When the Seattle Sounders joined MLS in 2009, no expansion team had even qualified for the playoffs since the Chicago Fire did it in 1998 (and they could hardly be called an expansion team when the league was only two years old at that point). With Wednesday’s win, the Sounders have now managed to do that in all 10 of their seasons.
That’s an amazing accomplishment, and one I wonder if we’ve sort of taken for granted. The only other MLS team to qualify for 10 straight postseasons was the LA Galaxy, who pulled that off every year from 1996-2005.