By the time July sputtered to a close in Seattle, it looked to all the world like the Sounders would need some kind of miracle to put together a run that’d lead them into the postseason.
Turns out they didn’t need a miracle. They needed Nicolas Lodeiro.
Lodeiro, named the MLS Newcomer of the Year on Monday, didn’t just represent a sea change in the Sounders’ identity. He almost immediately became the kind of high profile signing the league so desperately desires as the face of its newest iteration. Spry (Lodeiro signed at just 27), well-traveled (Lodeiro played in globally renowned clubs like Boca Juniors and Ajax) and unbelievably skilled (just take a slack-jawed trip down his YouTube highlights), Lodeiro represents good scouting and better decision-making.
It’s no surprise he was rewarded with a Newcomer of the Year honor, becoming the third Sounder to capture the honor in just eight years. No fresh face in MLS did more for their team in 2016.
To understand why Lodeiro’s impact was so enormous this year, you have to understand the 2016 Sounders before he arrived. For much of the year, the Sounders either used Clint Dempsey as their primary withdrawn creative force, or simply asked their fleet of deeper midfielders to take a more active role in the attack.
It didn’t work. Dempsey preferred to stay high and find his own space, while neither Osvaldo Alonso nor Cristian Roldan were natural assist men in the final third. As a result, the Sounders were dead last in MLS in team assists through the month of June and nursed one of its least prolific attacks. For the first three months of the season, center back Chad Marshall led the team in goals.
The Sounders had dropped into the Western Conference cellar before stabilizing in ninth when Lodeiro walked in. He arrived in time for a 1-1 draw against the LA Galaxy on July 31, which was also coach Brian Schmetzer’s first match in charge. Lodiero played each of the next 10 games and has played 16 of 17 since joining Seattle including the postseason. In those 1,170 minutes, Lodiero has four goals and eight assists. But it’s perhaps his mental impact on the team’s attacking ethos that’s the most subtly impactful piece of his arrival.
The term “newcomer” is defined by MLS in this instance as “a player with previous professional experience who made his MLS debut in 2016.” Alongside Lodeiro, the other two finalists were Columbus Crew SC forward Ola Kamara and LA Galaxy central defender Jelle Van Damme. Kamara and Van Damme both had compelling cases. Kamara quietly hit for 16 goals in 2016, tied for fifth in the league, while Van Damme emerged as one of the league’s preeminent defenders in his first year in the league.
The real knock against Lodeiro was in the amount of time he actually spent in the league this year. A midseason addition, would Lodeiro’s numbers and impact match up against players with full seasons to their name?
The answer, as we now know, was a resounding yes.
In truth, Lodeiro had more of an impact on the Sounders’ season in half a year than Van Damme or Kamara did in a full season’s worth of work. Very little about the Sounders’ roster actually changed when Schmetzer took over. Roman Torres returned from injury, and the team added wide depth with Alvaro Fernandez, but the Sounders are mostly playing with the same pieces they had at the beginning of the season. And that’s including the loss of Dempsey for the season to an irregular heartbeat.
Lodeiro’s most impressive stat reveals how quickly he took to the league. In 13 regular season games, he averaged 2.8 key passes per game, or passes that led directly to a shot. The Sounders desperately needed this kind of incisiveness in the final ball, something they sorely lacked in the first half of the year and a fact that pushed them into the bottom third in the league in shots on target per match. That key pass total put Lodeiro fourth in the league, just behind Sacha Kljestan, Diego Valeri and Mauro Diaz. Elite company indeed.
Given it’s a smaller sample size than those around him, Lodeiro also averaged a whopping 63.2 passes per game at nearly 80 percent accuracy coming into a new league cold at midseason. Those are Alonso numbers, and Alonso had the best individual season of his career this year.
Coming into a new league is difficult. Entering a new league at midseason for a team attempting to dig itself out of the deepest hole it’d ever been in since joining MLS with a new head coach upped the difficulty level to ridiculous proportions. It’s easy to forget now, but there was plenty of talk about having patience with Lodeiro while he adjusted to a new league, new teammates, new coaching, a new city. And those pleas weren’t out of line. Designated Players in particular usually need at least a full half season to acclimate and find their feet in MLS.
Lodeiro did not. He hit the ground sprinting with both feet from the jump, and he helped flip the Sounders’ season from the brink of anonymity to the brink of the MLS Cup. The Newcomer of the Year vote might’ve looked close on paper, but dig into the realities of what Lodeiro accomplished in such a short amount of time and this one was no contest.
