#GarthIn #GarthOut

As a fan there are only two things I can do to change the course of the team. First, I can vote with my dollars. Second, I can vote to retain the GM. That's it. They've already got my dollars for season tickets, so that only leaves one thing.

Garth in. An argument to vote to retain the General Manager.

Garth has been with the sounders a little over three years now. In that time he's improved the club and obtained the previously unobtainable: the coveted MLS cup. Taking over for Adrian he kept the best of the culture from before him. It's a place players love to be and feel cared for and they recommend it to other players. Community and charity remains core to the Sounders values.

For years the Sounders had been in a negative cycle of having to react in emergency situations with signings and expenditures, limiting their choices and dampening potential team high peaks. Garth instituted a long-term-outlook-first approach to managing the team. He stepped back and looked at the club holistically from top to bottom and made sweeping changes to previous approaches. For the first team, he insisted on finding a style he could acquire pieces around. He turned the team from a collection of the best talent we could get at the time to a balanced entity where the next man up has already been focused on his job and role before he was needed. Garth invested heavily in cultivating talent from the ground up. He built the Sounders academy into one of the best in the country where players see full a path to S2 and then the first team. He partnered broadly with youth clubs and has innovated in areas such as player college scholarships.

Garth has made the hard decisions when he needed to. When the team was floundering and had lost confidence in its coach, he fired Sigi, put in the right coach and worked on bringing in great assistants (Gonzo, Preki) to support him. He's walked away from more deals than we know to acquire players when the selling teams have wanted to gouge the Sounders limited dollars to spend.

In a league with such high parity of rules, in order to be better than other teams you have to work harder and smarter than the other teams. Garth's moneyball style leverages the Sounders reputation to bring in high quality international players for far less than other MLS teams have been capable of. Players like Ivanshitz, Leerdam, Torres, Wolff, Rodriguez and Jones that any MLS would salivate over have been brought in for nearly zero additional cost. Bringing high cost players in during the summer smartly kept us peaking in the playoffs.

Consecutive MLS cup appearances and one cup brought home speak volumes about how successful his approach has been. Repeated success at the highest MLS level has afforded him the right to continue as the Sounders GM.

Garth out. An argument to vote not to retain the General Manager.

In Garth's three years, the sounders have been as bad as they have been good. Three straight slow starts have pushed fans to question what the pattern is. So far this year has been the worst stretch we've had as part of MLS. In this same period, S2 have also performed poorly league-results-wise. With minimal reaction to severe, short term problems fans have begun to question the commitment of the club.

Before Garth, our motto was Hella-greedy. We wanted all the trophies and went after them with all our ability. It's now clear that the Sounders only goal is the MLS cup. Opportunities for silverware that means anything are few. One of the ones the club has built huge reputation for is the US Open Cup. Garth de-prioritized it. We no longer commit much of the club's focus to winning this tournament. Garth is quoted as saying we need an opportunity to play the kids. This can only be interpreted as need a place to improve bottom talent for something other than USOC. Garth has also stated winning CCL is a club priority. This is a tournament way bigger than MLS cup and way more elusive transient than any other. Winning it would put the Sounders on the map globally and be the ultimate in ambition.

However, Garth did not go all-in or change general strategy to win CCL. The team wasn't sufficiently prepared for CCL before the season. Garth stated a "a match fell through", I believe with a Mexican team. We entered CCL with open roster spots. We didn't use available TAM and DP slot resources to maximize the starting 11 for our best chance against Mexican teams that are generally better position by position. All of these are squarely Garth's responsibility and he showed that CCL wasn't a priority or true ambition by failing to make possible advantages happen.

And ambition appears to be on the decline. Recent quotes show where his mind is at and living with a 'decent' team for over half a season is adequate. It's OK to have long periods where we're not spending near the maximum allowable as we wait years trying to find a perfect fit. The perfect has become the enemy of improving. The promise of always being better years from now isn't good enough. We no longer have the ambition to be investing in talent as much as even the top 4-5 teams in the league. We don't aim to be the GOAT, we aim to be the most efficient. As a fan I don't give a rat's ass about efficiency if it isn't actually making us great.

While we're getting some good players, we don't target the highest player talent. The overarching goal of long term efficiency has led to many of our new players being a matter of what deals fall into our lap instead of planning or the best players we can get. Svennson and Kim were snatched up when China needed to offload them. Wolff's acquisition came into existence and was put together in a couple of weeks. There are also three HUGE misses to call out here. First, Joevin Jones was relied on in much of our offense last year. Losing him should have sent alarm bells ringing that we had a major offensive production hole. Gambling on Nouhou or the rest of the same people to suddenly begin producing similar offensive results should be considered insanity for a GM, but gamble he did and it has proven a costly mistake. Second, our talent at forward does not compete with the best of Mexico (for CCL). After Morris went out, it was inexcusable not to replace or upgrade for what was supposedly our highest aim with no return in sight. Lastly, we chose to miss out on arguably the most exciting, dynamic player in MLS. We had Almiron's rights and instead let him go to Atlanta for $75k GAM. He would be lighting it up in Seattle, creating excitement where there is none. Garth said we didn't have the budget to bring him in. However, we've now waited two years and haven't used an available DP slot. If we can wait years with the goal of signing the best fit player, we should also be open to striking when the iron is hot for such an amazing young talent.

Maybe it's not fair, but Garth must go. He may be the best GM in MLS, but we should use our only power to show he's not being the best GM for the Sounders.