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    Sounders’ Concacaf Champions League Title Boosts Seattle’s Soccer Stature

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    Sounders F.C. captured M.L.S.’s first CONCACAF Champions League title with a win over Pumas U.N.A.M. Our columnist remembers the day soccer took root in Seattle.SEATTLE — Everything broke right for the Sounders, who were prodded for nearly two hours of grinding action by a sea of Seattle fans in blue and green who pushed their trademark electric energy to the pitch.This was history — and it felt like a joint effort between a team and its supporters.For over 20 years, no Major League Soccer team had ever won the CONCACAF Champions League tournament, which includes the best teams from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. But the Sounders ended the drought with a Pacific Northwest downpour: a 3-0 win over the Pumas of Mexico on Wednesday.How important was the win?Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei, the tournament’s most valuable player, raised the championship cup after Seattle’s win. Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesDuring this week’s run-up to the match, Sounders General Manager Garth Lagerwey called it a chance at soccer immortality.In a promotional hype video, none other than the retired Seahawks icon Marshawn Lynch called it a “big (expletive) game.” At halftime on Wednesday, with the Sounders ahead 1-0, M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber stood in his suite at Lumen Field, looked me steadily in the eye, and called this match the “biggest game in the history of the league.”Since its inception in 1996, M.L.S. has sought to become an American league of such quality that it could stand toe-to-toe with world powers. But until now, failure was a regular rite of passage for M.L.S. in this annual tournament, with teams from the rival Mexican league having won the last 13 Concacaf tournaments.Well, the Sounders buried those failures on Wednesday.Initially the match was choppy and bogged down by physical play that forced a pair of key Sounders, João Paulo and Nouhou Tolo, to leave with injuries. But Seattle flashed its trademark resilience. Goalie Stefan Frei, named the tournament’s most valuable player, backed up a stout defense, and Sounders kept up the attack until forward Raul Ruidiaz scored on a deflected shot late in the half. In the 80th minute, Ruidiaz added another goal off a smooth counterattack.Nicolás Lodeiro sealed the victory with a goal in the 88th minute and ran toward the stands to celebrate among a frenzy of fans.Winning qualifies the team for the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament stacked with soccer royalty. The Premier League’s Chelsea won it last. Either Liverpool or Real Madrid will represent Europe next. Just being in the same draw as teams of that pedigree is entirely new for M.L.S.It’s fitting, then, that the Sounders will lead the league to this new precipice. Since entering M.L.S. during a wave of expansion in 2009, they have enchanted this soccer-rich city by winning two M.L.S. Cup championships in four runs to the finals. Seattle has led the league in attendance in all but two seasons, with area fans bringing the same fervor to Lumen as Seahawks fans have come to be known for. Maybe more. A tournament-record 68,741 fans showed up to watch the home team play the Pumas. On a Wednesday night.How did Seattle become an American soccer behemoth?Fans cheered a Sounders goal during Wednesday’s match.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. Part of it is the city’s history of embracing the unconventional and outré — which still describes professional soccer in the American sports context. Seattle birthed Boeing and Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It gave the world grunge rock and Quincy Jones. Jimi Hendrix went to high school three miles from Lumen Field. Bruce Lee sharpened his martial arts skills just a short walk away.One of its great works of art is a troll sculpture that sits underneath a bridge. It’s become customary to drape it in a mammoth blue and green Sounders scarf before big games.The love felt by this city for soccer in all its forms — from the Sounders to O.L. Reign of the N.W.S.L., to colleges and junior leagues — is also the product of a specific past and a specific team: the original Seattle Sounders of the long-defunct North American Soccer League.From 1974 to 1983, those Sounders teams were part of the first bona fide effort to bring big-stakes, U.S.