Premium: Seattle Goes Continental
At Long Last, An MLS Team Wins the CONCACAF Champions League
SEATTLE — From the moment he and his family moved into their house near Lake Washington six years ago, Garth Lagerwey, the GM and soccer architect of the Seattle Sounders, has kept an arresting three-by-five-foot photograph above the mantelpiece in his office. It’s the first thing he sees when he looks up from his desk. The picture of a sold-out Rio Tinto Stadium is from April 27, 2011, when Lagerwey’s previous team, Real Salt Lake, hosted Mexico’s Monterrey in the CONCACAF Champions League final—and lost by a single fateful goal.
“Other than my wedding, that was probably the biggest day of my life,” Lagerwey told me during an interview on his backyard deck on Monday. “I’d look at that and think, Would we ever be able to get back there [to a continental final]? It’s fair to say it’s been a goal of mine for some time. And if we win on Wednesday, I will take that picture down and hopefully replace it with one from Lumen Field with something happier.”
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During Wednesday’s CCL final return leg, in front of a sellout crowd of 68,741, Lagerwey got the long-awaited image he was looking for. Despite losing starters João Paulo and Nouhou to injuries in the first 30 minutes, Seattle brought on effective replacements (16-year-old Obed Vargas and 30-year-old Kelyn Rowe) and kept pushing until its stars did the rest.
Forward Raúl Ruidíaz scored twice, one goal on an unlovely but crucial deflection in the 45th minute and the other at the end of a gorgeous team passing sequence in the 80th. Playmaker Nicolás Lodeiro finished things off eight minutes later for a 3-0 win (5-2 on aggregate) and a permanent place in the lore of the Sounders and Major League Soccer.
Make no mistake, Seattle’s CCL title is the greatest achievement by an MLS team in the league’s 27-year history. For the first time since the tournament went to a league format in 2008, an MLS club is the continental champion. The 16-year stranglehold by Mexican teams on the CONCACAF crown is over. Never has an MLS team competed in the FIFA Club World Cup. That will change early next year when Seattle has the chance to go toe-to-toe with all the other continental winners in competitive games.
“This is a historic trophy,” Seattle goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who was selected as the tournament’s top player, told me. “I’m sure there will be multiple MLS teams in 50 or 60 years that will have won it. But there will be one that will be the first one, and that’s it. I mean, we’re all competitive. We don’t do this for s--ts and giggles, so that’s what you want. There’s no better thing.”
“It’s my favorite club trophy, for sure,” said midfielder Cristian Roldán, who has also won two MLS Cup titles with the Sounders. “Making history is special, and doing it with my brother [teammate Alex] is even more special. It’ll take a while to settle in, but this is by far, with the atmosphere, with how the game went, my favorite final.”
For years, MLS officials have proclaimed their objective of becoming one of the world’s top soccer leagues. But you can’t be that if you never even win your own continental championship. Year after year, MLS clubs have piled up failure after failure in the CCL, to the extent that it became the soccer equivalent of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown on an endless loop of despair. That’s over now.
Seattle’s second goal, featuring passes at high speed from Alex Roldán to Jordan Morris to Lodeiro to Ruidíaz, lit up the Pacific Northwest night. “It just was a surreal moment,” Lagerwey said afterward in an interview in which he choked up at times. “Look, I don’t believe any of these things are transcendental or anything like that, but soccer had arrived in that moment. It was on a different level. People will never forget that. And it felt like that little bit of immortality. You get in sports to do things that people can’t take away, that people have to write down, and this will be history. Forever, it’ll be history.”
And while winning one CCL crown doesn’t mean MLS has overtaken Liga MX—that will require raising the CONCACAF trophy multiple times—it’s a major step forward for a league that, unlike any other in the Americas, has aspirations of joining the world’s top circuits. On Tuesday, I asked Seattle owner Adrian Hanauer, who’s on the MLS product strategy committee, if league owners had spoken to each other about their frustration at not winning the CCL over the years and had come up with ways to address it, and he said yes.
“Our job is to look at the product every single day and figure out how we get better vis-a-vis each other, how we get better vis-a-vis Mexico and the Americas. How we optimize for tournaments, what we can do, how can we make the product look better? Those are conversations that happen. And we’ve done things over the course of time. Teams that qualify for Champions League get a little bit of allocation money. I don’t think we used to reschedule games [in MLS for CCL teams]. Now we do that. Charter travel, things like that are helping. But I think we can do more. I think we should do more.”
