Trajectory schematics
An exhaustive look at an exhausting topic
It’s alright. Pretty good, even. The team is competent and they seem focused, and a home playoff berth is a real possibility. The team is still playing for Brian Schmetzer and for each other. However, having now gone ten or eleven winless matches and being bounced out of two cup competitions already this season by LAFC, I’m not sure the belief is still there, from fans or— more crucially—the players, that the team is good enough to beat LAFC, which is likely a necessary condition to winning any hardware for the foreseeable future. Rather, now that the team is generally healthy, we’re seeing its true level: good enough to beat a healthy swathe of MLS, but below the league’s elite.
I thought last winter (and the summer before that, and the winter before that) would have been a good time to rip the band-aid off and begin rebuilding, in part to avoid this wheel-spinning period of just waiting for top-heavy contracts to expire before we do something (what I heard from Pynchon the Germans called brennschluss, that period after when the fuel’s used up and the rocket goes “pure ballistic”). But Sounders’ management seems content with staying the course, renewing core contracts, backfilling natural roster churn, and doing only what is actually necessary at any given time. As a result, the only needle-moving note was acquiring Pedro de la Vega from Lanús to replace the long-time Sounders talisman Nicolás Lodeiro, whose contract had expired.
In addition, the team didn’t do anything over the summer window to make the winter work easier for themselves—addition through subtraction you could call it — and so we’re in this uneasy spot. There’s a real excitement deficit with the Sounders. This is MLS, so we could always go on a heater and play eight of the best games you’ve ever seen and win MLS Cup. But more than likely, we’ll be good, hold our own, and come up just short to someone with real top end talent in the playoffs. And that means we’re good. Maybe even really good. But we’re not the top, which is a hard place to be very optimistic about when the team tells us to expect the top. And what makes it even more frustrating is we don’t feel that far off the top. A major move or two feels like enough to put us right in the conversation.
The offseason is coming, and with it the opportunities to end the squad building holding pattern we’ve been in for three years now. 14 player contracts (including two DP contracts and two TAM contracts) will expire at the end of the season, and while 10 of those contracts have available option years for 2025, I do not expect all of them to get used. This means that there will be at least some, and potentially a lot, of cap room to leverage. So what should be done? What kinds of players should the team be looking for? What gaps in personnel do we have?
Below is an attempt to think through what Sounders could / might / will likely do this winter offseason to go into the 2025 season and answer these questions.
Please remember that none of this is special knowledge. It’s just me consuming a lot of Sounders content bits and pieces and trying to put it all back out there into a coherent whole. You’re welcome to disagree and let me know why.
The Granddaddy of them all
Having signed a 3-year contract at the end of 2021, Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer is out of contract at the end of this season. Despite being the most successful MLS coach over the last decade (including the only one to win a coveted continental trophy), I think it’s within the realm of possibility that he is not the coach in 2025.
That said, I also think that that outcome is highly, highly unlikely. Schmetzer’s on record having said that the MLS iteration of the Sounders is his “dream job”. Obviously he’s from Seattle and he’s been a Sounder off and on for like 1,000 years. So even if Schmetzer has felt some heat due to real dire stretches of performances over the years, my guess is that if the Sounders head into 2025 Schmetzerless, it will be because it was Brian’s choice not to come back.
Schmetzer’s Sounders career league numbers are below. Note, for obvious reasons, I excluded the 2020 numbers in the averages.
Like I said, Schmetzer has been the most successful MLS manager of the last decade. In the eight years since he took the reins halfway through 2016, he’s been to four MLS Cup Finals, one Concacaf Champions League Final and one Leagues Cup Final. He was the architect behind the three biggest trophies the Sounders have won in their 50 year history, and the biggest trophy an MLS team has ever won.
Despite this trail of success, he’s also never put it all together for a full season. His teams have a hallmark of having large stretches that are just kind of miserable, periods of bad results accompanied by sluggish, ugly, and demotivating performances. This was most notable in 2022 when Sounders missed the playoff cut for the only time in their MLS history. “Summer with the Champs” was a horror show that extended through the end of that season.
At the time, this was chalked up to a post-CCL hangover, but the pattern has repeated itself in miniature both in 2023 and 2024. Of course, the MLS season is grueling and even elite teams have suboptimal stretches, but it does seem like Schmetzer teams have a way of extending them longer than they ought to go. Fans have split opinions on what the causes are, but the two complaints I’ve seen most consistently are that Schmetzer is overly loyal to struggling veteran players and too predictable in playing style.
I don’t think either of those critiques are unwarranted, but I also think Schmetzer has been a real value add for the Sounders, in particular with the tricky personnel tightrope he’s been walking the last two seasons. He’s done a decent Theseus routine rebuilding his ship while it’s underway, ripping up the blueprint again and again to find a functioning side.
Of course these are all good pros we’re talking about, but I think lesser (or more dogmatic) managers could have seen, for example, the situation with Nicolás Lodeiro last season spiral quickly out of control. We’re seeing similar situations now with João Paulo and Raúl Ruidíaz. These are alpha egos trying to hold tight to the remainder of their careers, and Schmetzer has dealt with them relatively successfully by keeping them engaged enough through the ends of their contract terms not to derail the locker room. And while his handling of certain situations may have ruffled feathers, he’s never had a 2016-like mutiny.
It should also be remembered that management hasn’t done him any favors in this regard. Perhaps he hasn’t asked for it, but the ejector seat option of buying out any of these players seems verboten from a budget perspective. Consequently, Schmetzer has had to make it work with the options at his disposal, and last year he managed to guide the plane from what felt like tailspin in July 2023 to a smooth landing well above the playoff line. And, after a miserable start to this season, he’s gunning for home field advantage again.
The points accumulation is somewhat impressive even apart from the personnel issues. In my opinion, the Sounders have slid from a top three talent side in MLS to middle of the pack now over the last few years, due in part to new, more ambitious teams coming into the league and in part due to a noticeable lack of investment in the squad recently. The razor-sharp edge has dulled. But Schmetzer’s found real value from unheralded players like Paul Rothrock, Obed Vargas, and Jackson Ragen, who have all cemented themselves as starters ahead of more expensive veteran pieces.
