When it was originally announced that Sporting Kansas City and Houston Dynamo would be joining the Western Conference in 2015, Sounders FC Head Coach Sigi Schmid noted that his team’s path to a trophy-filled season would become much more challenging.
“It just makes the West a little merrier,” he said at the time. “I think it’s going to make it tough in the short term for a West Coast team to win the Supporters’ Shield again, just because it’s going to be so competitive and teams are going to be taking points off each other.”
So far this season, Schmid’s prediction is proving to be accurate. The West is clearly the stronger of the two conferences, and D.C. United leads the league standings with 35 points (10-6-5).
During the preseason, MLSsoccer.com came to the conclusion that the five most difficult schedules in the league all belong to Western Conference clubs. As far as how the two new teams are performing, Sporting KC is sixth in the conference with 30 points (with three games in-hand on first-place Seattle) and Houston is in eighth with 24 points. If they had those same point tallies in the East, SKC would be in second and Houston tied for third.
First and sixth places in the Western Conference are separated by a total of two points. By contrast, D.C. United and sixth-place New England are 11 points apart in the East (and those two teams have played the same number of games).
“Probably didn’t expect it to be this even,” Schmid said this week of the Western Conference. “I think if we‘d not had the run of injuries we had, it’d be a bit of a different story for us at this point. But it is what it is, and we have to deal with that reality. It’s a very tight conference. It’s fortunate for us right now, because everybody is taking points off each other as well. We’ve got a conference game with Colorado this week, and it’s important that we get three points.”
Here are more facts that outline how competitive the West has been this year:
- D.C. is in first place of the Supporters’ Shield standings, and the next half-dozen teams at the top of the table are all from the Western Conference.
- Just one team in the East has more than seven wins this season. There are six Western Conference clubs that have earned over seven victories.
- In terms of goal differential, the top three teams in MLS (and seven of the top nine) are from the West. No team in the Western Conference has given up more than 26 goals, while five clubs in the East have allowed at least 27 goals.
- Even the Colorado Rapids, the last-place team in the West, are tied for the third-fewest goals allowed in the entire league (19 goals yielded in 19 matches).
Sounders FC has been struggling as of late, losing four of its past five games as key players have been missing due to injuries and international duty. The club would like to retain the Shield and earn a first-round bye in the MLS Cup Playoffs, but as long as they remain near the top of a crowded Western Conference, the Sounders will have a chance to accomplish their ultimate goal.
“The most important thing is you’ve got to get into the playoffs,” Schmid said. “You can’t win the MLS Cup unless you get into the playoffs, so we’ve got to put ourselves in a position to get in. And if we can get one of the top two spots, that’s a secondary goal.”
