It’s hard to appreciate what you already have. There’s a reason we have so many cliches like “the grass is always greener on the other side,” or in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” Closeness and familiarity can breed fatigue, frustration and a wandering eye at the best of times.
For fans of the Seattle Sounders that seems to be the case. While fans around the league get Big Macs, McRibs, 20-pieces, and McFlurries, Sounders supporters just seem to hear “we’ve got McDonalds at home” on repeat.
Brian Schmetzer has guided the Sounders to three of the greatest in-season turnarounds in the league’s history, starting with his first half-season in charge when he took the reins from Sigi Schmid just as Nico Lodeiro joined the club on the way to Seattle’s first MLS Cup victory in 2016. He did it again along with the addition of another iconic Sounders Designated Player in 2018 when Raúl Ruidíaz joined the side. Most recently he performed some genuine magic in 2024.
This time it wasn’t an addition from outside that changed Seattle’s fortunes but rather giving Paul Rothrock an increased role and returning to the team’s DNA that saw the Sounders recover from the worst start in franchise history to go on one hell of a run that saw them finish a game shy of both the U.S. Open Cup and MLS Cup finals. He’s helped to add two MLS Cup trophies and a Concacaf Champions League trophy to the silverware collection, and took the Sounders to four MLS Cup finals in five years. He’s done all that while feeding Seattle’s impressive talent development pipeline not only into the first team but into the starting lineup.
Schmetzer has performed when the pressure’s been highest and at a level few other coaches can touch. This season he’ll almost certainly push his way into the top-10 for most regular season wins in league history — he’s currently on 125, five behind No. 10 Frank Yallop and 12 behind currently-jobless Jim Curtin at No. 9 — and he’s already got the third most post-season wins with 20; only Sigi Schmid (26) and Bruce Arena (35) have more. He’s also one of only seven MLS coaches to win multiple MLS Cups, to go along with being the only MLS coach to lead a team to CCL glory. Just for good measure, he’s also got two USL championships under his belt.
Despite the accomplishments, Schmetzer’s never won the Sigi Schmid MLS Coach of the Year award. He’s shown off impressive tactical chops, built a team significantly filled with players from Seattle’s academy and development system, overcome significant injuries in his teams throughout his tenure, and bounced back from bad starts to accomplish what he has — all things that typically point to potential award winners — but end-of-year awards tend to be narrative driven, and while those narratives tend to be carried by the national media they start at home. Schmetzer is a humble guy. He doesn’t tend to wax poetic about his tactics or his system; he passes the credit and praise along to his players, assistant coaches and the staff around him; and he doesn’t even have an iconic look (maybe if he wore a monocle?)
We as fans love him for these things, but in our celebration of the local legend who leads our Sounders we have a tendency to cast him as something less than he is. He gets portrayed as an “everyman” and when people talk about him as a coach there is an overemphasis on him as a man-manager, ignoring the decades of experience as a player and a coach that preceded his step into the head coach role he occupies now. In an effort to contrast him with the coaches who do get the love and adoration of national pundits, Schmetzer gets sold short for what he actually does in order to get his teams to play to the level that they do. It’s not a fluke that Schmetzer is so high up the win charts, but if the hometown fans don’t seem to rate him with how he gets discussed, why should pundits consider him when they cast their ballots?
