Sound And The Glory , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Matt Pentz

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113 pages

English

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A unique and comprehensive look at the Seattle Sounders franchise and its storied run for the Cup The Seattle Sounders were a sensation from the start, attracting crowds of sizes unlike any MLS team had ever seen. By the 2016 season, Seattle was averaging more than 42,000 fans per home game, the most of any soccer team in the Western Hemisphere, and more than behemoths like Chelsea F.C. and A.C. Milan overseas. But, for all of its early consistent success, Seattle had yet to actually win the league. In order to reach the ambitious goals the club set for itself, the Sounders needed the jolt of a championship. To get there would require tumult previously unknown to a club built on stability, a clash of egos, and a title run so unlikely it could hardly have been scripted. This is a Cinderella story for all MLS fans and every Sounder at heart.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	05 mars 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773053233
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Sound and the Glory
How the Seattle Sounders Showed Major League Soccer How to Win Over America
Matt Pentz

Contents
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright

Preface
On the afternoon of November 13, 2007, a group of soccer fans stood shoulder to shoulder at the George & Dragon pub in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont. The occasion was a badly kept secret: the city was to be granted an expansion franchise to become the 15th team in North America’s top professional division, Major League Soccer.
The mood was festive. Despite the lunchtime hour, Boddingtons, Guinness and local favorite Manny’s Pale Ale flowed freely. Drew Carey, the game show host and new team’s celebrity co-owner, bought a round of beers for the standing-room-only crowd.
Adrian Hanauer, though, was unquestionably the man of the hour.
A local businessman whose family owned a successful bedding manufacturing company, Hanauer dated his soccer fandom to the first time he caught a glimpse of the North American Soccer League Sounders at the age of eight in the ’70s. He became the managing partner of a minor-league iteration of the club in 2002, an investment so shaky he once convinced his players to begrudgingly take pay cuts just to keep the team solvent. In this moment, in 2007, scanning a sea of beaming faces, that initial sacrifice was worth it.
Few patrons were aware how close Hanauer had been to landing an MLS franchise two years earlier — and that he viewed the delay as a blessing in disguise.
For most of the 2000s, the league stood on trembling legs. In 2002, it contracted two of its 12 teams, the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny. The U.S. men’s national team’s run to the World Cup quarterfinals that same year inspired a brief uptick in interest, but when Hanauer submitted his first expansion bid in 2005, he did so with trepidation. When the league went with Salt Lake City instead, Hanauer reacted partially with disappointment but with an underlying sense that it was for the best. In the minor leagues, at least operating costs were lower. At the time, MLS was a risky bet.
A decade on from that announcement at the George & Dragon, Hanauer’s club and the league he eventually joined were almost unrecognizable. By 2016, Major League Soccer boasted 22 teams, with a second Los Angeles club on the way and a Miami franchise theoretically in the offing. MLS HQ proudly unveiled a list of 10 cities competitively bidding for the final four slots in what the league said would ultimately settle at 28. Commissioner Don Garber’s oft-stated goal of becoming an internationally relevant league remained outlandish but was no longer incomprehensible.
If the world’s game hadn’t yet broken into mainstream American consciousness, professional soccer was on steadier ground on these shores than ever before. In many ways, it had Hanauer’s Seattle Sounders to thank. The Sounders, along with the Toronto FC team that was part of the same wave of expansion, created a blueprint that every successful new franchise since has borrowed.
Whereas the original clubs catered to a suburban crowd, building youth practice fields next to no-frills stadiums in an attempt to draw in soccer moms, Seattle played in the heart of its city. It catered to and worked with its most dedicated fans, cultivating a supporters’ culture that was at the time rare in MLS. By sharing business operations with the NFL’s Seahawks, the club was lent immediate credibility.
The payoff resulted in attendance figures that would be the envy of teams even in the biggest leagues in the world. The Sounders averaged more than 42,000 fans per home game in 2016, the second-largest figure in the Western Hemisphere and in the top 35 internationally — topping juggernauts such as Chelsea in England and AC Milan in Italy.
Yet as the club continued to mature, Hanauer wanted more. Midway through the 2016 season, he and the Sounders brass began drawing up ambitious plans to sell out the entirety of CenturyLink Field within the next decade. Timed around what they hoped would be a United-States-co-hosted 2026 World Cup, Seattle aimed to fill all 67,000 seats for every game, which would vault it comfortably into the top 10 in the world.
Before those grand plans came to fruition, though, the Sounders needed to finally win it all.
For all of the club’s early, consistent success, Seattle had yet to actually win the league. There was a sense that its grand project was stagnating. Buzz around the city had flatlined, its sports fans tiring of the team that reached the postseason annually only to fall short every year.
To reach Hanauer’s lofty goals — and drag MLS into heights even Garber might marvel at — the Sounders needed the jolt of a championship.
To get there would require the kind of tumult a club previously built on stability had never known, a power struggle over the present and future of the franchise. To get there would take firing the only coach Seattle’s modern era had ever known — and a title run so unlikely it could have hardly been scripted.

