Ferreira.

Ferreira played a key role in Seattle's second goal of the half. In the 31st minute, he broke away along the right side and, as he approach the box at the touchline, he sent a cut-back pass to KKR, who delivered it into the box for Albert and Seba under pressure. Albert got the ball to Seba, who fired a shot towards the right side of the net. Even though it took a deflection and began floating towards the net, Cabral Carter couldn't get to it in time and the ball floated into the back of the net.

It was 2-0 for Seattle. This was even with LAFC putting together a serious threat on net every five minutes; it seemed like the Sounders were allergic to keeping possession in the middle third of the field and the visitors were able to string together some pretty incisive sequences in front of net, only being kept out of the match thanks to some slight mis-touches and shanked shots, falling outside the post by mere inches again and again. Seattle had a couple similar shots - one taken by Cristian that came two feet from making it 3-0 - but the lion's share of the opportunities were for LAFC once the second goal came in.

Seattle lost their initial attacking edge. It was a good sight that that the team had managed to knock in a couple goals when they had that opening, because for the rest of the game, they wouldn't get one.

The Sounders even got away with quite a bit against LAFC. In the 54th minute, Dejan Joveljić tried to pass back to Hassani Dotson - the vision was for Dotson to fire it up into space for a charging Ferreira - but the pass went offline and Choinière stole it away and sent it up for Bouanga. Cristian and Kim Kee-hee swarmed the surging forward and in so doing kept his window small enough for Andrew Thomas to plug the last remaining gap, but that was the kind of mistake that peppered both halves and could have easily led to multiple goals for LAFC.

When a team loses its creativity and plays a passive, defensive game, even a decent lead can turn into heartbreak. 2-0, as any high school coach will tell you, is the proverbial "most dangerous lead in sports" - and in the 81st minute, Leo Walta's free kick went up into the right side of the crowd for Ryan Porteous, who headed it back for the goal-scoring Eddie Segura. Both of those headers should have been better contested by Seattle, but it seems the issues winning high-leverage aerials will continue until morale improves.

Tension filled the air as LAFC came forth again and again in the final minutes; it looked less like two MLS teams and more like the Sounders playing haramball against PSG in Club World Cup last year. What that says about Seattle's composure under pressure can't be good, but the second half stats were ugly for Seattle. They had one touch in the opposition box and made 78 total passes for a 65% passing accuracy. They actually won a good amount of ground duels and bailed themselves out with a boatload of clearances, but they were at serious risk of embarrassing themselves in front of their biggest crowd.

Luckily for Seattle, the game plan worked. The minutes drained off the clock and the final whistle blew to celebrations in the stands. The Sounders limped into the play-in game.

Albert made some neat history.

Obafemi Martins was one Sounder who always found a way to create something out of thin air. If there's any big intangible that this current Sounders team lacks that the mid-2010s team had in spades, it was that ability to do the impossible. you're beating today's Sounders badly by minute 50 or 70, you've beaten them; such was not the case in Oba's day.

Enough yelling at clouds. I bring this up because Albert's goal on Saturday was his 44th in all competitions for Seattle, edging out Oba for seventh in club history.

He also got the assist on Seba's goal, moving him to 16 for the season. In terms of including nonsense hockey assists, this ties his own club record from 2024, which in turn tied Nico Lodeiro's club record from 2018. In terms of primary (actual) assists, Saturday's was no. 13, besting the 12 that he himself and Lodeiro had reached in the two aforementioned years.

Oba also got 12 primary assists, doing so in 2014.

Andrew Thomas: 9.5/10

Okay, there was someone who did create a win out of thin air on Saturday, and his name is Andrew Thomas. The guy was excellently active in the box and, more importantly, had a penchant for intuiting exactly where an LAFC attacker's only line on net would be and plugging it quickly.

Seven of LAFC's eight shots on target came from Bouanga, Sieb, and Son Heung-Min, who between them had 29 touches in the Sounders box and 1.87 expected goals on target. Thomas stopped them all in scoreless in their tracks.

A Bouanga long shot to AT's right in the third, saved. Sieb's closer range blast later in the minute, saved. Son delivered him a two eminently saveable shots in the 25th and 55th (both saved) while Bouanga's shot in the 54th was hemmed in by other Sounders. Another Sieb shot, this time to Thomas' left, found the iron hand of the Sounders keeper in the 66th and another Bouanga shot in the opposite direction met the same fate a minute later.

And sometimes it was better to be lucky than good. Choinière missed a couple good chances in the first half and Son muffed a close range header in the 51st. Segura imitated Son in the 56th. There were a lot of ways in which LAFC should have won on Saturday.

Thanks largely to Andrew Thomas, they didn't.

The only blemish on Thomas' game was that he didn't find a whole lot of non-buildup options to get things going after a save or stop, and this worsened as the game progressed. While an effective ball in behind could have flipped the script completely at several points beyond halftime, his longer balls weren't very accurate and his clearances were less permanent than might be hoped.

The saves more than made up for it. And on the heels of having given up five goals to one of the Sounders' rivals, it was badly needed for the trinational keeper.

"He took five goals and he came back and had an outstanding performance. So there's your growth," Schmetzer said. "It's not easy sometimes, goalkeepers have a tough job. And for them to be mentally strong, it's part of the requirement of that position."

Seattle's back six may have had difficulty creating buildup, but they excelled at plugging the gaps.

