Adrian Hanauer had a stomach ache.
The Seattle Sounders owner had walked through his team’s gleaming new facility in the first days the team was moving in this spring and just couldn’t shake the feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Located at the site of the old Longacres thoroughbred horse track in Renton, Washington, about a 15-minute drive from Seattle-Tacoma Airport, the former Boeing headquarters was now retrofitted as a state-of-the-art practice facility and the new home base for the club. It is less than six months old and the gym still smells like the fresh rubber of the floor mats and weights. The training room is equipped with hyperbaric chambers and cold and hot tubs; the team dining room feels more like a downtown bar than a cafeteria, its walls decorated with pictures and jerseys from the club’s history. Hanauer’s office there is open and still not filled up yet. It feels more like a small lobby than an office. There is no desk, but rather a large table and some couches and chairs. A wall of windows overlooks the pristine fields where the team trains.
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As Hanauer meandered the halls and locker room and office, he kept asking himself: Is it too nice?
“Like, it just really made me uncomfortable,” Hanauer recalled.
Hanauer had guided the franchise from his early days of investment in 2001 when the Sounders played in what was then called the A-League in front of a few thousand fans. He helped turn it into the marquee club of Major League Soccer. Like watching a child grow up, the days when they had to get on hands and knees to tape down the turf at Memorial Stadium felt like a lifetime before, and yet also just yesterday.
For Hanauer, the duct tape at Memorial was still so much of what made up the identity of the club. And there is little separating the team from himself.
“It’s kind of my entire identity at this point,” Hanauer said.
The Sounders had found a way to survive. They won hearts in the 1970s and early 1980s in the NASL, including that of Hanauer, who had gone down to watch the Sounders play at Memorial as a young boy. They were brought back in the American Professional Soccer League in 1994, and Hanauer bought in after a chance encounter with the then-Sounders general manager, Brad Kimura, on a plane in 2001. The Sounders grew in the A-League, which became the USL in 2005.
Would all of that journey, the grind, be lost inside these new halls?
“We talked about this a lot before it opened, the context is important,” said Sounders chief business officer Hugh Weber, a Tacoma native and longtime friend of Hanauer who joined the franchise two years ago after years of working with the New Jersey Devils and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. “People need to know that this doesn’t define our core ethos.”
As the Sounders marked the 50th anniversary of their club on Saturday with a 2-0 win over Minnesota United, the fight to hold on to that history amidst the inevitability of evolution existed far beyond just the new training facility.
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When the Sounders entered MLS in 2009, they announced themselves with star designated players and sell-out crowds. They were quickly considered the big dogs of the league, and their popularity in the market became one of the key selling points and catalysts for the MLS’ growth. On the field, the success is unprecedented. Since entering MLS, the Sounders have missed the playoffs just once, in 2022, the same year they became the first MLS team to win the modern version of the CONCACAF Champions League. They have won four U.S. Open Cups, two MLS Cups and one Supporters’ Shield.
“At the beginning of the year, when guys come in, they know that the standard and the goal is to win trophies,” Sounders homegrown forward Jordan Morris said. “And I think it’s important that any player that comes here, any player that puts on the jersey, understands that.”
The MLS landscape has shifted dramatically over the last decade and a half, however.
No longer are the Sounders top spenders in MLS. They have been surpassed by the likes of Atlanta United, LAFC, Toronto FC, the Chicago Fire, FC Cincinnati, the Columbus Crew and numerous others. They are just two years removed from winning a trophy no other MLS team has won, and yet the Sounders are also at a crossroads.
So far, Seattle has found a way to maintain success, but the challenge is only growing and Hanauer knows evolution is the only path for survival. The vision for that evolution exists both with the work being done inside that brand-new building at Longacres and in the land all around it.
Brian Schmetzer hasn’t unpacked the boxes in his new office yet.
Schmetzer understands as well as anybody the expectations in Seattle. Upstairs in the Sounders’ office is a sign taken off one of the stores from his father’s famous sporting stores in the Seattle area: Schmetzer’s Sporthaus. He was born and raised here and has played, coached or worked across nearly every team and level of Seattle’s storied soccer history. For the first 20 minutes of an interview, Schmetzer is rattling off the names of historic figures in the market with whom he played or coached. Telling stories from the old days of lessons learned in those first training sessions in the NASL or beers bought by Hanauer for the team after Sounders wins in the USL days.
