Cascadia Corner: Thank you Sigi, the man who carried the can for a collective failure
by Steve Clare, Founder Prost Amerika
An era has ended at Sounders FC. This week the club parted ways with the only head coach it has ever known in MLS, Sigi Schmid.
The club PR claimed that parting was as “mutual” but I have my doubts how mutual it was. Speaking to the now former coach of the club last Thursday, he still seemed totally dedicated and motivated to rectify the club’s failings:
“I always say that losing motivates me and winning sustains me, so right now I’m highly motivated. When you’re in a situation like we’re in. you end up turning over the rock, looking underneath, saying is there something we can change, something we can do better, is there something I’m missing?”
The decision comes midway through the club’s worst season, following its elimination from the Open Cup and a dismal display in a 3-0 loss at Sporting Kansas. We now also know it was hurriedly inserted before a new Designated Player, Nicolas Lodeiro, could make his debut.
Could it be that the Front Office didn’t want Schmid to be in charge of Lodeiro’s first match in case he proved to be more of a match winner than Andreas Ivanschitz or Nelson Valdez? Possibly. It is more likely that the club decided to fire him the day before Lodeiro arrived in order to force his departure out of the news cycle as quickly as possible.
Certainly, the timing of the decision did not cover the FO in any glory but that alone does not make it the wrong decision.
Schmid had guided the expansion side to seven straight winning seasons in its opening years, a record way in excess of any comparable clubs entering the league. Four US open Cups and a Supporters Shield had also been won but crucially, he had failed to secure an MLS Cup title. That was an open wound with the fanbase which could have been explained away by their status as a newer club.
However acid arrived in that open wound when neighbours Portland, who joined MLS after Seattle, won the MLS Cup last year. Most of us even then thought that Schmid’s two year window to win the big prize had probably been reduced to one.
Still it seems more likely it was this season’s poor form that sealed the deal.
“Had you offered anyone, including Joe Roth or Adrian Hanauer, seven winning seasons in the first eight way back in 2009, they would have called you crazy but grabbed it.”
The Seattle fan base has been brought up to assume that success was inevitable; that the club arrived in MLS immediately doing everything better than the existing franchises. They are not to blame for believing this. Not only did the early club PR churn out a series of press releases exclaiming this line of thinking (that is their job after all) but the media, both local and national, failed to ask questions and generally played along with the storyline that Sounders FC’s arrival had ignited the league. Then Majority Owner Joe Roth’s bombastic outbursts fed into that belief. All of us, including the media, are partly to blame.
So uncritical was the local media, that a MLS media relations officer once expressed concern to me privately that the media in Seattle was TOO favorable towards the Front Office and this was not good for the club’s development. When a MLS media relations officer is concerned that coverage is too sycophantic then something is badly wrong. Normally, they live for that kind of coverage.
The other side of the debate is that few coaches will hold onto a job for the length of time Schmid had without winning an MLS Cup.
Montreal Impact entered the league the year after Seattle and have had five head coaches. Vancouver came in two years later and are on their fourth. There was a strong argument that is was ‘time for a change’ or “change for the sake of change” as MLSSoccer’s Ari Liljenwall put it, and the only remaining thing to be settled was where – and when. Given Adrian Hanauer had already stood down as General Manager, the coaching slot was a logical next casualty. Lodeiro’s arrival probably forced his hand.
After all, as Alan Hinton put it:
“It’s easy to fire the coach. The owners aren’t going to fire themselves”
The bombastic tone of the initial PR is old news now but it would not be unfair to say that, party or no parity, Sounders fans more than most in MLS believe that success is a natural order of things for their club; that winning seasons are an outcome somehow inbuilt into the system. That sense of belief, critics might say entitlement, ultimately led to Schmid’s downfall where not even he could withstand one losing season after seven straight winning ones.
Had you offered anyone, including Joe Roth or Adrian Hanauer, seven winning seasons in the first eight way back in 2009, they would have called you crazy but grabbed it. Had you also added into that 4 Open Cups, a Shield and playoff soccer in each of the seven, they would have been ecstatic. But expectations rose with every successful season and that is as it should be.
So why is the coach gone? Is there now an unspoken policy that Sounders will fire the head coach the first time (or in this case even before) he fails to make the playoffs? I don’t think that is the answer. Down that path lies a western Montreal Impact with its rotating managerial door and an egotistical owner who fires good coaches for personality clashes.