-based competition to professional soccer within this hemisphere.If you ask me, a Seattle native who grew up in that era, I say the love began, specifically, with a single game.Since I was 9 years old I’ve called it the Pelé Game. That’s when I took a city bus downtown to watch that original iteration of the Sounders. The date was April 9, 1976, the first sporting event ever held at the now-demolished Kingdome.A crowd of nearly 60,000, then the largest in North American soccer history, watched Seattle host the star-studded New York Cosmos and its leader, the greatest player the game of soccer has ever seen: Pelé. The Black Pearl, as he was known, had come to the N.A.S.L. to celebrate a last stanza of his career — and as an ambassador to spark the game in North America. I don’t remember details of that match as much as I remember being in awe of the lithe and powerful Brazilian.Pelé didn’t disappoint. He scored two goals in a 3-1 win.The game was a harbinger. Those first Sounders players quickly became local legends, deeply woven into the city’s fabric. In those days, it seemed to me that a Sounder visited every classroom in every public school. In 1977, the Sounders made it to the league’s Soccer Bowl title match. Played in front of a full house in Portland, Ore., a three-hour drive south, they lost to the Cosmos, 2-1, in the last non-exhibition game Pelé ever played.Pele, center, looked on as his New York Cosmos teammate Giorgio Chinaglia, left, ran at the Seattle Sounders defense in 1977.Peter Robinson/EMPICS, via Getty Images“I still have his jersey,” Jimmy McCalister said in a phone interview. I could almost see the smile in his voice. A defender on that Seattle team and the N.A.S.L. rookie of the year in 1977, McCalister told me how he’d somehow summoned the nerve to ask Pelé for his fabled No. 10 jersey. The legend obliged. The jersey now sits in McCalister’s lockbox.“People call me from time to time, wanting to buy it,” he said. It’s not for sale. Some things are worth more than money. The jersey contains memory and soul.McCalister loves the modern day Sounders. He hailed their cohesiveness, blue collar work ethic, and their growing talent. Raised in Seattle, he is one of many Sounders who remained in the city after their playing days were over. These days he runs one of the top junior development clubs. Many others stayed to teach the game, coaching in clinics and at high schools and colleges. Some helped guide a now-defunct minor league team — also called the Sounders.They kept soccer alive in the fallow pair of decades between the N.A.S.L.’s demise and the birth of M.L.S.Fredy Montero met fans who stayed nearly an hour after Sounders’ win.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night, nearly an hour after the game, fans remained in Lumen Field. Vast swaths of them. Joyful chants rumbled down to the confetti-covered field. Players responded by lifting the gold Champions League trophy high. Unlike that Kingdome game of 1976 — the original Sounders versus the glitzy, star-studded Cosmos — this matchup wasn’t memorable because of the opponent. It was memorable because of the home team, which just put itself on the international map. And that would surely make Pelé, long soccer’s proudest ambassador, more than a little proud. More

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      When Will the Seattle Sounders Play in the Club World Cup?

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      One prize for Seattle’s Concacaf Champions League title was a chance to face some of the world’s best clubs. When are those games? “No clue,” one FIFA official said.The Seattle Sounders won the Concacaf Champions League on Wednesday night, beating Pumas of Mexico, 3-0, to claim a 5-2 victory on aggregate in the two-legged final. The victory made Seattle the first team from Major League Soccer to lift the trophy in a generation, and gave the United States the continental title it has coveted for more than 20 years.It should also make Seattle the first M.L.S. team to play in the FIFA Club World Cup.Except that no one, not even FIFA, is sure when that event will take place, or what it will look like. The tournament’s traditional December window is unavailable this year because of the World Cup in Qatar, and grand plans for an expanded Club World Cup in China have gone nowhere after they were announced and then promptly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.“No clue,” one FIFA official said in a text message when asked when Seattle could expect to take part in the event.The Club World Cup has been held annually since 2005, with representatives of each of FIFA’s global confederations facing off to determine a world club champion. Top European teams have dominated the event, with the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Chelsea lifting the trophy in the last decade. Facing off against teams like that in an international competition has been a dream for many M.L.S. players, executives and fans.FIFA, which runs the Club World Cup, has been eager to expand the tournament, and it put a plan on the table for a 24-team tournament shifted to the summer and held every four years instead of annually. In a meeting in Shanghai in October 2019, it approved the change and awarded China the hosting rights for the first edition in 2021. The coronavirus soon made that plan unworkable.The pandemic-delayed 2021 Club World Cup that was held in February, and won by Chelsea, was nominally the final one under the old, smaller format. Holding another one in 2022 could be problematic, with league schedules already being squeezed by the enforced break caused by the World Cup that opens in November. There has been talk of holding the first expanded version in the summer of 2023, but as of now there is no official date for the event.Under the original plans for the expanded tournament, three teams from the Concacaf region — covering North and Central America and the Caribbean — would participate. One of them presumably could be the Sounders after Wednesday’s victory, although the official qualifying criteria has not been announced.It is also possible that the old, smaller format will be retained for a few more years: Not even Sounders officials were sure in the afterglow of Wednesday night’s win.