When the Seattle Sounders take to the pitch at BMO Field on Saturday for the 2016 MLS Cup final there will be a figure watching from the stands with more of a vested interest than most.
Sigi Schmid will be in Toronto doing on-site work for Major League Soccer, but it’s fair to say the 63-year-old will be far from a neutral observer.
The Sounders up until a few months ago were Schmid’s team, his team of seven years. Appointed for their expansion season in 2009, he had been Seattle’s only MLS era head coach. Schmid and the club he presided over were inseparable in their identity. One reflected the other until, this season, they didn’t.
After a dismal summer run which saw the Sounders win just two from 11 games Schmid was fired. For so long a defining figure at CenturyLink Field, there was a reluctant acceptance at the club that the stalwart manager could offer no more. Change was needed, and has been vindicated by Seattle’s astonishing run to this weekend’s MLS Cup final.
Some might be tempted to use the Sounders’ late season form to argue that Schmid was holding back the club; that Seattle didn’t recognise their own quality until he was dismissed from his position. But that is a rather simplistic view, one that doesn’t give Schmid his fair due.
If the Seattle Sounders overcome Toronto FC on Saturday to win their first ever MLS Cup Schmid’s contribution to their success shouldn’t be forgotten. This team, after all, is one that both he and general manager Gareth Lagerway put together. One hopes his long-term assistant and now successor Brian Schmetzer would invite Schmid on to the pitch for the trophy celebrations if the Sounders win this weekend.
“I mean, I’m proud of the fact that the team that’s playing is the team that the entire staff behind Brian – Chris Henderson, myself, the others involved – it’s the group that we assembled,” Schmid told the Seattle Times this week when asked how he felt about the Sounders’ streak. “That’s the group that is carrying through.
“We had identified [Nicolas] Lodeiro. We had identified [Alvaro] Fernandez. We knew that [Roman] Torres was coming back. It’s satisfying to see that the belief we had once we felt that whole group would come together has been warranted.”
And yet for all that Schmid insists he feels pride (as he should) over the Sounders’ run to the MLS Cup final there is surely more than a twinge of personal ruefulness. He was at the club for seven years, credited with establishing Seattle as a stable MLS franchise. Schmid is a giant of the Sounders’ 21st century history, but he will be watching from the sidelines as they finally take to a stage that the veteran spent so long trying to scale himself.
Of course, the narrative could be flipped to focus on Schmetzer and how Saturday’s MLS Cup final provides him with the perfect vindication for all the years he has spent at the club. It could be argued that he, just as much as Schmid, embodies the Seattle Sounders, having played for them in the NASL, also turning out for the Seattle SeaDogs in the days of indoor soccer.
Schmetzer was in fact Sounders head coach for six years between 2002 and 2008 when they were an A-League side, but was overlooked for the head coach position upon expansion to MLS. He served as Schmid’s assistant instead, stepping into the head coach role on an interim basis in July. The 54-year-old was given the job permanently after taking Seattle from ninth place in the Western Conference to fourth with an 8-2-4 record. As Lagerway put it upon removing the interim tag from Schmezter’s title, “he earned it.”
And so, there’s something fitting that as the Sounders prepare for the biggest game in their history they have someone who was there at the very start picking the team. While Seattle are North American soccer’s biggest club, Schmetzer provides a link that keeps them enveloped in their community. Not even Schmid, a man who might secretly feel bitter over what has happened since July, could possibly begrudge that.
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