Sounders Decision Day Outlook: Uncontrolled Destiny

2026 is already, in many respects, a disaster for the Seattle Sounders. A team that went into the year with aspirations of winning multiple trophies sits one game from the end of the season out of even a spot in the play-in.

The Chicago Bulls would never.

But Saturday's fixture against LAFC is their last opportunity to salvage a postseason out of this wreck. It's not so simple as win and you're in; rather, it's win or else you're out.

Okay, they could get into eighth place if they draw and both the Timbers and Rapids lose. But even if the Sounders win, a concurrent victory from both those sides and the LA Galaxy would keep the Sounders out of the picture anyway.

The thing's not entirely in their hands. Much crying over the spilt milk can be done: they dropped points at home against Montreal. They blew a two-goal lead to San Diego and then lost 1-0 to the Houston Dynamo despite having six times the xG. The Whitecaps became their second Cascadia opponent of the year to drill them 5-1 and cemented the Sounders' 0-4-0 record in Cascadia Cup play. And that eight-game losing streak (part of 13 straight without a win) did them the opposite of favors.

Would you believe this team was an outside Shield contender in mid-May?

Even if the Sounders somehow manage their absolute best-case scenario of sneaking into seventh and then sneaking past FC Dallas to get to the knockout - beating the 'Caps in a best-of-three might be next to impossible - the offseason will have to entail a whole lot of soul-searching for this team and their identity. They may have missed the playoffs in 2022, but at least they made history with CONCAChampions. 2023 was disappointing in a lot of ways, but that was something of an in-between team. 2024 saw them nearly make the MLS Final! 2025 ended in heartbreak, but they had one of the best summers an MLS team could possibly have!

They dealt with a lot of injuries, sure. But even with that cavalcade, they shouldn't have been close to losing eight in a row. They shouldn't have been within a 100-mile radius of a beating as lopsided as the one we all saw on Tuesday, yet they did that twice - once each to their biggest rival.

Of all the things to pre-enact. (Well, they pre-enacted the other side of that equation a couple times in 2025; such is life.)

Anyway, the Sounders did it to themselves in 2026. They got trapped by low blocks and scared by high ones. They played timidly with the ball and slowed up when they had momentum. They were passive on set pieces and got dominated in the air. They waited for a ref's whistle when another team came out of the gate with fire in their bellies. They tried the same things over and over during games despite none of it working. And when things went bad, they went worse with incredible speed; how else do multiple bad losses become 5-1?

When a team is doing so much wrong, it's often hard to course-correct because it's hard to find the one thing above all others that needs to be corrected. It all needs to be corrected! So where to start? Cristian Roldan, when asked about their slow starts on Friday, instead emphasized ability their ability to keep cohesive when the plan - as all plans do - falls apart upon first contact with the enemy.

"Response and belief is gonna be even more important," Cristian said. "If things don't go our way, how can we not compound those mistakes and make things worse? ... if we get punched in the face, we have to be able to respond."

When asked about how his team was going to approach LAFC, Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer had a different but adjacent token. He stated the obvious things about keeping transitions from their powerhouse forwards (specifically naming Denis Bouanga and Son Heung-Min) in check, but the big change he promised was about the team's willingness to take risks.

"I thought when we won the ball up in Vancouver, it was always a sideways pass or a negative pass just to keep possession," Schmetzer said. "And we've challenged them that, when we win the ball back from LAFC, your first look has to be forward. And if we can play forward, let's do it, because let's get after them before they get organized in a defensive block."

Go big or go home, as they say. It's related to what Cristian was talking about (response involves risk-taking and proactivity to take an opponent's tone-setting ability away), but so is everything the Sounders have to improve on. Is there a disconnect here? Maybe, maybe not, but we'll see if the cues work when LAFC and Seattle square off on Saturday.

On the defensive side of the ball, Schmetzer warned against falling prey to the desires of the moment that may cause a player to break formation, the exact kind of thing that could give LAFC the space they need to strike.

"We're gonna press; we're gonna have to press because we're at home and we wanna aggressive, but, as always, we have to make sure that, when we make the decision to press, that all 10 players are on the same page," Schmetzer said. "It can't be, a guy makes a mistake and he wants to get the ball back and he chases and then he opens things up, and then the next guy is late, and then the next guy is late, because that's what they want."

This is quite similar to what Cristian said. Don't compound the mistakes. But there is a tension between a desire to not compound mistakes and a desire to take risks. A player in a besieged headspace can turn a realistic desire to keep his team mistake-free into a timid, uncreative mess. That same player can then decide to take a risk, but do so on vain magical hopes instead of the sorts of instinctual "soccer IQ" calculations that the best in the sport make.

And this tension has shown up plenty often for this Sounders side. It showed up as they got drubbed 5-1 by the Whitecaps, and thanks to that, Schmetzer told the media that he's going to be shaking up the starting XI.

"Look, after 5-1, you can't start the same team ... it's gonna be different."

The lineup won't start Alex Roldan, however, as he got injured in training, according to Schmetzer. That probably means a back line of Nouhou - Jackson Ragen - Stu Hawkins - Kalani Kossa-Rienzi, but you might consider putting Kim Kee-hee in at center back instead of Ragen or Hawkins. Given how bad Snyder Brunell did in Vancouver (and this might be fighting the last war), we will probably see Hassani Dotson alongside Cristian in the double pivot. Albert Rusnák will be the 10 and Dejan Joveljić will be the nine, but the wingers are another question mark for Schmetzer to fill out. American Soccer Analysis' goals added (g+) says it should be Paul Arriola and Jordan Morris, and that's about where I'm at, but I would also recommend Seba Gomez as either a starter or an early second-half sub if one of Arriola or Morris aren't panning out.

In any case, Schmetzer and the Sounders can't afford to stick with players for long if they aren't doing it on the pitch. The bench will have to get it done.

"It's not just my expectations that they have to meet, it's actually their expectations," Schmetzer said. "Because they're the ones that said, 'okay, we want to do this, this, and this.' And so now I have two of them, I have my expec[tations], coaching, what we wanna do tactically, and, if it's not going well, I'mma say, 'look, this is what you guys committed to, and so, if you're not doing it, the next guy's gonna step on the field and he's gonna do it.'"

The Sounders know why they're in the spot they're in.

"I think it's really important to just focus on ourselves," Cristian said, "because at the end of the day, we're the ones that got us in this mess. And the same people that got us in the mess need to get us out."

Can they get there? Can they at least delay the inevitable on Saturday?