It’s amazing how many similarities there are between the Portland Timbers and Seattle Sounders FC, when you start looking at the teams’ personnel. Perhaps amazing is too much, but between the teams’ mirror-image midfields, complements out wide, veterans in central defense and experience in goal, in some areas, the teams feel cut from the same cloth.
Fans won’t want to think of the similarities between the world’s Charas and Alonsos or Valeris and Lodeiros, because there is never a reason a Portland supporter would want to empathize with Seattle. And vice versa. But in how these teams are constructed, the talents at the team’s disposals, as well as the clubs’ results over the last two regular seasons (with only five points between them), you see there are few things that, player for player, truly separate the Timbers and Sounders.