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Seattle is sitting closer to the bottom of the Western Conference standings than the top and Schmetzer, despite his longevity at a club where he signed as an 18-year-old in the NASL, knows the nature of pro sports. Those boxes sitting to the left of his desk are a reminder of that.
Schmetzer doesn’t love the word “culture,” but he knows enough to know that in Seattle the club is built around two things: “the connection between the players and the fans,” he said, and “winning, because we have to win.”
Sounders general manager Craig Waibel said the latter is omnipresent.
“The fans are very clear: There’s an expectation here to win every game and I think it’s a healthy expectation,” Waibel said. “You know, not every club has that. … Ultimately, what’s defined the Sounders is winning, and I don’t think that gets lost on the fans.”
MLS’ rulebook is complex, but overall the keys to sustained success are typically straightforward. Chief among them is the ability to hit on designated players, and the Sounders have done that with astounding regularity. It started in the expansion season with Freddie Ljungberg and carried forward with players like Fredy Montero, Mauro Rosales, Obafemi Martins, Clint Dempsey, Osvaldo Alonso, Nico Lodeiro and Raul Ruidiaz. If there is a through line to the trophies, it’s that.
That hit rate can be attributed to a number of things, but Seattle has also boasted widely-respected front office executives, including inaugural coach Sigi Schmid, current Inter Miami sporting director Chris Henderson and current Atlanta United president Garth Lagerwey, who is widely considered the best sporting executive in MLS history and left Seattle in November 2022 having built a team that won two MLS Cups, advanced to two other MLS championship games and won a Champions League. (Hanauer served as the team’s general manager from 2002-14, when Lagerwey was hired.)
Waibel became just the third GM in the team’s MLS history in 2022. Like many people around the Sounders front office, Waibel has close links to the area. He grew up in Spokane and his wife is from Bellevue; he attended the University of Washington and played for the Sounders in the A-League. The tall GM with a shaved head still looks like the center back that roamed MLS fields for 11 years, winning four MLS Cups along the way.
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The job he has isn’t an easy one.
The Sounders still carry all of the expectations, but they are operating with a far different budget. Observers around the league wonder whether the Sounders will be able to keep up with the big spenders, or if the pace of the league’s growth will push them down the pecking order.
“I’m not gonna sit here and say we’re spending the most money,” Waibel said. “We’re not spending the most money. Anyone can do that research. You know, you look at transfer fees, which is where most of the money in MLS is spent.”
But Waibel added, “it’s not just the money that solves it.”
Waibel’s job is to put together a competitive roster, but it’s more than that. The Sounders finished second in the Western Conference last year, but the pragmatic approach to winning games wasn’t as entertaining as fans wanted. The club has to win, but also win pretty. They are chasing rivals and chasing their own history.
Hanauer, who sits on the league’s sporting and competition committee that determines league rules, is probably better-versed on roster building than any owner in the league. He is at the facility every day and contributing to decisions at every level. Weber laughs telling stories about Hanauer going to a rock quarry to pick out features for the drive into the facility, and of finding the furniture that fills the office.
Hanauer isn’t concerned with whether the Sounders are considered big spenders or not, pointing to MLS’ competitive balance and the fact that Seattle is far from a bottom-spender, too.
“I see zero empirical evidence that spending money leads to success in MLS at this point in time,” he said.
That may be true to an extent, but the vast majority of MLS Cup winners in the last 15 years have been high spending teams, from the LA Galaxy to Toronto FC, LAFC, Columbus, Atlanta and, yes, those Sounders teams.
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In today’s MLS, considering the heft of ownership groups that have entered the league in recent history, the Sounders are likely going to have to do it by being smarter, not by outspending.
“I believe that in our league, great clubs are the aggregate of all the pieces,” Hanauer said. “Yeah, players are important, but so are the coaches, and so are the medical staff, and the data and analytics, and the sports science, and the support staff, and the dieticians, and the administration, and all of the business people and how we all connect.”
