TUKWILA — In the exciting aftermath of a goal, it’s easy to forget how a team got there; easy to overlook how the ball worked its way from player to player, eventually ending at the feet of whoever put the ball in the back of the net.
But more and more often when you watch the Seattle Sounders this season, you’ll notice their goals are the culmination of a slow buildup, and not just the work of a nice pass or two and a clinical finish. With these Sounders, many goals are a big-picture production.
In last weekend’s 2-0 victory over Vancouver, for example, the Sounders completed an astonishing 24 passes before Marco Pappa connected with Chad Barrett with pass No. 25 to set up the team’s second goal. It was roughly a minute of non-stop possession leading up to the goal — such a long buildup, in fact, that the TV broadcast missed the first three passes because a highlight of an earlier play was being shown.
The 25-pass sequence was the longest leading up to a goal this season and second longest since 2010, according to MLSSoccer.com.
The Sounders had a couple of other lengthy possessions in that game that didn’t end in goals, and against New York City FC two weeks earlier they strung together 18 passes to set up an Obafemi Martins goal.
So no, it’s not your imagination, these Sounders are better at possessing the ball than previous versions of the team.
With Gonzolo Pineda and Pappa each in his second season in Seattle’s midfield along with Osvaldo Alonso, there is a better understanding between players, more cohesiveness not just within the midfield, but from the back four all the way to the forwards. And those midfielders’ technical abilities, along with those of forwards Martins and Clint Dempsey, make this team better suited than most in Major League Soccer to play keep-away.
“There’s a lot a players who are technically good, and they like to interconnect passes,” said Sounders coach Sigi Schmid. “When you’ve got Pineda and Alonso and Dempsey and Pappa and Obafemi and guys like that, that’s something they want to do, so that helps us in terms of stringing together long passing sequences. It’s something we’ve been working on as well because it’s something that seems to fit the character of this team.
“Every team is different. Even though you think it’s basically the same team or a lot of the same players, each team each year takes on a little bit of a different dynamic, and that’s just the dynamic of this team, that’s something that they’re comfortable with.”
While Pappa’s through ball to Barrett was perfect, and Dempsey’s back-heel pass to Martins was highlight-reel material, the little work done up to those passes was just as important. Well before Martins split New York’s defense with a perfectly timed run, that defense was widened by a sequences off passes from Dempsey to Pineda to Alonso to Dylan Remick that moved the ball from the middle of the field to the left wing.
Before those killer final passes can happen, midfielders such as Alonso and Pineda have to put in the work, moving off the ball, setting up the short, easy passes that lead to an eventual payoff. Pineda didn’t register an assist on either of the aforementioned goals, but he completed four passes leading up to the New York goal and seven in Vancouver.
“You need connectors,” Schmid said. “Every team needs connectors. When you look at all the great teams around the world … you look at all those teams, they have somebody in the midfield that’s sort of a connector for them. He’s maybe not getting all the assists and all the attention and all the glory, but players need to connect to keep the play going and the ball flowing.”
Good teams that possess the ball — Barcelona is the perfect example in global soccer (and to be clear, nobody is saying the Sounders are Barcelona) — do so with a purpose that goes beyond just keeping the ball away from an opponent. All of those passes slowly break down a defense, or even deject an opponent, leading to a brief letdown that is enough for a good offense to exploit.
“They put pressure on the first two, three passes, they don’t get it, then they get frustrated,” said Alonso, who completed five passes in the buildup to Martin’s goal in New York, and six leading up to Barrett’s goal in Vancouver. “That’s good for us to keep the ball and find a way to score a goal.”
While all that passing is going on, forwards such as Barrett and Martins move around, looking for soft spots in the defense and sensing when is the right time to make a run.
“People are like, there were 20-some passes in the defensive half and those passes don’t mean anything; Barcelona does it, and when they do it, it means something,” Barrett said. “It was a beautiful play up to the goal. All of those passes gave Pappa that much space and gave him the time to look up and find me. We made eye contact, I made the run, perfect through ball and I finished it.”
Schmid and his players were in agreement that Saturday’s game was one of the team’s best performances this season, and a lot of that had to do with how well Seattle possessed the ball.
“That was one of the things we did really well,” Barrett said. “Our video today was pretty much all our possession. We had spells, a couple of them, that were a minute long, 1:30 long, and that’s really deflating for another team.”
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