It truly beggars belief. The Seattle Sounders just lost their eighth straight league game, a new club record, and they did it at home against an Austin FC squad sitting 14th out of 15 teams in the Western Conference. This wasn’t just any loss; it was their fourth straight home league defeat, another club record we never wanted to see. By the time this team takes the field again on Saturday against FC Cincinnati, it will have been more than 100 days since they even claimed a single point in league play. One hundred days! We’re talking about rarefied depths of suck, folks, the kind usually reserved for the absolute worst teams in MLS history.
The Unfathomable Collapse Against A Terrible Team
Let’s talk about the opponent for a second. Austin FC came into Lumen Field with a horrendous 1-6-1 record over their previous eight league games. Their only win in that stretch? Against *our* Sounders, several weeks ago at Q2 Stadium. They were winless in 11 road matches across all competitions, having scraped together just three points. Plus, this was their sixth match in 19 days, with three more coming in the next ten. Austin FC’s manager Davy Arnaud even swapped out all but one starter from their last game, giving goalkeeper Damian Las his MLS debut start. You’d think that would be the perfect recipe for Seattle to snap out of it, right? Nope. Somehow, the Sounders still managed to lose, piling on another defeat to a team that should have been an easy target. As Sounders forward Danny Musovski put it in a near-empty locker room, “I just think every loss is just more painful. It keeps compounding on top of each other. It’s tough, and we’re trying to get out of it.”
Deserving This Pain? That’s The Hard Truth.
The most frustrating and depressing part of this whole nightmare stretch is that it’s tough to argue the Sounders have deserved much better. These eight losses have come mostly against bad teams. LAFC was the only team even in a playoff spot during this brutal run, and even *they* were on a three-game losing streak when they faced Seattle. We’ve been outscored a brutal 18-4 and only even held a lead in one game, when we scored first against the Portland Timbers on the road. The Sounders have, unfortunately, earned virtually every bit of this pointless stretch. Against Austin FC, there was a glimmer: they finally snapped a seven-game streak where they had an xG disadvantage, and Snyder Brunell’s inclusion at halftime provided a genuine spark. For about 20 minutes in the second half, the Sounders actually looked dangerous. But, as we’ve seen too many times, it “failed to materialize into anything of actual consequence.” Head Coach Brian Schmetzer’s postgame comment sums it up: “There are no positives here. You are goin.” And that’s all we needed to hear.
What’s next for the Sounders? A Saturday match against FC Cincinnati. We’re well past the point of looking for positives. The pain is compounding, and we’re all just desperate to see *something* change before this season completely spirals into the history books for all the wrong reasons.
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by Sounder at Heart.
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