It bears repeating: despite significant underperformance by a decent chunk of the top end of the roster, Schmetzer’s recreated what’s lacking by rejiggering the team midseason to guide them safely into the playoffs two seasons in a row. And indeed, I think the big reason the ’23 and ’24 iterations of the team have made the playoff cut, while the ’22 iteration didn’t, is precisely because Schmetzer learned a lesson about not being as loyal to struggling veteran players, and the value of shuffling the deck. So in my mind, he’s still Brian Schmetzer, but he’s showing strings to his bow I didn’t know he had.
This piece will mostly focus on the squad, but I wanted to start with this discussion of the manager because there is a vocal minority of Sounders fans who want Brian Schmetzer gone. I’m not totally against moving on from him either, but whether that’s a good idea or not depends entirely on what the alternatives are. If the options are promoting internally or bringing back Gonzalo Pineda (which seem the most likely options), that’s a hard pass from me. None of those options have significant enough upside to warrant moving on from Schmetzer, in my opinion.
However, if the alternatives involve bringing in an outside voice that has a proven record of playing compelling ball, who will fight internally to get talent into the club and won’t put up with penny pinching, or wasting time running non-performing contracts off, well, I could be persuaded. But I just do not foresee that happening, largely because I think Schmetzer will return and largely because I don’t think Adrian Hanauer would hire someone like I’ve described above, despite it being what I believe the club needs.
So with that out of the way, let’s talk about the squad.
2024 squad
Before we talk about the future, let’s have a look at what we currently hold. Below is the overview of roster categories each player falls into. MLS started making these squad breakdowns earlier this year, and they’re very helpful because before they did, it was all a guessing game about which players were allocated to the Senior and Supplemental Rosters. Now we know for sure which mechanisms bear on which salaries, so we have much better grounds for tracing the cap situation.
This season the Sounders have the full complement of Supplemental and Reserve players (10). These salaries are automatically excluded from the cap. They are using only 18 of the 20 Senior Roster spots available to them, including all three of their allocated Designated Player spots, and two of their three allocated U22 Initiative spots.
As you can see from the red text in the bottom right of the preceding table, the Sounders are, by my best calculations, about $106,000 over their allocated salary budget for 2024. This is also before adding in whatever Georgi Minoungou, Jackson Ragen, and Andrew Thomas (hence the yellow cells with salary estimation placeholders).
There are at least some known, and potentially a number of unknown, factors bearing on why the math shows them over budget. For example, it was announced in July that Andrew Thomas had signed a new long-term contract to keep him with the Sounders for the foreseeable future. This likely means that Thomas’ salary budget for 2024 will be a weighted average of his two applicable salaries (pre- and post-new contract), with the number of season weeks he was on each salary being allocated pro rata to each side of the ledger. We could calculate this but, we would need to know exactly what date each of the contracts were signed and/or what date the new salary takes effect from, and that is not information we’re ever going to be privy to.
In any event, $106,000 is close enough for me to simply assume the Sounders are at or very near their maximum allocated cap hit with the players currently on the roster, and this is in line with what team representatives have told us as well.
Expiring contracts
The players who have contracts or option years expiring and their 2024 numbers are listed below (players in blue cells have options avialable for 2025 at least).
As I wrote above, this list includes two Designated Players (Raúl Ruidíaz and Albert Rusnák) and two TAM players (Yeimar Gómez Andrade and João Paulo Mior). Those four players’ salaries alone represent 50% of the total cap hit and 43% of the Sounders’ total spend, so even if the number of players going in and out this season may not be huge, the dollar amount associated with them may prove significant.
If the team were to allow all of these contracts to run off the books with no options called or contract renewals, it would look like the below:
I will talk about all the players in turn, but since there is no better place to really deal with them, I will say a bit about Dylan Teves and Raúl Ruidíaz now.
Dylan Teves
Dylan Teves is out of the contract, and the Sounders have no options available. I don’t foresee the Sounders pushing the boat out to extend him either. Despite flashes of effectiveness last season, he hasn’t made much of an impact this season, having made 6 appearances and amassing 89'. He did score a nicely taken goal, though it was the fifth in a 5–0 blowout against 10-man Montreal.
Teves is a handy player to have around. He can play multiple positions and can do it at a replacement level, which in MLS is useful as it allows for greater cap flexibility to have one bench player that can cover a number of positions. But I do not foresee him being more than a sometimes-bench player on this Sounders team, and I think the Sounders have other options that have higher upside. In short, I think it may be good for Sounders to move on, and also good for Dylan to start fresh somewhere else. I think he could find a spot on several teams, even if not for the Sounders as they’re currently constructed.
Raúl Ruidíaz
Man, what to say about Raúl Ruidíaz? He helped us win our second MLS Cup in 2019, he helped us win Concacaf Champions League in 2022. He’s arguably the best pure striker we’ve had in our history. He’s been a goal machine for us over the years. It was, until recently, never a question about whether he would score, but rather if we could keep him on the field enough (between a number of injuries, personal issues, and international call ups) to make his eye-watering salary number worth it.
Below is a quick overview of his Sounders numbers so far, as well as a visualization of his availability and G+A/90 production (brown line). The blue bars are the total number of league minutes available each season. The grey bars are the number of minutes Ruidíaz actually played. As you can see, Ruidíaz only managed to the play on average 51% of the minutes available to him over the entire course of his Sounders career, and only around 40% the last three seasons. Perhaps surprisingly, even though he’s been the second choice striker for a significant chunk of this season, 2024 represents the second most appearances he’s ever made in a season for the Sounders and tied for fourth in number of starts.
The main problem is his goal return has been on a downward trend the last few years. Through is first three seasons he produced an average G+A/90 of 0.80, but his last three seasons have him down around 0.58, which simply isn’t good, especially when combined with the diminishing availability. For those reasons alone, it’s time to consciously uncouple. Raúl seems to know it, too, since he came out earlier this season and said he’s moving on after this season.
And so his time with the Sounders will come to an end. I wish him very well and will remember the good times with him as the best the Sounders have ever given us. What a goleador. I will miss him a lot.
Options
I expect the Sounders to make use of several of the contract options available to them. I would assume Jacob Castro, Jon Bell, Yeimar Gómez Andrade, Braudilio Rodrigues, Paul Rothrock and Léo Chú all find their options being called for the 2025 season. Each are discussed a bit below.