“We don’t have the format yet; we don’t have the location,” Garth Lagerwey, the team’s general manager, told reporters. “We’re told, probably February-ish. Probably Middle East maybe.”Despite the uncertainty, Lagerway, a longtime M.L.S. executive, did little to hide his excitement at the achievement. “We’re going to play Real Madrid or Liverpool, man,” he said. “In a real game.”Officially, FIFA would only say Thursday that “further details about the FIFA Club World Cup 2022 will be announced in due course.”An American team has nearly played in the Club World Cup once before. The very first Club World Cup, in 2000, was an eight-team event in Brazil. That year was the last one in which an American team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, won the continental championship. So for the 2001 world event, expanded to 12 teams, the Galaxy was duly entered alongside Real Madrid and other teams from around the world.But financial concerns and the collapse of a sponsor led the event to be scrapped. It was revived in 2005 in its current format. Too late for the Galaxy. Mexican and Costa Rican teams — to the immense frustration of M.L.S. — have won the title every year since.Now that the Sounders have broken that streak, they and M.L.S. will hope the Club World Cup — whenever it is held, and whatever it looks like — goes more smoothly.Tariq Panja contributed reporting. More

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      Columbus Beats Seattle to Win M.L.S. Cup

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationVaccine TrackerFAQAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyM.L.S. Cup: Crew 3, Sounders 0Columbus Wins M.L.S. Cup, the Final Stop on a Journey to Stay PutLucas Zelarayán’s two goals carried the Crew over the Sounders in the stadium the team had almost abandoned three years ago.Lucas Zelarayán, center, scored two of the Crew’s goals and set up the third.Credit…Emilee Chinn/Getty ImagesDec. 12, 2020The celebration was the catharsis Columbus Crew fans had dreamed of since 2017, when the team’s former owner had threatened to move their team to Texas. It was the party they had pined for since 2018, when their campaign to stop him had yielded new owners and new hope. It was the dream that sustained them this year when the coronavirus played havoc with the schedule and locked them out of their stadium.So once the party finally began, once the final whistle had blown on the Crew’s 3-0 victory over the Seattle Sounders at Columbus’s Mapfre Stadium and Columbus had won its second league title, the only sadness, it seemed, was that more Crew fans were not there to see it in person.“When I took the job, I had a dream to take M.L.S. Cup to those fans over there,” said Crew Coach Caleb Porter, who circled the field thanking the roughly 1,500 socially distanced supporters in attendance even before his team had been handed its silver trophy. “That’s why I was so emotional.”Porter had denied those fans just such a celebration five years ago when, as coach of the Portland Timbers, he beat the Crew at Mapfre Stadium to win his own M.L.S. Cup. When he was hired by the Crew in January 2019, only months after the city’s successful campaign to save the team, he pledged to give Columbus fans something to cheer again.On Saturday, those who had been allowed inside — where they were instructed by health officials and stadium signs to stay masked and safely distant for all 90 minutes — showered Porter with thanks. The hugs will come later, when that sort of thing is safe again.That the final of M.L.S.’s 25th season took place at all was, in many respects, a triumph in itself. The season had begun on Feb. 29, the earliest start in league history, and concluded with the latest M.L.S. Cup ever played. In between was a year like no other: two weeks of matches and then a four-month hiatus because of the pandemic; a five-week summer tournament; and then weeks of wary returns to empty — or near-empty — stadiums.Along the way, the league conducted more than more than 130,000 virus tests, with about 20 percent of its players recording positive results, according to a players’ union official. Dozens of games were postponed, rescheduled or simply not played at all. To get to the end of the season, the league repeatedly tweaked its health protocols, adjusted its rules and crossed its collective fingers.Not even the final was immune, though. Columbus’s title hopes were dealt a significant blow on Friday when the team’s most important player, midfielder Darlington Nagbe, and a key member of its attack, Pedro Santos, were ruled out of the final for medical reasons. Both Nagbe and Santos later confirmed the league’s worst fear: that they, too, had tested positive for the coronavirus.