The Sounders typically have invested in areas of the front office that assist in spending, like data and analytics. The new Longacres facility should help with recruitment, too. Seattle’s first DP signing under Waibel, Pedro de la Vega, who arrived with a transfer fee around $7 million, has missed most of the season due to injury. It’s not clear if they’ll be aggressive in the summer window or willing to spend more, but the roster is approaching a point of turnover.
The Sounders, though, must figure out a way to get their roster to compete not just with the very best in MLS, but also the world’s best. The CONCACAF Champions League win in 2022 means Seattle will play in next year’s FIFA Club World Cup. They will be ambassadors trying to sell the league, just as they were when they entered MLS with such fanfare in 2009.
Seattle will also be stepping on to that stage at a time when they are rethinking their own growth. It is a transformation that may start with the land around the Longacres facility.
On Monday, a few days after celebrating their 50th anniversary, the Sounders officially announced their acquisition of the NWSL’s Seattle Reign. The purchase, made in partnership with investment firm The Carlyle Group, is a massive step toward how they see the next 50 years of the business.
The Reign’s logo was already on the wall of the training facility last month, a sign of the then-pending sale. The belief is that the organization will now be able to reach more fans and grow soccer in the market across both the Sounders and Reign. It’s part of a plan to expand the impact of the business as the league and team look to grow at a key moment in time for the sport in the United States, with the 2026 World Cup just around the corner.
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“We have two core priorities,” Weber said. “One is to double our fan base and one is to double our business, and doubling our business doesn’t mean doubling our ticket revenue, doubling our business means doubling how we think about this as an enterprise.”
It is vital for the Sounders to find a path to the levels of sustained success they have had their entire history in MLS, not just for the on-field results, but also for the relevance they have long had in their home market. The Sounders’ attendance is down this year, a trend over the last few years that the club needs to reverse.
Among the major decisions Seattle has is what to do about the stadium where it plays. Currently a tenant at Lumen Field, the club’s lease is up in eight years. The lease, which has friendly terms, feels like a ticking clock. Hanauer and Weber said that the team, among other things, is considering whether to build a soccer-specific stadium on the Longacres campus, which is accessible by train but would obviously not have the same convenience of Lumen Field.
“We would be remiss if we didn’t do the work to find out if it was if it made sense,” Weber said.
There is still a lot of work to be done, Weber emphasizes. The club wants to “engage our fan base” and also meet with government officials and partners. It has to make financial sense. But Longacres has opened the possibility of a stadium, which might not have existed any time before.
“Lumen has been a great home, let’s start with that,” Weber said. “They’re partners of ours. The economic equation of this is just a small component of it. There’s a qualitative component, which is: we can’t play on grass at Lumen, right? Just their business model won’t allow for grass. So that, coupled with the cavernous 67,000 versus if you built soccer a soccer-specific you wouldn’t build 67,000, the premium areas, Lumen’s a great building but it’s (22 years old). … We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe we could pull off a fan experience that people would say, ‘I’m going, for sure.’
“If you can imagine this whole campus is full of places to gather and easy parking and train stops, which is just across the way, and places to eat, drink and hang out and then go to the match, if we could do all that then it becomes a compelling qualitative reason.”
It is the most grandiose part of the evolution of the business for the Sounders, but it is hardly the only bullet point in the plan. Seattle plans to do more work in the community space, Hanauer said, and get back to outreach they felt was a strength of the organization pre-Covid. They are also looking into the possibility of building a music venue on the Longacres campus, as well as potential residential and commercial opportunities. The Reign purchase is a huge part of the growth of the business, too.
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As Weber puts it, the Sounders are in the “data and live events business” and they need to leverage the information and success they’ve had in the market to grow their business, and the way the enterprise interacts with the market. It’s more than just about keeping up with the “big spenders” in MLS and about enhancing their place in the sports and entertainment industry.
“What does it mean to actually live-work-play in a soccer ecosystem,” Weber said. “And could we do that 10 minutes from downtown Seattle? That’s just a different level of thinking about your business and about what it means to be a core soccer fan. If we’re good at all of this stuff, it feeds the engine for what we can put out on the pitch.”
Ultimately, what’s out on the pitch is what will measure the success of the club — and of its evolution.
(Top photo: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports)