[Montreal: Where only failure guarantees your job]
Let’s then assume that it wasn’t purely the failure to have an eighth successive winning season, after all it wasn’t yet impossible, but another matter that brought us to this point. The team was basically crap.
ROSTER OR COACH?
There is no beating about the bush on the quality of the team. They have been awful. It’s hard to accept but the results have been commensurate with the quality of the players and vis-a-vis of their opponents on most days. Sounders have lined up with weaker elevens than those facing them more often than most. This has not been the norm in the past so what has changed?
Sadly the answer is nothing. Nothing but the natural process of time.
The spine of Seattle’s team is still Brad Evans, Osvaldo Alonso, Chad Marshall and Clint Dempsey. All are in their 30s and none of them are still on the upward curve of their careers. Alonso has not physically dominated a game in years like he used to. The Honey Badger just don’t badge like he once did. The loss of Evans in midfield has cost the club more than it gained by placing him in defence. Chad Marshall reached his peak two years ago and has been slowly but still perceptively declining from being the find of the season to just another above average MLS centerback.
Then there’s Dempsey. What can you say about Clint Dempsey?
The talent he once had, if at all still there, is saved for the national team.
Never have so many jerseys been sold with the name of a man who cares so little about that jersey. Without Obafemi Martins to do the hard work, he has proven a colossal waste of money – money that arguably could have saved Ross Fletcher’s job and prevented the need for tifo for profit. One can only imagine how much his exorbitant salary annoys the other players, and that’s before you consider his tantrums that cost him red cards and absences from the team.
After tearing up the referee’s notebook in an Open Cup tie, he was banned for three MLS games. Sounders lost them all. At that time, they were the best side in the country and a very solid bet for an MLS Cup. Their hitherto successful season never recovered. Who can tell what the team might have achieved that year had they not embarked on that losing streak? Basically, had the highest paid player in the league not behaved like a petulant brat, that star above the crest may well be there by now. And so might Schmid.
As if to point out that he had not learned anything by that episode, Dempsey missed the derby in Portland this year after another pointless act of petulance against Dallas when the game was already well won. Sounders lost that Cascadia Cup derby in his absence. It could be said that the presence of Diego Valeri and the absence of Dempsey was the biggest difference maker in that match. Certainly Schmid thought so when asked if Dempsey’s absence had been a game changer:
“Is Portland the same team without Valeri? I’ll ask you that question. So, I think there’s your answer.”
His needless manhandling of TFC’s Mark Bloom’s private parts is probably long forgotten.
As those four players have aged, there has been an absolute dearth of hungry young men willing and able to take over or even pressure them. The club did the right thing, painful though it was, to clear out Marco Pappa, Chad Barrett, Lamar Neagle, Kenny Cooper and Gonzalo Pineda off the payroll, because they too contributed to the very high average age of the squad. Those were good calls, tough but necessary. They weakened the side in the short term although there is of course no guarantee that their form would not have dipped too with the passing of another season.
The one error might have been to part with Michael Azira, who never found a role in Seattle, but has excelled this year at table topping Colorado.
He has started all 20 games for the Rapids missing just eight minutes all season, yet he could not find more than eight starts and 727 minutes in Seattle in 2015. On current form, he would have been pushing Alonso for a starting place. Colorado Rapids announcer Richard Fleming paid tribute to Azira’s influence on the Shield chasing side:
“Micheal Azira is a no-frills player in every sense. As a defensive midfielder, he stubbornly sticks to the role, doggedly denying any threat. The fact that he has yet to score a goal or provide an assist during his MLS career does not matter to this softly-spoken Uganda international. He breaks up the opposition’s play and releases those with the offensive flair. Azira keeps it simple, but – so far – it’s proved very effective.”
Sadly for Seattle, rather than pushing for Alonso’s place, he’s pushing Colorado to the Supporters Shield.
However hindsight can be a wonderful thing and it is universally thought that the club had Cristian Roldan lined up to replace Alonso, so to be fair, the move made sense at the time. With Roldan’s visible improvement it probably still does, but that just plays into the belief that this year was always a ‘transitional year’ in which not quite ready players would be asked to learn on the job. It is the inability of the club to cope with the reality of a ‘transitional year’ that may have made this decision inevitable. Saying “we don’t rebuild, we reload”, is a marvelous slogan, but doesn’t cover the eventuality that there are no bullets available.
So it has proven with youngsters receiving some minutes but those departures necessary to the future of the club have inevitably led to bad results. Couple that with the aging spine of the team, the unprepared for loss of Martins, errors by experienced veterans and a DP’s unnecessary absenteeism and you have all the ingredients for a losing season.