“There’s a balance,” he continued. “If you spend $20 million more per year, no doubt you get better, but there’s a reality to our business. And how do we balance continuing to get better on the field, continuing to generate more revenue, and continuing to live by the principles of parity that we’ve created within our league while still giving teams that edge when we go into an international tournament like this?”
Heading into the final, no Sounders players had done more to put Seattle in a position to win the trophy than Roldán and Frei. Roldán, a 26-year-old midfielder who was drafted out of the University of Washington, has added to his game each year and become a regular U.S. men’s national team call-up thanks to his skill and his guile. “He’s a smart, tactical player,” Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer told me this week. “He’s very durable. He’s a better athlete than most people think, and his soccer IQ is off the charts. He will try and do whatever it takes to win anything that he participates in.”
If “getting CONCACAF’d” has become a widespread expression in recent years—it refers to the vagaries of refereeing and other aspects found in the region—Roldán has figured out that sometimes you have to do the CONCACAF’ing yourself. In the dying moments of the first leg against Pumas, Roldán felt contact in the penalty box and consciously chose to stay down on the field, thereby giving referee Iván Barton time to check VAR and rule for a penalty. It turned out to be a huge moment in the two-legged final when Lodeiro converted the 97th-minute spot kick to make the score 2-2 heading back to Seattle.
“It’s a call that’s difficult to make,” Roldán told me, “a call that when you see it on replay, you say there’s contact, but maybe in the run of play you don’t see it. That’s why a lot of our teammates were already running back. But I was on the ground trying to hold up play so that he can see on VAR. Fredy [Montero] was yelling at me, ‘Hey, get back!’ And I’m yelling at Fredy: ‘It’s a f---ing PK!’ Sometimes you have to delay and stay on the ground a little bit longer.”
As Frei explained to me this week about Roldán, “He has smarts about the game and smarts about CONCACAF. We make fun of it: You got CONCACAF’d. But it’s just a way the game gets played differently. And then maybe the reffing is a little bit different. But you have to adapt. Everybody that watches CONCACAF games knows what that is.”
For his part, Frei’s performance in goal throughout Seattle’s CCL run was dominant. And with the concerns about the USMNT goalkeepers—Zack Steffen and Matt Turner are looking likely to be Premier League backups in the run-up to the World Cup—the possibility of bringing in the 36-year-old Frei as a reinforcement has become a talking point among U.S. fans and even some coaches.
“Should he be included in that conversation? For sure,” says Schmetzer. “And then whether he’s finally selected, that’s up to Gregg [Berhalter]. But I believe personally that he is the best shot-stopper. And I’m biased of course, but he’s top two in our league for shot-stoppers, and the top one for me. I mean, that’s the goalkeeper’s No. 1 job. Keep the f---ing ball out of the net.”
Frei himself isn’t expecting to get the call and told me he hasn’t had any communication with Berhalter. The last time Frei was in the conversation was during the U.S. January camp in 2017, but he suffered a high-ankle sprain and had to return home.
“I kind of restructured how I look at my goals, and I try to focus a little bit more on things that I can actually control,” Frei said. “I understand that every coach has a way they want to play and has opinions about every player and whether they fit or don’t fit. And that’s fine. At this point, I feel like it’s almost too late now.”
But when it comes to things Frei can still control? Man, he sure does. In the 65th minute of Wednesday’s game, with Seattle still clinging to a precarious one-goal advantage, Frei made a majestic save on a header by Diogo of Pumas to maintain the lead. That set the stage for Ruidíaz’s glorious second goal 15 minutes later that sent the crowd into fútbol ecstasy.
“This is the future of soccer in this country,” Lagerwey marveled afterward. “Things like this. This is what people want to pay for. This is what people want to see. And man, if you’re not entertained tonight, if you watch that second goal and you don’t think MLS is worthy of your respect, I just don't know what to tell you.”
Seattle is not the highest-spending team in MLS. So how does it make up for that gap? By being smarter than other teams and using the advantages that it does have over the rest in the league. “The special thing about Seattle is that the fan base makes us relevant,” Lagerwey says. “And when you’re relevant, that touches every aspect of the organization. And what I mean by that is the players know that they matter within the community, within the city, in that fan base. And the owners from day one have reinvested the money from that fan base and put it back into the team.”
