Sounders embrace the chaos in finally reaching the MLS Cup finals

Published 9:30 pm Wednesday, December 7, 2016

TUKWILA — Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, had an interesting take on turmoil. Rather than viewing upheaval with dread, he said, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

Seattle Sounders FC is just the latest example of that concept. How else to explain that this, of all seasons, is the one in which the Sounders finally made the breakthrough to play in their first MLS Cup championship game?

The Sounders are on the cusp of scaling MLS’s highest peak. On Saturday Seattle faces Toronto FC in Toronto for the MLS Cup, with the opportunity to claim its first league championship in its eight seasons in MLS.

And should the Sounders claim the title it would cap off the most inexplicable of seasons, as this has been by far the most tumultuous campaign in franchise history.

“It’s the story behind the final game,” Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer said Wednesday at Starfire Sports following Seattle’s final training session before departing for Toronto. “We talk about it all the time. Why did we struggle at the start? What happened? What did we learn from that? What did we do to get the team moving in the right direction? Those are the things that we reflect on.”

It makes for some deep thinking.

Before this season things came easy for the Sounders. It began in 2009 with one of the most successful launches of an expansion team in American sports history. Seattle immediately built a large and rabid fan base that became the envy of the entire league, and the Sounders quickly became one of the league’s glamour teams.

The Sounders backed that up with their performance on the field, too. Seattle had a winning record and made the playoffs in each of its first seven seasons. The Sounders won the U.S. Open Cup in their first season, then repeated the feat three more times. Seattle claimed the Supporter’s Shield for the league’s best record in 2014. While there were no trips to the MLS Cup final during those seven seasons, there was always the sense that it was just a matter of time. Losing? That’s what other franchises did.

Then came 2016, the year that seemed intent on extracting payback. It was as if Sounders co-owner Drew Carey, no stranger to making deals as host of the game show The Price Is Right, negotiated with the devil for seven smooth years to get the franchise off the ground, but in the eighth the devil would collect on the debt — with interest.

The turmoil came before the season even began. Star striker Obafemi Martins, the team’s Most Valuable Player in 2014 and 2015, unexpectedly bolted just before the season began after being offered a lucrative contract to play in China. The loss of Martins left Seattle headless for the start of the campaign.

What followed was the worst five months in franchise history. It reached its nadir on July 23, when Seattle suffered an abject 3-0 loss at Sporting Kansas City, dropping the Sounders’ record to 6-12-2 and plunging Seattle into ninth place in the 10-team Western Conference. Legendary coach Sigi Schmid, the only head coach the Sounders had known since joining MLS, was sacrificed in the aftermath. Even the most die hard of supporters accepted that the rest of the season was about damage control rather than championships, and that Seattle’s streak of making the playoffs in every year of franchise history was over.

Even after the Sounders showed signs of life under Schmetzer, who was originally elevated to the head job on an interim basis only, the chaos monster reared its ugly head one more time. Star forward Clint Dempsey, regaining his stride with five goals in three games, was struck down in late August by an irregular heartbeat that shut him down for the remainder of the season.

It was a sequence that even the Biblical Job would have expressed sympathy about. Yet here the Sounders find themselves, one step from the pinnacle. Who could have predicted this?

Certainly not Schmetzer, who was with the organization throughout the good times as an assistant coach under Schmid, then asked to pick up the pieces after things went bad.

“I didn’t have time to think about that, it was crisis time,” Schmetzer responded when asked if he imagined being in this position when he took over in late July. “And we just needed to put our heads down and work, and that’s what it’s been.”

Indeed, the Sounders didn’t give in to the chaos, they embraced it. And now with one more win, their star will be dancing through the streets of Seattle without a care in the world.

For more on the Seattle sports scene, check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/heraldnet/tag/seattle-sidelines, or follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.