The first 60 minutes or so saw the Sounders let in a fair amount of leakage on net; that was where Thomas came in and saved the day.

But the intermittent leakage all but ended after that point, and even with LAFC's near-constant possession, the back line and the pivots were stellar interrupters who consistently threw the LAFC attacks off their game and slowed them enough for Seattle to keep a mostly tight seal on the back of the net.

Dotson and Cristian were especially notable in this regard. While they, like the rest of the team, didn't have the creativity to find ways to bust in behind LAFC past the second goal, they won 18 ground duels between them and Dotson intercepted five LAFC passes. Both of them used space exquisitely off the ball.

"I thought Hassani Dotson was probably the best player on the field tonight," Schmetzer said. "Probably best player on the field, maybe not on the score sheet, but best player on the field."

Schmetzer may not have made any comments about Federal Way or "Pacific Northwest grit", but that's the way the back line defended behind those two guys. Yeah, okay, that's sappy. But it's true. Kim Kee-hee did an excellent job as a plug-and-play center back in lieu of the less experienced Stuart Hawkins, Jackson Ragen blocked three shots, and Nouhou put in some stalwart minutes. Kalani Kossa-Rienzi was more than a little iffy against Bouanga, losing most of his duels, but despite being outmatched, he managed to at least slightly neuter the pace of the LAFC left winger.

"Kalani coming in for Alex, playing against the best left winger in our league, and some of the moments of calmness that he had, chesting the ball back to Andrew, and some of the defending that he did," Schmetzer said as he rolled through his list of praises.

Schmetz was a little rosy, I think, in assessing KKR's performance (it was Bouanga, sure, but he could have been more on-point on Saturday), but he was right that the back line more than held their own against the onslaught.

There was a fire and desire, so to speak, to the players as they fought to keep LAFC out of the net. On the goal line, Thomas saw that intensity, as he put it, and attributed their perseverance to that trait.

That idea of "suffering" was also present in the way Schmetzer talked about the late game defense on Saturday.

"We talked at halftime going out and scoring the third goal, putting the game really to bed. But obviously, LAFC, they're a good team and they didn't allow us to get out of our half. So we had to suffer, and sometimes when you're hard to beat in those moments, it's just as good as being really, really good and scoring four or five goals," Schmetzer said. "Because I'm still a true believer that defense wins championships, and I say that because I know we have enough quality always to get one or two, and so if we can become defensively really strong, then that's where you that's where you make long runs in the playoffs."

But to counter one stock phrase with another, the best defense is a good offense.

Seattle's early flurry was the best thing they could have gotten, but they never found that life in the second half.

Scoring 54 seconds into the game is just about what every coach dreams of at kickoff. Their high press legitimately surprised LAFC, especially a third-string keeper that goofed up badly in the face of that pressure the first time he saw it. Seattle was also contesting balls heavily and winning whistles early on, forcing a kind of attacking momentum that could go on hold when the visitors made their own pushes yet be restarted as soon as the defense did its job.

That they got two goals in two shots on target and 0.71 xG was a pretty good stroke of luck, but they also had a creative vision in these early minutes as they hunted for a second goal. Free kicks and shots from distance both made their way directly to the goal, continuing Seattle's early trend of being a step ahead of their opponents as they sought the second goal they had emphasized before the game.

But it was night and day once that second goal came in; the faucet simply shut off. Was the desire dissipating? Was that edge dulling? Did LAFC finally plug their gaps and adjust to the way Seattle was attacking?

All of the above. LAFC stopped getting scared by high presses, sure, but the Sounders mentally de-emphasized the attack and started letting off the gas when they could have pounced. Their one second half breakaway saw JF get a chance to either take a long shot or deliver a ball into space on the right touchline, but he hesitated, cut back, and tried to play a short pass with plenty of visitors in range and LAFC quickly got the ball.

Seattle's defense managed to do the job, but the Sounders shouldn't be expecting their defense to make that performance every day. They need to be in the business of creating their own luck, so to speak, and they did an excellent job of that for 31 minutes - and then stopped doing it.

Play those last 60 minutes over again and there's a good chance the Sounders end the year on the last day of the regular season.

Play-in time (Nov. 19).

Seattle has the eighth seed in the Western Conference at the end of the 34-game season, meaning they host ninth-seeded RSL in the play-in game to determine who gets to face Vancouver in the best-of-three first round of the official playoffs.

"It's not ideal, but we're gonna take it," Schmetzer said. "I mean, again, we can go back and say, 'shoulda, coulda, woulda,' on any sort of various game, one point would have made a difference."

The good news is they don't have to go to the accursed ground in Salt Lake where nothing good is allowed to happen to the Sounders. They need to step all over RSL the same way they shoved LAFC around for 30 minutes on Saturday.

Schmetzer expressed confidence in his team's ability to go the make a good run in the postseason.

But given that he was discussing momentum and not skill, that in and of itself doesn't breed confidence in me that they will get it done. Then again, neither do the 34 games they played to get to this point. Jordan Morris is injured (say what you want, he has been an effective winger this year), Alex Roldan is injured, Paul Rothrock will be on limited minutes, and even if they make it to the full playoffs, they will face Vancouver.

The same Vancouver that clubbed them 5-1. Unlike against Portland, this wasn't wholly on Seattle for getting in their own way; Vancouver is just that much better than the Sounders. They can luck their way into one playoff win against the 'Caps, but two?

Anything can happen, but I'm not holding my breath.