Jacob Castro
Jacob Castro has made 16 appearances (1440') for Defiance so far in their MLS Next Pro season. I can’t say I watch Tacoma enough to really have a very strong opinion on him, but I think it’s safe to say that it would take a real disaster for him to see the field for the first team because the Sounders have two guys they trust and think are starting quality MLS goalkeepers ahead of him.
But Castro also has some things going for him. First, he’s the right age (24) for a third GK, and he’s from the right place (Spanaway) for a Sounder. He’s got a big (6'4), athletic frame and, crucially, is eligible to remain on the Supplemental Roster, meaning his salary doesn’t hit the cap at all. Finally, he’s a known quantity. The Sounders have been tracking his progress for years, from his local youth days, through to UW and his transfer to San Diego State, and then back again to the first team with Seattle. I doubt he’d have gotten this far without the Sounders being high on his upside.
For these reasons, I believe Craig Waibel will push the button for another year and let him cook for a little longer with Dutra’s coaching. As such, the GK corps will likely be the same in 2025 as it was in 2024, and I don’t expect any changes until after Stefan Frei’s contract is up end of 2025.
Jon Bell
In the preseason, I thought Jon Bell might be used primarily as a back-up for Nouhou. At the time, Sounders were playing a more 3–2–5 shape in build-up, meaning Nouhou would slide over to form a kind of back three with Ragen in the middle and Yeimar on the right as Alex Roldan went looking for width up the right sideline. This role seemed ideally suited to Bell, a left-footed center back who has also played left back.
However, a couple things have happened over the course of the season that have meant that role didn’t materialize for him. First, the Sounders have slowly reverted to a more balanced back four¹ look, meaning the Sounders left back has been higher and, in some cases, wider in the course of the season than the role called for in preseason. Secondly, Reed Baker-Whiting (more on him later) has stepped up as the main back-up left back option when Nouhou can’t go. As such, Jon Bell has really only played when Jackson Ragen has been otherwise unavailable or the team is rotated. Consequently, he hasn’t played a ton (9 appearances, 5 starts, 483').
Eeven so, I think he’s done enough to earn himself a spot on the team next season. He looked comfortable enough on the ball and defending in his appearances and even scoring a goal from a set piece against his old team, St Louis City. Combined with his miniscule cap hit when compared to other center back options on the team, he seems worth keeping around.
The pathway for him is there, too. He’s the right age to grow into a starting role beside Jackson Ragen as other options age out if he shows himself capable of it. He’s also left footed, making him and Nouhou the only naturally left-footed defenders on the entire team, which is an added bonus. Schmetzer’s shown faith in him in league games this season, and I think it all adds up to his option being called.
Yeimar
Yeimar is a multi-year MLS Defender of the Year finalist and is the best defender on the team. He has his moments, but for the most part you can expect him to be where he needs to be and making the plays he needs to make, which is gold for a defender in MLS. I don’t see any reason not to call his option, provided it is not wildly out of sync with the $832,500 he made in 2024. In my opinion, despite the high salary, he represents good value for money, both for his performances and his durability. He’s a great player, one of the better CBs we’ve ever had (and we’ve had a few). I assume he’ll again be about $100,000–150,000 over the DP threshold, and therefore be a TAM player.
There’s not a lot more to say, other than I don’t think it would be smart for the Sounders to renew his contract, either now or after the option year. He’s 32, so in order to avoid a similar situation that we’ve seen with Lodeiro, Ruidíaz and João Paulo before him, I think we would be smart to call the option for 2025 and then immediately start looking for our next TAM defensive piece to take us onward after that. His will be big shoes to fill, but his contract expiring shouldn’t be sneaking up on anyone.
Braudilio Rodrigues
Braudilio Rodrigues had a rough inaugural first team Sounders season, having missed nearly all of it with hamstring issues. He’s only seen the field in rehab assignments with Defiance this season, and even then only managed to accumulate 113' on the field over the last eight months of play.
But I think the Sounders are still high on Braudilio. He showed real quality and versatility in preseason with the first team. In my season preview, I wrote the following:
Rodrigues is a player, who, as far as I can tell, can play any position you put him in. Last season at Defiance, he played mostly on the left side of attack, but was also utilized up top, in the pocket behind, and even dropped to central midfield or popped up wide right during open play periodically. That’s impressive!
Even more impressive, in my opinion, is that he managed to stay goal dangerous despite the shifting of positions in his first season with the team. Rodrigues set a record, scoring 17 goals over the regular season and playoffs (30 games), and also contributing 5 assists for Wade Webber’s side as they finished second in MLS Next Pro and made a run to the conference semifinals.
He’s 24, he’s on a senior minimum contract, and he’s versatile enough to play anywhere he’s put. I think that’s enough for Sounders to kick the tires again and hope for better health in 2025.
Paul Rothrock
Paul Rothrock has been the pleasant surprise of the 2024 season. I had basically no expectations for him coming into the season, simply because I’d hardly ever seen him play, and he’s clearly exceeded the expectations anyone had for him (except himself, it seems). Not only has he integrated himself into regular first team minutes, but he’s making an impact and keeping himself ahead of more expensive options in the pecking order. Our man’s got 5G / 3A in a little under 1,100 MLS minutes since he came into the starting lineup over the summer.
No one has done more to force Schmetzer to rethink Plan A this season, and Rothrock has earned every minute he’s been given on the pitch. His willingness to make the unselfish run and grind out of possession helped get a team that was sputtering back on the motorway. People talk about certain players having a “knack” for being in the right place when the ball falls, but this isn’t some third eye situation. Paul just works hard, runs hard, wants it enough to get to the spots he needs to be in, over and over and over and over and over. And it’s working for him and the team.
The Sounders would be insane not to call his option, and the only question in my mind is whether his play warrants a full new multi-year contract.
Léo Chú
It pains me to say that I don’t think Léo Chú will be on the Sounders in 2025. It’s a shame because the skill is there, but the guy has simply not showed enough. Outside of a run of impressive games in early 2023 he’s struggled to consistently affect games, despite being giving nearly 3,800' over the last three seasons to do so.
He started the season as the first choice left winger, but Rothrock came and just kind of munched his minutes and the switch to Rothrock has been justified because he’s doubled Léo’s production without being the minor shape liability defensively that Léo is. Rothrock is also on like 15% of Chú’s salary, hits the cap at less than 50% of Chú’s cap hit, and doesn’t take up a U22 Initiative spot.