One
Sigi Schmid sat in silence in his cluttered office, staring blankly out the window when not looking down at hands creased with age.
The walls of the room were covered with photos of sweaty, jubilant soccer players, most of them lifting one silver trophy or another. To look up would mean coming to grips with all he’d accomplished here and, by extension, what he had just lost. To look up would be an admission that it was over.
The old coach had been fired once before, by his hometown L.A. Galaxy. This felt more personal, somehow. The hollow ache in his chest was more repressive than he remembered.
Seattle was supposed to be his legacy, the exclamation point on a long and storied career. In seven previous campaigns, starting with the Major League Soccer expansion season of 2009, Schmid’s Sounders never once missed the playoffs. They won four U.S. Open Cups, not the league championships they craved but trophies nevertheless.
Seattle’s off-field gains started with the consistent success the winningest coach in MLS history built from scratch. Yet the ultimate triumph proved elusive. To fans weaned on steady victories, the shortcomings grew more unacceptable with each passing year.
Festering frustration came to a head in the summer of 2016, midway through a season during which everything that could have gone wrong had.
After a decision that felt simultaneously abrupt and a long time coming, Schmid found himself on the wrong end of an early-morning phone call informing him of his termination. Sitting in what was now his former office, he peered out the window as the team that was no longer his walked out to practice without him.
Schmid pulled his phone out of his pocket, checked its blank face for what he hoped was an update on his ride and sighed. A gentle knock disturbed his brooding. Nicolas Lodeiro walked in with his hand outstretched before pulling Schmid in close for a hug.
“I’ll do everything I can to help make the playoffs, take on any role,” Lodeiro promised, prescient if a few days late to save the coach’s job. “I’ve come here to win titles.”
His boldness drew a resigned smile from Schmid: “You’ve come to the right place.”
Schmid had personally helped recruit Seattle’s new star. He’d coached the player’s previous coach in Columbus back in the day, and in this business, personal touches like that could make all the difference. Lodeiro, he was sure, would turn the season around. He was the missing piece. The timing of Lodeiro’s addition as an impact midseason signing was an unfortunate coincidence. That Schmid was somehow still in the building upon his arrival was considerably more awkward.
Out in the hallway, visibly uncomfortable with this exchange of pleasantries, stood general manager Garth Lagerwey. This was supposed to be a cleaner break. Lagerwey hadn’t spared a thought to how it would look if the coach’s ride was running late.
For a franchise often regarded as MLS’s model of stability, the overlap was illustrative. Seattle’s past and future eras collided often that summer, but rarely as clumsily as they did that morning. Lagerwey finally had the control he had long desired, but the transition was never going to be as straightforward as he’d hoped.
***
For once in his life, Lagerwey’s timing was off. As such, the collision course between him and Schmid was inevitable from the outset.
When Lagerwey was hired as GM, in the winter of 2015 and away from Salt Lake, the Sounders were coming off the most successful year in their history. A few bounces the other way, and Seattle could’ve become the first team in league history to sweep all three major trophies in a single season. Coming in as an interloper from the outside, Lagerwey did not find an especially eager audience at staff meetings. And why would he?
Schmid was open to collaboration, more so than most of his detractors knew. Longevity like his demanded adaptability. Building trust and gaining his ear, though, took time. The coach still set the tone during meetings, and his voice carried the weight of the last word.
So far, the system had worked. Seattle’s brain trust experienced only sustained success from year one. Even if they hadn’t yet summited the loftiest peak, in the winter and spring of 2015 the breakthrough felt inevitable.
“It was stupid,” Lagerwey said, “to take the job when I did.”
Of all the adjectives used to describe the general manager, not even his biggest critics often reach for stupid . Even they would allow that despite his faults, Lagerwey possessed