“It’s a big loss; it’s a big blow,” Porter had said Friday. But he expressed confidence that his players could adjust, and his team took the game to the Sounders from the opening whistle.The first goal came in the 25th minute: a driven cross from the right by Gyasi Zardes, and a powerful one-timed finish at the back post by Lucas Zelarayán, an Argentine midfielder signed out of Mexico’s top league last winter, and — despite his diminutive size — a menacing presence throughout the first half.Six minutes later, it was 2-0, after Zelarayán fed an open Derrick Etienne Jr. — Santos’s replacement in the starting lineup — on the left side of the penalty area. Slipping behind his defender, Etienne coolly curled a right-footed shot around Seattle goalkeeper Stefan Frei.Health regulations limited attendance at the final to about 1,500 fans. They were ordered to sit only with their own parties and to wear masks at all times.Credit…Kyle Robertson/USA Today Sports, via ReutersSeattle tried to adjust, making two substitutions at halftime, but by then the momentum — or was it fate? — was too much to overcome. Zelarayán’s second goal, Columbus’s third, in the 82nd minute removed all doubt. The Sounders, finalists for the fourth time in five years, and seeking their second title in a row, never stood a chance.“This was going to be our day,” Porter said. “Our time, our day and our trophy.”Next season is scheduled to start in March. But, in a halftime interview on Saturday night, Commissioner Don Garber said the ongoing pandemic meant that he could not guarantee it.The Crew, for now at least, are fine with waiting. The title is theirs again at last, and they are more than happy to hold on to it as long as they can.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      They Saved the Crew. Now It's Playing in M.L.S. Cup.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheir Team Almost Left Town. Now It’s Playing for a Title.Fan activism, public pressure and new owners kept the Columbus Crew in Ohio. On Saturday, the team will try to pay back its supporters by winning M.L.S. Cup on its home field.Columbus Crew fans at the groundbreaking for the team’s new stadium last year, a prospect that seemed unthinkable only a year earlier. Credit…Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire, via Getty ImagesDec. 11, 2020, 3:24 p.m. ETThe Columbus Crew is not supposed to be here right now.Not “here,” as in Major League Soccer’s championship game, M.L.S. Cup, against the Seattle Sounders on Saturday night — though for some fans that feels unlikely enough.But here, in Ohio, they said. The team’s home. Their home.Their path to Saturday’s final begins in October 2017, when Crew fans received the nauseating news that the owner of their beloved team — an M.L.S. original that began play in the city in 1996 — was angling, with the support of the league office, to uproot the entire operation and move it to Austin, Texas.It was a devastating revelation, precisely because Crew fans knew how these things often go: rich owners, omnipotent leagues — in American sports, they tend to get their way. In Ohio they knew this all too well. Just look at what happened to the Cleveland Browns, they said.But the self-pity lasted only a moment. Then came anger and determination and, soon, organization. Keeping their team in Columbus, in defiance of the wishes of wealthy and powerful forces, felt like a long shot. But they would try.Their energies coalesced behind a simple slogan — Save The Crew — but the campaign was more than just a hashtag. Behind the scenes, a group of almost two dozen longtime fans assembled itself into a leadership team that had the energy, and long hours, of a buzzy start-up.The group included graphic designers, public relations specialists, lawyers and anyone else who had an angle they could work. Their message traveled far. Fans of opposing teams extended their sympathies. Some even flew the Crew colors in solidarity. If it can happen to them, other fans said, it can happen to us.In time, public officials and community leaders in Ohio took up the cause, exercising whatever leverage might they could muster. Twelve thousand fans signed a pledge to purchase tickets if the team stayed in the area. The pressure points on the owner behind the move, Anthony Precourt, and the league increased. Slowly the tide began to turn.In October 2018, the parties began working on a deal to transfer ownership of the Crew to an investment group that included Jimmy and Dee Haslam, the owners of the Browns, and Pete Edwards, the longtime Crew team doctor. The new owners pledged to keep the club in Columbus, an announcement that set off a volcanic blast of joy and relief that in some ways has yet to settle.The fight to save the Crew, still fresh in everyone’s memory, has made the team’s unlikely ascent to the championship game this season that much sweeter.The goal is to win the match, of course.But in some sense, maybe more than the average sports fan, they’re all just happy to be here. In Columbus. Still home.David Miller and his wife, Ellie.DAVID MILLER, 31, joined the leadership group of Save The Crew, helping out with communications.I was angry. I didn’t sleep well. And the next day I was still angry. Within the following week or so I saw this movement had been started, a website, a Twitter handle. I was following media clips. My wife kept telling me, if you keep getting angry, you’re going to have to do something about it.People who had skills kept popping up. We needed an attorney, and an attorney appeared. We needed someone who could submit records requests, and someone came out of the blue who was good at that. It’s amazing that all these volunteers came out of the woodwork and were interested in fighting the machine and came prepared.