That said, Chú is still relatively young and experienced enough that he has value. There were reports last season that he was on the radar of a couple Brazilian clubs, and that at least one had made a bid. Of course, that was on the back on his most productive year, and 2024 has been worse for him, so it remains to be seen if any clubs are still interested, but my point is, I think the Sounders will call Chú’s option for the purpose of asset value protection, with the express goal of moving him on, hopefully against a fee, and freeing up that U22 Initiative spot to use on other players (more on this below).
Options not taken
A quick word about Sota Kitahara and Nathan. It may be that the Sounders keep Kitahara on an option year in 2025. He’s on a Supplemental Roster deal, meaning his salary makes no difference to the cap analysis, so there is very little risk involved in keeping him for his last remaining year. But he’s been on the team for two seasons now and made only three appearances for less 150', almost exclusively in matches where nearly the entire side was rotated.
I suspect the analysis on Sota will come down to whether he’s blocking another academy product from taking a first team spot on the Supplemental Roster that they will not be able to hang on to absent a chance at the first team. If so, his option won’t be called and the Sounders will look to do right by their local kid by finding him another landing spot.
Nathan is another story. He’s a senior player and hits the cap hard. His senior salary of $550,000 is tied for the 6th highest non-DP salary on the team, taking up 10.05% of the available cap, and he’s offered us basically zilch. He’s played only 90' over the course of the season and was unavailable due to injury and green card status for almost all of the early cup games when he would have been a really useful rotation option.
I had high hopes that a guy with as much experience as Nathan would push Ragen and Yeimar and come to fight for starting minutes, but his presence hasn’t been felt much — he’s not even making the gameday squad regularly, even after getting fit and the sale of Xavier Arreaga. Bell has had a significantly better year than him, and with Stuart Hawkins apparently outgrowing MLS Next Pro, it would be best to say goodbye to him and his $550,000 per year contract and allocate that cap hit in more productive directions.
So with that said, here is the depth chart if all goes according to what I’ve written out above. This would leave the Sounders with 19 players under contract going into 2025 (players in green are the called options):
2025 cap space
In 2025, the cap space, GAM and TAM allocated to each team will amount to $11,105,000. The DP threshold has also increased by $60,000 to $743,750, meaning each of the TAM and DP players now have a slightly bigger cap hit, but require accordingly less TAM to buy down. The overview of the situation in the context of the current CBA is below.
With the above numbers in mind, let’s look at the cap situation with the players under contract after the options are called.
Of the 19 players Sounders will have under contract, 13 are Senior Roster contracts and six are Supplemental Roster contracts. All of the allocated $5.95M cap hit is already used and approximately $1.84M in TAM is required (again, guessing at the new numbers for Thomas, Minoungou and Ragen). This leaves Sounders with $3.81M in cap + TAM + GAM to work with, as well as two DP spots and two U22 Initiative spots vacant (assuming Léo Chú is moved).² More detail below.
Now that we have an overview of the cap situation of the players likely to be with the squad on their existing contracts, let’s move on to those players whose contracts are expiring, but who Sounders will likely attempt to re-sign.
Contract renewals
We will take each roster category in turn, starting with the least expensive (Supplemental and Reserve Roster) and ending with the most expensive Designated Players).
Supplemental / Reserve Roster
The 2024 Supplemental Roster cohort details are below.
Of these 10 players, seven have contracts expiring. Of those seven, only Dylan Teves did not have an option year available. As I noted above, I expect four (Bell, Castro, Rodrigues and Rothrock) of the 6 to be called, with Kitahara moving on.
The remaining Supplemental Roster guy whose contract or option year is expiring but who I have not yet mentioned is Reed Baker-Whiting. I will discuss him in more detail below under the U22 spots, but for now I will just say that I do not expect the Sounders to call Reed’s option because I think Reed to be back for 2025 on a new contract as a U22 Initiative player.
As such, I expect that the Supplemental Roster next season will carry over only five of the current 10 players, i.e. the four options called plus Stuart Hawkins, who remains under team control until 2028.
The U22 Initiative players
In 2024, the Sounders had two U22 Initiative players, Léo Chú (Sounders first U22 signing in Summer 2021), and Josh Atencio (who signed a new U22 contract, replacing his initial first team contract, before the this season).
As a quick refresher, U22 Initiative roster spots allow teams to move all of a player’s cap hit above $150k/$200k (depending on age) off cap.
According to MLS roster construction rules, acquisition costs count against a player’s cap hit, and are amortized over the course of the player’s contract term. For example, if a player’s salary is $550,000 per year and his acquisition cost is $1M with a 5-year contract term, then his cap hit would be $550,000 plus $200,000 (=$1M / 5 years) per year, or $750,000. However, if the U22 Initiative mechanism is used on this player, then all of the acquisition cost and salary above $200,000 is moved off cap, meaning a cap hit reduction of $550,000 per year.
In non-salary capped leagues, teams are willing to overspend relative to a young player’s current ability because they are paying for potential. Clubs are betting on their talent identification yielding a player who will improve at a level that makes the initial overspend worth it, either in performance on the field, or in a future sale fee, or both. It’s a gamble, but one teams are often willing to take due to the very high potential rewards.
But in capped leagues, teams need to be incentivized to buy future talent, because maximizing cap efficiency means spending less than — and certainly no more than — exactly the value you get from each player. This downward pressure tends to favor veterans with experience, not young players who have to be played through ups and downs to realize their upside. The ability to move the acquisition costs and some salary off the cap through the U22 Initiative mechanism is clearly designed to bridge this squad building gap and incentivize MLS teams to spend big to bring in promising young players.
The rule has changed a little bit since my way too-long MLS roster mechanisms overview. Until this season, MLS had given its teams a choice. A team could decide between either: (1) three full designated players roster spots and one U22 Initiative spot, or (2) two full designated player roster spots and up to three U22 Initiative spots. The league has modified this rule, and now this choice for teams is between: (1) three full designated players and three U22 Initiative spots, or (2) two full designated player spots, four U22 Initiative spots, and $2M in extra GAM.
