Let’s start this year: None of this is Clint Dempsey’s fault.
He saw an opportunity to capitalize on success abroad, to bank another big contract before he was too old, and move his wife and children back to the United States, closer to his family and his wife’s family. Once here, the U.S. international did his best – so none of this is meant to criticize Dempsey.
But for the Seattle Sounders this can only be labeled a big swing and miss. So far, at least. There is still plenty of time to reap reward for their swing for the fences … but now the organization is playing from behind on the deal, so to speak.
There is no other way to see it. The organization has done so much right, and has certainly brought energy and emotion to the league in barrels full. Full credit for all that … but they got this one very, very wrong.
For chagrined Seattle Sounders officials, some of this is failure to grasp the laws of unintended consequences. That’s just a misdemeanor offense.
But failure to understand more about the league and how things are won? That’s on them.
The Sounders have never excelled in spending their DP dollars, and here’s more evidence, putting all of their DP dollars once again into the attack. Dempsey, Obafemi Martins and Mauro Rosales are paid handsomely to generate goals, and they didn’t do enough of it.
Dempsey’s sum total: one goal and one assist in 12 matches.
Add in the inability to do something about the goals falling like Pacific Northwest rain at the other end, and it’s not hard to know why Seattle is sitting around today, wondering where it all went wrong, some major soul-searching ahead – and probably some pretty significant organizational changes.
(MORE: What we learned from Portland’s win Thursday over Seattle)
Dempsey was available, and the club got big eyes. They grabbed him up right fast. And in a way, who could blame Sounders officials for that?
But did they really think that defense was good enough? Because it wasn’t and plenty of us were saying so. In the end it was the worst among Western Conference playoff teams and 9th of 10 post-season teams overall. It was only that good because of heroic screening from the league’s top defensive midfielder, Osvaldo Alonso.
That’s bad roster management, period. The midfield was pretty good, but average at very best if we subtract Alonso. And Rosales as a DP this year was a roster mistake; he just didn’t have the DP chops in 2013.
Rosales played sparingly down the stretch. And in a match the Sounders had to have, Rosales was once again on the bench. Manager Sigi Schmid tried to explain it away in tactical terms, but at some point that’s just silly.
Think about it: In a match where Seattle needed goals, Schmid declined to start his DP attacker, but did start three men (Alonso, Adam Moffat and Shalrie Joseph) whose best position is defensive midfielder. Joseph as a forward? That was a massive reach, a gambit that screamed desperation. Any way you slice it, when your DP attacker is on the bench for a match you absolutely, positively have to win, someone near the top of the food chain has made a mighty mistake.
Beyond that, what did Dempsey’s deal do to the Sounders locker room? Hard to say unless you were in there, but Eddie Johnson was clearly unhappy. And it’s fair to wonder if Alonso was, too? Watching Rosales, Martins and Dempsey make more money while he was so singularly critical to the body of work, that cannot make a man very happy.
In the bigger picture, Seattle has a problem worth exploring: it’s about a certain creeping exceptionalism, this idea that everything is better in Seattle. Because it affects roster choices.
It’s fine if fans want to feel this way, that every player who puts on a Seattle Sounders jersey is a talented individual that every club would kill to have, a player who is top-half or top-quarter in the league pool just … well … just because they play for Seattle. I mean, if the Sounders want him …
Again, the defense wasn’t good enough. The roster needed more balance, and a more objective going-over.
Moving forward, management needs to make better choices, and certainly needs to spend those big DP dollars more wisely.