“Save the Crew” was seen in Columbus as a battle between good and evil. That’s a motivating story for a lot of people, how the fans, the community, banded together to fight the millionaires and billionaires.Karen Crognale and members of her family on the field before a Columbus Crew game in 2017, when her son Alex played for the team.Credit…Ralph SchudelKAREN CROGNALE, 55, is a longtime fan of the Crew, a former club employee and the mother of a former Columbus player.This is a closer-knit community compared to Ohio State. You could run into Crew players at the grocery store, at the mall. They were approachable. And it still feels that way.When we found out the team was going to be saved, I was by myself. I sat on my bed and sobbed. Over a sports team! It seems crazy. But that was the emotional toll it took on us all year.Fans can recall Frankie Hejduk’s header for a goal in 2008. I can’t recall moments. It’s never been about the team or how well it did or if we made the playoffs. For me, it was the place my kids grew up, where we raised our family, the friends we made in the stadium, the parking lot. It was not about the game of soccer. It was about everything outside the pitch. And if the team leaves, that’s what we lose.Frankie Hejduk was the Crew’s captain when the team won its only league title.Credit…Lucy Nicholson/ReutersFRANKIE HEJDUK, 46, a beloved former player who was still working for the team, had to walk a fine line during the Save the Crew campaign.I like to focus on the positive, but it was tough. I couldn’t say much during it. I was employed by the club. So I had to do what I had to do. But the fans, I think, know how I felt. I think they felt for me, whether they knew or not. And if they didn’t, I was going to have a beer with them after the game and tell them. But openly I couldn’t say much.When they saved the team, that was probably the seventh-best moment of my life. I have four kids and a wife. So those are top five. The sixth is winning the M.L.S. Cup in 2008 with the Crew. I’ve played with the national team. I’ve been in the Olympics. I’ve won other M.L.S. Cups. But that might have been No. 7.Signs supporting the #SaveTheCrew were soon everywhere in Columbus, but they popped up in other cities, too, as the campaign gained popular support.Credit…Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire, via Getty ImagesJOHN ZIDAR, 33, used his design skills to help with the branding of “Save The Crew” movement.We would get my dad season tickets for his birthday slash Christmas, and he would alternate taking me or my brother or my sister. I met most of my closest friends through the team. I go with my brother now, still. It permeates every part of my life.During “Save The Crew” my dad passed away, and he didn’t get to see that we saved them. So having them here now is nice, like I still have a piece of him that I can enjoy. It means the world to me, possibly in ways I can’t necessarily put into words.Ben Hoelzel, Miranda Leppla and Robert Rovick.Credit…Courtesy Miranda LepplaRANDI LEPPLA, 36, has had Crew season tickets since 2009.We’ve seen relocations all the time. It’s based on money. You have to account for that. But that’s not how soccer works anywhere else in the world. There is an identity to teams, and their identity is the community.Save The Crew jerseys, yard signs, stickers, bumpers stickers — they were everywhere. Local businesses were putting things up in their shops. It was a very quick turnaround from, ‘Oh no this is so sad,’ to, ‘What are we going to do to fight this?’We weren’t supposed to have a team this year, and here we are. Winning would be a fairy tale ending for us. It’d be quite a way to close out a two-year victory lap, if you will.Dee Haslam with Pete Edwards in 2018. Both are members of the Crew’s ownership group.Credit…Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressDEE HASLAM, 66, was a newcomer to soccer when she and her husband, the Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, bought the team.We’re really excited for Columbus and for our fans, with them having gone through the process of almost losing a team. Cleveland lost a team. We obviously came in much later into that story, but you still hear the stories. It was a crushing thing. So when we heard about the Columbus Crew and that they might leave Ohio, we were just like: “That can’t happen. That’s terrible for a community.”Standing on the field for the conference championship [last weekend], it was like, Oh my gosh, we’re really here. We’re in the finals. It’s the M.L.S. Cup. We haven’t slept, really. When you lose, there’s a lot of tension and a lot of stress. When you win, and you’re expecting to win, the stress is even worse.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More