The reason I bring all this up is because, at the Annual Business Meeting held during the 2024 FanFest at Longacres’ Providence Swedish Performance Center and Clubhouse™, Sounders GM Craig Waibel was explicit with the vision he has for building this Sounders squad going forward. I’ve transcribed what he said at length here below because all of it is interesting:
If you’re a club that cares about developing your own players, that actually invests in your academy and your people and your players equally, you probably have some really good young players. Which, it turns out, we do. So retaining some of our players and labeling them with this U22 spot is going to be essential over the next couple years.
From a salary cap standpoint, a [U22] player counts against the salary cap $200,000 regardless of the salary. […] So the U22s are extremely valuable on your roster. They’re essential to get correct. Because if you get value out of those three players, it’s a total [cap hit] of $600,000, [meaning] you’re getting performance out of three players instead of just one for that same number.
Where this really impacts is, there are clubs that are going to […] spend a lot of money chasing trophies, […]. There are going to be teams that chase with a lot of money on these three DP spots and these three U22 spots. When I see a team that has gone out and spent a ton of money and has three young players that are better than our three, considerably better, exponentially better, I might feel different, but I think we’re years away from that with the way our academy and our development system works, the players we’re producing.
To me, this sounds like Waibel making it crystal clear that fans should not expect the Sounders to lay out significant transfer fees chasing young, expensive foreign talent. Rather, they plan to use these spots to keep their cap hit manageable while retaining their homegrown players longer than they may have otherwise been able to.
I see the upsides in this approach. Of course, there is asset value retention. Being able to keep your young players long enough to extract maximum value (either through minutes on the field, or through outbound transfer, or both) is key to any team in a selling league. A lot of time, effort, and money goes into the academy and youth system for the Sounders and having some return on investment there is, I assume, crucial to the Sounders’ business plans. So far, they’ve been successful in finding players good enough to be squad contributors, filling out the bench, and even finding some starters, but outward transfers for profit, and real consistent game changers have not really been a feature.
Secondly, simply filling up the squad with affordable, contributing players. As Waibel said, you get three for the price of one. Getting this discount on regular contributors means more cap space to go around, which, in turn, (at least theoretically) means more good players on the squad.
Finally — and this is just conjecture — we are talking about local, or at the very least Sounders Academy, players. They are Sounders from a young age, will likely feel an affinity with the club and will fight for the badge. I can see the thinking in prioritizing them over some mercenary. Not only does it reward internally but it can also be used as a long-term recruitment tool to show potential academy prospects that we care for our own.
So with all that as a preamble, my strong suspicion is that your U22 Initiative cohort going into the 2025 season will comprise of Josh Atencio, Reed Baker-Whiting and Obed Vargas.
Atencio is already confirmed. He signed a new contract at the beginning of the 2024 season to become Sounders’ second ever U22 contract. His final option was in 2024, and it seemed that Sounders wanted to lock the young midfielder down before he got into his final year of team control. Atencio’s had some injuries this season, but still managed to make 24 appearances and log over 1,000 minutes.
The plan seems similar with Reed and Obed, who have both attracted attention from a young age from European teams. Reed has an option available for 2025, whereas Obed’s contract’s natural term ends after 2025 leaving a team option for 2026. As such, it may be that the Sounders don’t use the U22 spot on Obed immediately if they are unable to find a satisfactory offer for Léo Chú.
But Sounders also need to keep their players happy, and it doesn’t sound like either Reed or Obed are short on options elsewhere. A player as key as Obed has been for us for the better part of three seasons now (63 appearances and 4,500+ minutes) should not remain on a Supplemental Contract if we want to avoid turning friends into enemies, so giving him a contract that reflects his value and performance should be a priority if he’s not going to be sold right away.
Assuming Sounders do use all the U22 spots on these players now, in keeping with the plan laid out by Waibel above, they would hit the cap at a sum total of $600,000, or all together about the same as any of Nathan, Nouhou, or Ragen individually. As I said above, having these three guys, all of which are significant contributors to the first team, on manageable, long-term contracts not only allows the team to reduce the total cap hit to stock more high quality players, but also gives the team extended control over their highest-prized assets. Those are good things.
But here is where we get to the first real discussion of long-term strategic planning, and on this point reasonable people can disagree. Does using the U22 Initiative spots on these three players increase how efficiently we use out resources? Yes, for all the reasons I laid out above. But is it the best way to do it? I’m undecided.
Here’s my thinking. As I tried to lay out above, the point of the U22 Initiative spots are to incentivize MLS teams to go out and spend — spend big, literally no caps on acquisition cost — on young talent. All that spend gets to be moved off cap. The way we have chosen to do it does not do that. If we were to bring Obed and Reed up to Atencio-level salary, for example, that would be a total salary of a $1.05M for the three players with a cap hit of $600,0000, meaning all three U22 spots would yield a cap reduction of $450,000. That’s enough to keep another player, like Alex Roldan, who we would perhaps have to move on if we didn’t do this. So far so good.
But now consider the case of Léo Chú, who was acquired as Sounders’ inaugural U22 signing from Grémio for a reported $2,500,000 on a four-year deal, with a salary of $550,000 per year. That means that the cap hit savings from using that spot on him alone is $350,000 (i.e. the amount of salary above $200,000) plus $625,000 (i.e. $2.5M / 4 year contract term), or $975,000 per year. That is over twice as much cap relief as they get with all three U22 Initiative spots going to Josh, Reed and Obed, given the salary numbers I estimated above. This is because there are no allocation costs related to Josh, Reed and Obed, which, again, that is the main value add of the U22 Initiative roster mechanism.
So my argument is, use the tools in the most effective way. You can drive a nail with a bike pump. It will get the job done, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best use for the bike pump or the best tool for the job. But wait! I can hear you say. Léo’s not as useful as those other three players! And that might be true. But that’s not a good argument for using the U22 Initiative spot in a less efficient way. That’s a talent identification (and perhaps coaching) issue, in my opinion. It is not, however, a good reason not to buy good young players when you have every competitive incentive to do so.
But my greater point is, there is a false dichotomy developing here, in which the team has set up the limits such that we are told we need to pick between our own young players and foreign young players.
My question to that is, Why not both? Why not keep the academy graduates that we are high on, put them on senior salaries and use the U22 Initiative spots for how they can be best utilized, instead of overpaying underperforming veteran players? If the Sounders are truly confident in these three academy players (and they should be, they’re good) just make them senior players. If the choice is between something similar to the below, I’d like to see Option B³. Or better yet, somewhere in between! For example, use the U22 spots on Obed and Reed, but cut Nathan, allocate that money toward Atencio’s salary, save $200,000 in cap hit and go shoot for the moon on a Uruguayan wunderkind with the remaining U22 spot!
