Just ahead of Sounders FC’s opener Saturday at the Clink for their fifth Major League Soccer season, it feels as if the club is the middle of a checked swing. Wrong sport, but you get the idea. They haven’t taken a full cut. Yet general manager Adrian Hanauer claims to be close to a rip.
In the swift person of Nigerian striker Obafemi Akinwumni Martins, the Sounders think they may have found the guy they’ve never had — an international-class striker in his prime capable of transforming the offense.
But his current team, Levante of Valencia in Spain, is in the playoffs and thus in a poor mood to part. Imagine the reaction of fans if the Seahawks surrendered Russell Wilson between playoff games in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
“It’s very complicated,” Hanauer said Wednesday. “We want the player, but he’s their most effective player, and they’re in the round of 16 in the Europa Cup.
“It would be hard for me say they want to lose him.”
But Hanauer and the Sounders need a collective drool bucket after describing the 28-year-old veteran of five top-tier European teams. In fact, Sounders owner Joe Roth was passing by our conversation and stuck in his head to hiss, “thisclose” while barely holding apart his thumb and forefinger.
“We think he would score a lot of goals in MLS,” Hanauer said after smiling nervously at his boss. “We think he would pair fantastically with Eddie Johnson. He’s a very entertaining player fans would like.
“Ultimately we’re trying to win a championship, and anything we can do to get over the hump is open game.”
The hump, an MLS Cup championship, has been nearly the only mark against the Sounders in their run from expansion newbies to perennial playoff team. A business success beyond the imagination of everyone in Seattle as well as the rest of American sports, the Sounders, because of the conservative MLS salary cap (this year $3 million), have only one significant way to use their financial muscle — paying salary premiums for up to three designated players.
But they haven’t had premium luck in getting a player who still has enough of his prime to create the impact that, for example, David Beckham and Robbie Keane have had in Los Angeles. You may recall that the expensive savvy of the UK stars was cited as the difference in the Galaxy’s ouster of the Sounders from the playoffs Nov. 18, just after the Seattles broke through against Real Salt Lake to advance in the playoffs for the first time.
In the 5-foot-7 Martins, they think he is likely the straw that will stir the rave-green drink. But negotiations have been tough because Levante knows what it has, and probably smells the urgency from the Sounders.
“There have been reports from the player that he wants to leave,” Hanauer said. “We’re encouraged by the fact that he potentially wants to be in Seattle. As far as a contract, I can’t comment.
“But in the world of football, money talks. At some number, I’m sure they would be fine losing the player.”
If and when Roth & Co. throw down the proper coin and pull Martins through the international transfer window, the Sounders likely will buy out the contract of Christian Tiffert, one of their three designated players. The German midfielder made $625,000 last year — more than 10 times the average non-DP MLS salary — and wasn’t a part of training camp in Arizona the last couple of weeks. By league rule, a decision to keep or buy out Tiffert’s contract must be made by opening day.
But even if Tiffert goes and Martins signs, he won’t be here for the 7:30 p.m. Saturday for the match with Montreal. Also absent is the club’s most valuable player from 2012, Ozzie Alonso. He was yellow-carded twice in the cranky finale against the Galaxy, making for a red card that carries over a one-game suspension into the 2013 season.
Jettisoned earlier in the offseason were star striker Fredy Montero (loaned to a club in his native Colombia) and Jeff Parke, voted the team’s best defender in 2012 (traded to Philadelphia for money and a draft pick).
Not only are the Sounders down potentially four prime-time starters from a year ago, two of the replacements are unlikely to see action. Midfielder and designated player Shalrie Joseph was acquired from Chivas USA, but he is 34 and woefully out of shape. Another newcomer, Djimi Traore, is 33 and just arrived this week from France, where he played for Marseille and is unlikely to be ready for Saturday action.
Even Hanauer wasn’t ready to kid anyone about their fitness. But the Sounders were up against the salary cap from the start of the off-season. Choices were few.
“I’d be lying if I said this off-season wasn’t a challenge from a cap-management standpoint,” he said. “It’s taken longer than I would have liked to reconstruct things to puts us in better position to win the Cup.”
So he’s not bothering to kid much about Joseph and Traore, at least at the start.
“Joseph and Traore are very good signings, but it would be disingenuous to suggest they are in the absolute primes of their careers,” he said. “They’re towards the end, but they are going to add some leadership that we (coach Sigi Schmid and sporting director Chris Henderson) have been talking about for four years that will be good for our team.”
Aside from the work of goalie Kasey Keller and his successor, Michael Gspurning, the Sounders have lacked a take-charge guy who plays in the middle of things.
“We’ve searched over time for players who have experience in championships and in leadership,” Hanauer said. “As an expansion team, you’re just going to do that, generally. To be honest, we’ve looked for that every year, and haven’t quite found the players to step right in. With Shalrie and Djimi, we have that.”
But from a playing standpoint in March, it’s hard to argue that the Sounders are a little Mariners-like like in their inability to make an off-season splash that dazzles a constituency feeling it deserves better.
Coming off a 15-8-11 season and 56 points that was seventh-best in MLS, Hanauer cites two 25-year-old midfielders, Steve Zakuani, fully fit after his broken leg, and Lamar Neagle, the Federal Way prodigy back home again, as parts of the reason to think the Sounders aren’t lacking in championship-level talent.
“We’re a couple of bad bounces and maybe a substitution away from competing in the (2012) MLS Cup,” he said. “For us to make a massive reaction — that we have miles to go to get over the hump — would not have been right.
“To get as close as we did and miss . . . we have a good chance to get there again and beyond.”
In the face of only words, however, the hump remains the mountain.
2 Comments
Martins would be exactly what the Sounders need but I really don’t see Valencia giving him up though the very fact that they’re even listening to the Sounders is interesting. I’d be happy with Martins playing just half a season with the Sounders.
As Hanauer said, money talks.