Garth Lagerwey wants to remain GM of the Seattle Sounders. He lays out a pretty strong case, too, but it's now in the hands of his fans.
The Sounders' second-ever General Manager Vote will end on Oct. 17 at 5 pm PT (8 pm ET). Alliance Council members, consisting of all 2018 Sounders FC season ticket members and their seat designees, suite holders, and half-season package holders and their seat designees, are eligible to vote. Votes can be cast at the stadium, with the last opportunity being Monday's match against Houston (10:30 pm ET | TV & streaming info), or online at SoundersFC.com/GMVote.
On Friday, Lagerwey spoke at length with Sounder at Heart about the vote. He confidently touched upon multiple subjects in the conversation, including transfers, slow starts, the academy, his philosophies for his job and more.
"Ultimately, it's up to the fans to judge if [the transfers] worked out," Lagerwey said. "When we signed [Nicolas] Lodeiro, we won the title. That's a pretty good return on investment. Raul has been really good, I've been really happy with that signing. From our internal perspective, those are big, big expenditures and it was important for us to not just get good players, but to get them at good ages. We have the ability to build around these guys."
This season, the Sounders endured a difficult start to the season and looked as if the franchise would miss the playoffs for the first time in club history. But thanks to a historic win streak, the Sounders are back above the playoff line. Despite having happened three consecutive years, Lagerwey insists the club isn't set up to struggle at the beginning of each season.
"The stuff that I get a little bit frustrated with is the idea that we intentionally start slow-- I'm still mildly incredulous by this," Lagerwey said. "The job is hard. You try to win every game but sometimes you can't. In 2016 we started slow but we held ourselves accountable. We changed the coach, who is in the hall of fame and had been here seven years, I don’t know what bigger response as an organization we can give to a slow start than that."
Part of the reason for this season's slow start was Lagerwey's desire to win the Concacaf Champions League, something he was public and honest about before the season.
"I'm happy to take responsibility for it but I honestly don't know what we could have done differently," Lagerwey said. "I wanted us to win the Champions League. For better or worse, we stated publicly ahead of time that this is what we're doing. That hurt us, there's no question that hurt the start of our season. … There are factual, quantifiable, objective reasons for why we got hurt."
After back-to-back MLS Cup finals with Seattle, on top of his success with Real Salt Lake prior to taking the Sounders' gig, Lagerwey hopes for some goodwill.
"I ask for some faith. ... Five finals in nine years is a decent track record with the expectation put upon this job," Lagerwey said. "At some level either you agree with the methodology or you don’t. I’m probably overly defensive about it. It’s going to be hard to persuade me that a different foundation is the right one."
Lagerwey's position is one of constant scrutiny and he'll soon find out if he'll be able to continue doing it.
"I have the job very few people have done but most people think they can do better than me," Lagerwey said.