This all comes back to willingness to spend by ownership. You’ll note that the primary difference between Option A and Option B above— and why the team will likely spring for Option A — is not what is best for the team and what maximizes cap allocations, but what costs the least overall. Option B has a significantly lower cap hit than Option A, but it costs $6M+ more in real, actual United States Dollars. And so, using my supreme powers of deduction, I predict that is why we will end up with Option A.
Hopefully I have presented the case sufficiently enough, because I have written too much about it already. This discussion of what is the best use of the U22 Initiative spots could have been an entire post on its own. But let’s leave it there and move on to take a look at where we’re at in the zoomed out squad build.
So having used up our three U22 spots, we’re now up to 21 on roster (six Supplemental Roster guys, 15 Senior Roster guys) and approximately $2.82M in cap + TAM + GAM, and two Designated Player spots still to use.
TAM players
Other than Yeimar (discussed above) the only TAM player currently on the roster whose contract is expiring is João Paulo Mior. The team has no options available. His 2024 salary numbers are below.
I wrote in the 2024 season preview that I think JP is Brian Schmetzer’s security blanket. At that point, I didn’t think there was anyone on the squad more trusted, and I thought Brian would likely go down with the ship before rotating JP out for other options.
And I was wrong. While JP has been up and down this season, he’s been mostly down recently, and has also struggled with niggling injuries, meaning Sounders have had to nurse him through the season. This has meant subbing him out of 11 of the 16 matches he’s started so far. Consequently, even when he gets back to full fitness, it seems probable that he has lost his starting spot to a central midfield cast of Cristian Roldan, Josh Atencio and Obed Vargas who have kept us collecting points at a really good rate, and all have legs enough to make it through 90', meaning it’s not a near-automatic burned sub.
I have loved João Paulo since the second he arrived. His calm head, passing range, and positional awareness are some of the best on the team. One of my biggest regrets is that we didn’t get to see him and Nicolás Lodeiro play together as much as we would have liked due to their respective knee injuries in successive seasons. And while he went down with that knee injury early in the second leg of the CCL Final in 2022, him in the center of the park for that campaign, and his steely veteran presence, was a primary driver of our success in that competition, and a heavily felt absence the rest of that disastrous season.
All that said, he’s slowing down. While it’s often said that the first couple yards are in your head, JP is now more than a couple yards behind a lot MLS midfielders he comes up against athletically. He can't hold it down by himself, which hinders Obed, Josh and Cristian from getting into the attack and finding overloads as they hang back to keep their rest defense shape.
In a perfect world, I’d love to have him back on maybe a 1+1, but absent his willingness to come back on a 2021-like Fredy Montero discount, I think it is time for a new TAM central midfielder to step in, and consequently time for us to say goodbye to a player I really love. I’ll be sad about it, like I was about saying goodbye to Osvaldo Alonso and Gustav Svensson before him.
Designated Players / Albert Rusnák
In 2024, the Sounders carried three DPs. Detailed numbers below:
We know Pedro de la Vega will be back next season so that’s all I’ll say on him for now, and we know both Rusnák and Ruidíaz are out of contract, meaning Sounders will have two Designated Players spots open.
In this piece, which is long enough already, I will not get into identifying specific players I think the Sounders should look to bring in. Tim Ostlund-Foss does great pieces about players that fit the profiles that Sounders need periodically. If you want your Transfermarkt research done for you, check those out on Sounder at Heart.
What I will do, however, is have a think through the real obvious question of how the Sounders should approach Albert Rusnák, who is out of contract at the end of the season and is having a career year at age 30. The reason I am focusing so much on Albert Rusnák’s contract is because the way this squad build will round out depends a lot on what the Sounders choose to do with him, which I’ll attempt to show in what follows.
Albert Rusnák is balling out this season. Our man’s got 21 goal involvements in around 2,400' so far, which is as good as any Sounders playmaker’s had in recent history. He’s currently playing out the last and only option year on his original 2+1 contract after making the move to Sounders from RSL before the 2022 season. After bouncing between more of a controlling midfield role and being Nicolás Lodeiro’s primary back-up for the first two seasons, he’s operated as the hub of the offense this time around. The team initially struggled to adapt, not necessarily to him being in that role, but to a series of injuries (including his own) and bad performances from usually reliable players, leading to a poor beginning to this season. But since getting healthy, the Sounders have really picked up steam and Albert is one of the primary drivers behind it.
I have been a consistent Rusnák defender throughout his time with us, and I really don’t understand the people who think he sucks. He is a very good player. I want him to come back next year, and indeed I’ve argued that we should have already extended him on a max TAM contract many times. I am not against him coming back as DP, mainly because the alternatives are not known to me and we know the level at which he can operate. But I have concerns about it, too, and two in particular that I will elaborate on now.
First, the age curve concern. We’ve just seen the downstream effects of this team renewing contracts of veterans one too many times. Not only do we experience overpaying for underperformance for the last year or two of contracts like these, but the team’s way of dealing with it (i.e. not dealing with it) leads to resentment and hurt feelings. Both Lodeiro in 2023 and now Ruidíaz in 2024, beloved heroes of our team, have felt it necessary to speak out midseason the past two seasons to let everyone know they’re not happy, and want no part of coming back. While you can allocate blame on the players for their performances not living up to the numbers in their contracts, the team giving them those contracts in the first place and not nipping it in the bud when it became an issue deserves its fair share of culpability.
The second issue, and this connects back to the U22 Initiative player discussion earlier, is Rusnák’s Designated Player status and what that says about the team’s ambition. The club gets six roster spots to spend unlimited money with no detriment to its cap situation⁴. If things go according to what I’ve already laid out, we are already using three of those six spots (the U22 spots) in a way that is, as I tried to show above, not very efficient, or at the very least improvable. Pedro de la Vega’s status as a Designated Player is also as a low-salary DP. Indeed the salary number he’s on for 2024 is below the max TAM number (although with his acquisition cost of $7.5M, he is likely well above that in cap hit were he not occupying a DP spot). If we were to use the second DP spot on Albert, and sign him back on, for example, a 3-year contract on a number like he is now, then five of our six “unlimited spend” spots would be going to people who are very low salary players for the roster spots they take up, meaning we are leaving significant meat on the bone when it comes to moving salaries off cap⁵.