Lagerwey likes being process-oriented, delegating responsibility to the people running the eight departments under his oversight and taking the 30,000-foot view over the wholeSeattle soccer operation. He points out that when Salt Lake made its run to the CCL final in 2011, the entire technical staff included 11 people. Just 11 years later, that number in Seattle is 38.
“And it’s a totally different job,” he explains. “If I can make all the people that work for me 1 or 2% better and empower them to run their departments, now we can level up each department. If you can make each department a little bit better and let them run with it, now you’re exponentially better across the organization.”
One of the eight departments is the head coach, Lagerwey says, and his relationship with Schmetzer has been an intriguing one. In 2016, one year after Lagerwey took over Seattle’s soccer operations, the club let go Sigi Schmid, its head coach since 2009, and named his longtime assistant Schmetzer as interim head coach. If Schmetzer hadn’t gone on to win much, he almost certainly would have been replaced, but he led Seattle on an unlikely run to the MLS Cup title that year and lost the interim tag.
Two more major trophies have come with Schmetzer as the coach since then: the 2019 MLS Cup and now the ’22 Champions League. Talent recruitment is not part of the head coach’s job description. “I think Brian is pretty pragmatic,” Lagerwey says. “One of the things he says to me is, ‘Get me a good player, and I’ll coach him.’” But if you bring up the topic of of “creative friction” between Schmetzer and Lagerwey, as I did with the coach this week, his response is short, and repeated twice for good measure: “He’s very good at his job. I’m very good at my job.”
Lagerwey points out: “I’ve never hired a coach, and I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I’ve made the playoffs with four different coaches, which I don’t think anybody else can say, and I haven’t hired any of them. So however we got here, whatever goofy way, it all kind of shook out. It’s worked. I think if I have a skill, it’s building organizations and thinking big and having a vision and being methodical and strategic and carrying out that vision.”
Lagerwey is regarded by his peers as the best GM in MLS, which has raised questions over whether another MLS team might try to poach him (he’s originally from Chicago, where the Fire could use him) or whether he might want to make the move to a European club. His contract runs through the end of this season, when by club statute Seattle fans have the power to vote out the GM or show their support. No sane person thinks they’ll vote against him. In Lagerwey’s view, he has three more five-year contracts until he hits 65, when he plans to retire.
“I’ve really enjoyed the time in Seattle and would love to continue growing here and growing with the league,” says Lagerwey, who has three sons aged 4 to 10 with his wife, Hilary. “And the answer to that European question is to me, a lot of that is kid-driven. If your kids are at an age where it would be a fun, educational thing to take them over for a couple of years and do that and have that be a big part of their lives, then to me that makes sense as a family to do that. It might be a little too young still right now for that. I will say this: It has never been my ambition that I have to run an EPL team or I will die unsatisfied in some way. I’ve always been American at heart. What gets me out of bed in the morning is making MLS one of the best leagues in the world. And between now and 2026, I honestly think it would be foolish for me to be in any league other than MLS.”
Now that Lagerwey has won a CCL title, that giant 2011 photograph in his office will soon be replaced. But there is one reminder on his wall, a gift from his old law firm mentor, that won’t be. Anyone who’s on a Zoom call with Lagerwey will see behind him a print of the famous 19th-century painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838. In it, a wind-powered sailing ship is being retired as steamships have taken over the world.
“It’s just to remind myself: Whenever you think you know something, then you’d better get out and start learning again, or you’ll get left behind,” Lagerwey explains. “You have to continually evolve. Don’t be the Temeraire. Don’t be the last ship of the line that has to get tugged back into harbor by the steamship.”
Now there will be new horizons for the Seattle Sounders. Likely in February 2023, they will play in the FIFA Club World Cup somewhere in the Middle East. Liverpool or Real Madrid could be their opponent, and not in some friendly but in an actual competition for a trophy.
Far from being left behind, Seattle is burying other MLS teams in its wake.
How has Seattle sustained such interest in MLS? I’m so used to teams joining the league, getting a bunch of sellouts and then slowly working their way down the attendance table until they are about half-full. The Sounders have done an amazing job countering that. Beyond “Seattle” what’s the way that the ownership group has done it and what could other teams in major metros learn from them?