By Ian L (@ahandleforian)

To say that the Seattle Sounders exist solely to confound me would simultaneously be both incredibly narcissistic and also accurate. I’ve been tasked with the preseason and postseason previews for the perennial contenders for the past few years, and every single time I’m more and more tempted to just submit this as my draft:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Editor’s note: this would not be up to ASA’s stringent editorial standards, as we’re not Bleacher Report… yet.)

See the thing with the Seattle Sounders is that at very few times over the last several seasons can you look at their underlying numbers, their place in the standings, and their play on the field and you think “Yes. This all checks out”. But for whatever reason, Seattle just simply did not pass my eye-test this season. If you were to pick six matches from this season out of a hat and watch them, there’s an extremely good chance your opinion of them would be somewhere between “ooof” and “meh”. Their underlying numbers suggest they should probably be on the edge of the playoff picture or out of it all together, but the only thing that matters at the end of the year is what that number to the left of the team in the table says. Now, this isn’t to say that they aren’t capable of being good at soccer. They are. We’ve seen it, but at times this season I also saw a team so abject that I was certain that whatever magic that allows them to annually float towards the top of the Western Conference had abandoned them. But it didn’t. Every team in the West has been playing for second since like March and lo and behold when all the flamethrower smoke clears there’s Seattle: number two with an amenable playoff draw.

Seattle have earned a reputation as slow starters. This was something the staff was very focused on rectifying, and they did. Seattle came out of the gates with a head of steam, taking five wins out of their six matches. Their early season clash with LAFC was billed as the first matchup of the two best teams in Major League Soccer. They, uh, did not win and getting back up off of that mat wasn’t easy. Those all-consuming marauders to the South not only beat Seattle, they popped the balloon keeping them at the top of the table. They took 10 of the next 30 points on offer heading into the summer. International call-ups decimated an already wounded squad and the long summer months of June and July were not pleasant times in the Emerald City. If there were a season low point, it undoubtedly came on a trip to the LA Galaxy where they were only spared the blushes of losing despite having a man advantage by one of the most random and wild own goals I’ve ever seen in MLS, but then the ship was righted. A bit anyway. Five wins in their last eight matches were just enough to see out the late season pushes of Minnesota and RSL (WHAT happened in the West this year?), and Seattle again found themselves in the catbird seat (non LAFC division) of an oddly tiered Western Conference. It wasn’t often pretty. It very frequently wasn’t good. It was certainly buoyed by the even more lacklustre play of rivals, but it was enough and that’s all it needed to be.

Statistics:

Possession: 50.2% (9th in MLS)

Passes per game: 471.8 (8th in MLS)

xGoals for: 45.2 (17th in MLS)

xGoals against: 47.5 (16th in MLS)

xGoals difference: -2.2 (16th in MLS)

Here’s some analytics for you. Those underlying numbers suck, but having underlying numbers that are bad isn’t unbroken ground for this team. It’s not unusual for Seattle to plod about a bit in the attacking phase of play. They are, let’s say, picky in and around the area. Their haul of 426 shots this season was the league’s sixth lowest. Being picky isn’t in and of itself necessarily a bad thing, but when you look at how much Seattle possess the ball and how many passes they complete, it makes you wonder where all of these possessions are going (and it doesn’t seem to be going to super high leverage shots either - Seattle rank 12th in the league for shots with an xG value greater than 0.25). For as much as these underlying numbers suggest that Seattle shouldn’t be in the playoffs, much less the second seed, they’re actually better than they were last season. Now this puts me in a bit of a difficult position, because last year I suggested that Seattle were in fact, very good, and that their underlying numbers were more of an anomaly than their results. This year, I can’t help but have the opposite impression.