A little while ago, in a puddle of depression after being knocked out of yet another cup competition by LAFC, I wrote the following tweets:
My outlook (and the Sounders place in the table) has improved since then, but I still stand by the analysis generally. Waibel and Hanauer tell us all the time that spending money does not guarantee success in MLS. I won’t argue with that. But spending more money well will always get better results than spending less money well, and no one will argue that spending to get more top talent into this squad would be a detriment to it. The point I was trying to convey with the tweets above is not that Rusnák isn’t good enough to play for this Sounders team, but that he’s not good enough to be our highest paid player if we expect to compete with teams spending significantly more. You can’t bet against the odds forever and expect to keep winning, and saying yes to Albert as a DP is saying no to another, potentially significantly better, player down the road.
The Sounders need to show ambition, and the profiles of the players they sign matter in how they’re perceived by their fans. And Sounders seem to understand that, or at least they say they do. Craig Waibel, after talking about the U22 Initiative strategy the Sounders will employ (as quoted above), seemed to at least imply to fans that they should expect the DP targets to be ambitious, when he said:
We will focus on the [Designated Roster] spots, and this year we have two of those [who] are going out of contract […] so we have some decisions to make. So strategy for the Sounders is, the [Designated Players] is where we will focus most of our energy because right now we’ve got a spoil of riches in terms of players under 22 that show a lot of promise.
Taking that at face value, I think if the Sounders come back with five of their six unlimited spend spots used on players already under contract now, and especially if that sixth spot remains unfilled, fans will be bitterly disappointed.
But, in addition to showing ambition to the fans, I think they also need to show their players that their performances matter. The Sounders are learning the painful way that it’s important for players to be aware that they won’t be kept around if they’re not performing. But, additionally, it’s even more important for the team to show players that if they do perform, they’ll be supported with quality talent around them.
So what is the best way forward? I think there are four distinct paths, and I’ll discuss all of them in turn. The first involves allowing Rusnák to leave on a free. The second, third and fourth cover various ways Albert may end up back on the squad for 2025. I’m somewhat ambivalent about it mainly because we can’t know what the alternatives are, but I think Routes 2 or 3 are my preference. Read through and come to your own conclusion.
Route A: Rusnák leaves on a free
No way around it, this would be a huge bummer. Even if you’re the biggest Rusnák hater and want him gone, think about what it would mean in practice. For the sake of being competitive in 2025, I think this would be a disaster unless they already have been planning a post-Rusnák option they are confident of landing, and not just landing, but landing during the winter window and able to go through preseason with the team.
I mean, there are upsides. Yes, it would give us the most cap flexibility. We’d have approximately $4.82M cap + TAM + GAM to spend, and two empty DP spots available to utilize. So, in the long run you could make the argument this route gives the highest potential upside, but that’s because the team is like an empty bucket and you project unknowns to be as good as you want them to be. But it will leave the Sounders with the very real job of trying to stock two high earners and probably three or four TAM spots in one offseason, which won’t just happen all at once. Filling at least half of those spots will likely be put on ice until Summer 2025, meaning the team will be short, at least talent wise, for the first half of the regular season, including the Club World Cup. And even those moves the Sounders do choose to make during the winter offseason will likely require transfer fees of some kind due to the FIFA calendar, and the caliber of player that Sounders’ transfer fees command is not exactly mind-blowing. They’re certainly not going to be blowing $35M on anyone, which is why they’ve usually waited for summer windows (when free transfers are available) to bring in high earners.
This is the route that leaves the most up to decisions by the team which I just can’t predict. I also think this is the least likely route things will go, so I will just leave it at that for now.
Route B: Rusnák extends on max-TAM
This route is, in my opinion, the way to pack the most high-end, game-winning attacking talent into the side, and will also be the most expensive and leave the least flexibility for in-season maneuvers. What it would entail is Sounders trying to get Albert Rusnák back on a TAM contract with the express understanding that those two open Designated Player spots won’t be accounting tools or tire-kicking exercises, but will be used on acquiring dyed-in-the-wool trophy-hunting killers.
When Albert first came to the Sounders, he said what attracted him to Seattle was the chance to win trophies, and so to retain him, we need to show him we’re serious about doing that again.
So if they go in this direction, the ideal chain of events would be that Waibel tells Albert we’re going to bring in high quality players around him, he licks his chops thinking about how much fun he’ll have playing with them and signs back up for three years on about $500,000 less than he’s making now. Will this happen? I don’t know. Probably not. Albert qualifies for free agency, meaning he’ll be able to shop his services around, and after the year he’s had, I’m sure someone will be willing to back the Brinks truck up for him.
Before we go on, let’s take a look at where we are with the squad assuming we can get Rusnák back on TAM money (and, again, all the assumptions from the first half of this piece). It would leave Sounders with 21 players under contract (six of 10 Supplemental Roster spots, and 15 of 20 Senior Roster spots filled). I would also assume the Sounders would choose to fill out the Supplemental Roster spots as that has no impact on the cap analysis and doing so is essentially risk free. Perhaps some of the talented younger players on Defiance like Snyder Brunell or Chris Aquino round out these spots, but I won’t pretend to know enough to make any real guesses. That would bring the total number of players to 25, which is about two or three players lighter than Sounders typically run.
Not coincidentally, Sounders with Rusnák have three vacancies down the spine of their team (highlighted yellow in the depth chart above) that I think they would try to fill with their remaining $1.27M in cap space + TAM + GAM and the two Designated Player spots that are available.
If the Sounders use their two remaining Designated Player spots on non-Rusnák players, that will require $1,487,500 of cap space (i.e. 2 * $743,750 max senior cap hit). That’s more cap space than they have available on the books if they bring Rusnák back on a max TAM contract. Of course this $213,135 gap is easily be bridged by selling an international roster spot or two, perhaps the proceeds from the Léo Chú sale discussed above, or by moving another player on, but it would require some maneuvering to accomplish.