“Never have so many jerseys been sold with the name of a man who cares so little about that jersey.”
The salient point is that Sounders have a weak starting XI and an even weaker second string where hardly anyone is making the regular veterans work for their place. The battle between Joevin Jones and Dylan Remick at left back is the one exception, yet neither are still the completed article.
The injury to Roman Torres was unlucky but all clubs suffer a long term injury at some point during a season. Sounders can be grateful it wasn’t Stefan Frei, Brad Evans, Tyrone Mears or Jordan Morris.
Still the fact that, rather than have a young and hungry centre half ready for promotion, the club had to rely on the 36-year-old Zach Scott tells a story by itself. Tony Alfaro was beginning to get his chance and that process may continue but like so many of the youngsters Schmid has tried to blood early, he is not yet the finished article. And the team suffered.
Which brings one to the question, why is Sounders pipeline of young players so barren?
It now appears that Deandre Yedlin was a very special one off. There has hardly been a quality young player emerging other than him, something Garth Lagerwey was specifically brought in to fix. That process will take some time, and obviously Lagerwey has decided he doesn’t want those jewels to fall into the tactical hands of Sigi Schmid. But how have the men responsible for the pipeline of players, both homegrown and international, including Schmid’s son, kept their jobs?
Nelson Valdez and Andreas Ivanschitz have not been great signings, and the club’s return to the well of former players like Nate Sturgis and Erik Friberg, suggests a scouting department totally out of ideas. Even Alvaro Fernandez’s name is being bandied around the fansites. If Sigi has had his last chance, Lodeiro surely represents the last chance to avoid blame of certain others who must also bear some responsibility for the club’s subpar squad.
After all, did Brian Schemtzer not say that “we are going to hold people accountable”? If that is so, it has to go beyond Sigi and the players. As Seattle Times’ Matt Pentz also said, ‘there’s plenty blame to go around’.
We are yet to see if interim head coach Schmetzer will play for wins to give himself a reasonable chance of being made the permanent coach or if he will accelerate the blooding of youngsters and throw Alfaro (212 MLS minutes), Aaron Kovar (795), Oalex Anderson (317) and Oneil Fisher (131) more readily into the mix. Then there’s the perennial short term Zach Mathers.
In an interview conducted the morning after the LA Cup tie, Sigi Schmid assessed where he thought the youngsters stood:
“There’s some guys who have done well. Fisher’s done well playing as an outside back. Remick has had some good moments as well. Mathers is definitely a player for the future; Farfan finally getting back into a rhythm and getting game time is important. Oalex Anderson still has a lot to learn bit he’s got that explosiveness. That is always a danger for the opponent.”
That is a matter for the future.
For now, it’s still time to ponder over the career of Sigi Schmid in Seattle and the reasons why he is no longer the head coach.
Schmid has carried the can for a collective failure and to be fair, the buck usually stops at the coach; especially after the General Manager replaced himself last year. However, to assume that Sigi or his tactics, or the timing of his substitutions are to blame for all that ails Sounders FC would be delusional.
The sudden disinterest of the SeaHawks caught the club unawares. Be under no doubt, the split was not Sounders FC’s decision and they were not prepared for it. When the Hawks won the Superbowl, they concluded it was the right time for their staff to stop wasting time on soccer when there was a championship to be cashed in on.
That, and once more Sounders’ total lack of preparedness, left the club scrambling to recruit and train hundreds of new staff. You can only ask why Sounders were so unprepared and why they were not prime movers themselves in the split. We can obviously not make the connection directly between off field matters and poor results suffice to say that it will take the club some time to regain its self confident footing.
Many fans had been clamouring for a coaching change and it would be fair to say that Schmid’s firing was the fans’ choice although many in the journalistic fraternity are more dubious about whether it will fix all that is wrong.
Either way, a new chapter has begun for the best supported club in the league. The search for a new coach will inevitably start with the name Brian Schmetzer on the list. That is totally correct. It is not yet time for us to compile our list, not in this article.
But for 7 winning season, a Supporters Shield and four Open Cups, it is the correct time to say
“Thank you Sigi Schmid. Bis später.”
Also See:
(Video) Alan Hinton: “It’s easy to fire the coach. The owners aren’t going to fire themselves”
Matt Pentz: “The issues here go far beyond the coach. The problems are systemic.”
Cascadia Corner: #sigiout is a sticking plaster for a bigger wound
