Sounders—Way More Than Just A Business

For most foreigners from soccer countries it is very difficult to understand how a team that should belong to a city could be uprooted and carried away to another city on the other side of the country.

It’s ridiculous for us to imagine Santos FC in Rio de Janeiro, Boca Juniors in Rosario, Barça in Cadiz. Arsenal in Leicester? Absurd! Well, we have to mention the great fiasco of Wimbledon moving to Milton Keynes, but it is an exception that confirms the rule.

For us a team belongs to a city, or even a neighborhood, and that’s it. It’s your team and nobody would be brave or crazy enough to try and change it. And this is as true in Brazil as it is in Spain or Korea.

So, it’s a worrisome affair to put your heart and passion into a club that will literally disappear (Sonics? What Sonics?). Transferring a team to another city should be classified as a serious crime against an entire town.

Now, let’s talk about MLS. Moving the Earthquakes out of San Jose was a bad sign, ugly stuff in my opinion. Are we going to cheer for “our” club, just to have it taken away from us down the road? Much more than other sports, soccer teams become an addiction, a case of benign sickness. The way passion is building around the Sounders, losing it – suddenly moved down to, say, New Orleans – would be a disaster.

The love being built for the Sounders by Puget Sound folks is a lesson and a sign of things to come. Soccer will take over, it will grow, and although it won’t replace other sports, it will be as great as football (the other kind, the “egghand” one; Great game, wrong name…), or basketball.

I’m not a sociologist, anthropologist or any “logist” out there. Just passionate about soccer. But I can think of a few reasons why the Sounders are such a phenomenon: the Sonics leaving; the passion for soccer without a muse in this state; the small town turning into a big city; the very clever move to keep the Sounders name – if it happened the way I think it did it was brilliant! Great Chess Master’s move!

But at the end of the day what counts is this: Seattle fans showed for the first time in US soccer history that a team is more than just a business. They proved that there is a non-quantifiable value, an intangible characteristic that traditional teams in the world have, that go beyond the business. And this value belongs to the fans.

The only owner of the Sounders whom I know a bit about is Adrian Hanauer. And knowing that he’s a Seattle guy through and through, and was willing to lose a ton of money with the old USL Sounders, making sure we had a pro soccer team in town, I believe he will never even dream of moving the team. I think that the other owners are getting it also. Passionate ownership? I hope so.

The Sounders are already a tradition. I see a behavior towards them that normally takes years to build. A great team? Not yet, not yet. But it will probably come. But if it happens or not they will need a lot of bad decisions, of screwing up beyond belief to destroy what is coming.

I don’t want to take credit away from the ownership, or from the marketing, but what Seattle is showing is that soccer is about us, it’s about the fans and the passion we put into it. The Sounders are the soccer team of Seattle, of the people of Seattle. We are the first city in the USA to have a true soccer squad. One that belongs to the supporters as much as it belongs to their owners.

I haven’t seen much of it – always cooking and serving – running from the kitchen when fans shout in the restaurant, trying to see the replay, but I must tell you: It feels good to be in a soccer city again…

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Tags: Seattle Soccer, Seattle Sounders, Seattle Sounders FC, Soccer fans