Should the Sounders choose to go this route, Sounders would likely use those Designated Player spots to target the long-rumored center forward and a central midfielder, either a 6 that can hold the center of the park by himself in a single pivot and allow our other two midfielders to get forward, or a box-to-box type that can hold position in a deep block when necessary but is also tidy enough on the ball to join in the attack. But regardless of what type of players the Sounders target with their DP spots, the cap analysis will remain the same. They’d likely be able to add DP contracts, and nothing more.
And that would be the team. There would be no cap space left over, and it would break down as below:
So that is Route B. It creates a real stacked attacking and midfield corps, but I would worry about the center back depth, as Hawkins is — as good as he looks at Tacoma level and with the USYNT — still very young and has no MLS experience.
Whether Sounders offer Rusnák DP money if this TAM contract route fails, of course, depends entirely on the options available to them. If the choices are Rusnák on a DP contract or nothing, of course, I’m picking Rusnák on a DP contract. But if we get to a point where those are the options, that would be a real failure of planning on the Sounders’ part. In any event, let’s take a look at how Rusnák as a DP would play out from a cap perspective.
Route C: Rusnák extends on DP contract
If the only way back for Albert is on a DP contract, it is certainly not the end of the world, and indeed, it might actually walk a better balance between making our team deep enough to compete across the whole schedule and but sharp enough to compete in the late rounds of cup competitions.
The main limiter with the players we have on contract now is the actual cap space + TAM + GAM we have available. As discussed above, if Rusnák is a max TAM player, that exacerbates the problem by immediately eating up a full senior cap hit plus $1M in GAM/TAM. However, if Albert’s on a DP contract, then only the senior cap hit would be needed, and none of the GAM/TAM would be required.
This would mean the Sounders would have $2.27M in cap + GAM + TAM to fill out the final three roster spots that I think they’ll target (CF, CM, CB). This would allow them to acquire a full DP attacking piece, a $1M per year salary CM and still have approximately $500,000 left over for CB depth. An estimation of how this could look is laid out below.
This squad build doesn’t have the game-winners packed into it like Route B does, but it may allocate resources across the squad in a more balanced way, and hopefully provide adequate depth at all positions to avoid those hallmark in-season dry spells.
But what I will say is that if they sign Rusnák back up on low DP money, like is a laid out here in Route C, then that final unlimited spend spot (i.e. the DP attacking piece) better be a needle-moving player because this team needs game winning talent in more than a couple positions and the fans need something to buzz about.
Route D: Rusnák, Chú, and a bunch of GAM
The only other way I can see Rusnák coming back and fitting under the cap is the following. If you remember, back up when I discussed the details of the U22 Initiative rule, I noted the rule changed such that MLS gives each team the option of having four U22 Initiative spots. I could see the Sounders, if they are unable to move Léo Chú against a fee, keeping him for his option year and running with all four of Atencio, Vargas, Baker-Whiting and Chú in those spots.
It’s great to have all those U22 players, but it would come at the cost of having no additional Designated Players, assuming Rusnák comes back. That would mean your contingent of Sounders’ Designated Players for 2025 would be Pedro de la Vega and Albert Rusnák and that’s it.
However, it would also mean an additional $2M in GAM (which, to be fair, is a lot of cap flexibility). I’m not sure this is the best option, simply because that’s a lot of GAM to use within the 30 roster spots on the team, given the number of players that are already on contract. In order to do so would require us to bring in three additional TAM players making over $1.3M per year (approximately what João Paulo is on now) or two max TAM players, leaving us with at least five total TAM players.
I don’t necessarily hate this route. Sounders have almost always spent well when bringing in TAM players. For whatever reason, they usually get really good value out of the players they identify and recruit in this salary range. But I don’t prefer this option, because I don’t think running with Chú on the squad another year will bring any value, particularly if we have a healthy De la Vega, Morris, Rothrock and Minoungou as alternatives to him. Plus, him being the sole reason for blocking our ability to acquire a new DP player would be a real bummer.
Summing up the DP situation
By way of quick recap, the numbers behind Routes B, C, and D are below.
Route B or C are my preference. Both mean Rusnák is back with us, one leaves us thinner in defense but allows us to have significant attacking and midfield talent, while the other spreads the talent out across the field a bit more, but leaves us with potentially less cutting edge. My assumption is we go Route C, it’s the cheapest (only one DP-level transfer fee), and keeps the squad depth similar to the current squad build, which I think the Sounders are comfortable with.
Of course, we can’t really know how pieces the Sounders bring in will gel with the current players. It may be that we go the cheapest route and get better performance out of those players than we would have if we spent $55M on two huge DP pieces. We also can’t really counterfactual it because we don’t know who would have been brought in if we had gone another route.
As should have been made obvious by all the words above, the main hinge points of this team build, and the things I’m looking forward to knowing the most, are:
First, whether the Sounders do truly allocate all three of their U22 Initiative spots to Academy players, as I’ve predicted they do above. I really think the best way to deal with those is to perhaps allocate two of them as I think they plan to, and gamble a little with the third one. Go find a high upside kid somewhere and see what happens. You never know; and
Second, whether Rusnák comes back, and what contract level he comes back on, because it will tell us a lot about how the rest of the team will shake out.
— — — — —
Notes
¹ See below some average position visuals from @mlsstat on twitter. On the left is Sounders vs Rapids (16 Mar 2024); on the right is Sounders vs Vancouver (3 Oct 2024). Note the difference in balance between fullbacks. LB is narrower earlier in the season, and RB is significantly further up the field. More recently, they are much more balanced, as RB (mostly Alex Roldan) has not been going looking for width, but stepping into midfield to support.
² For projecting salaries for 2025, if the players are already under contract, I have increased all salaries less than $180,000 by 5%, in line with Section 18.13 (Annual Base Salary Increase) in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. I have not done the 16-month guaranteed portion of the adjustment in the second half of the clause to be on the conservative side of my estimates.
³ This is just an example. I think Alex Roldan, despite struggles in the first half of the year, has improved significantly since he no longer is required to be the main width provider on the right side. I want him with the team in 2025.
⁴ While the Designated Player rule allows for unlimited spend on both salary and acquisition cost with no cap implications, the U22 Initiative spots allow for unlimited acquisition cost, but limited salary cost, which is capped at the relevant max-senior salary threshold (also called the DP threshold). In 2025, that will be $743,750.
⁵ I wrote extensively about how Albert Rusnák’s contract situation could have been improved upon in the second half of this piece. I go into much more detail on his numbers, and my frustrations with them, there.
