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

Matt Pentz

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 Americas top professional division, Major League Soccer.

The mood was festive. Despite the lunchtime hour, Boddingtons, Guinness and local favorite Mannys Pale Ale flowed freely. Drew Carey, the game show host and new teams 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. mens national teams 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, Hanauers 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 Garbers oft-stated goal of becoming an internationally relevant league remained outlandish but was no longer incomprehensible.

If the worlds game hadnt yet broken into mainstream American consciousness, professional soccer was on steadier ground on these shores than ever before. In many ways, it had Hanauers 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 NFLs 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 clubs 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 Hanauers 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 Seattles modern era had ever known and a title run so unlikely it could have hardly been scripted.