Seattle thrashes Inter Miami to win 2025 Leagues Cup

Seattle has been competitive in MLS all season. It's fourth in the Western Conference, two places above where Inter Miami sits in the hyper-competitive East. But even though Seattle has proved its bona fides time and time again on the field, it entered this match as a clear underdog in the eyes of the public. 

Blame it on the superstar effect: Miami's ex-Barcelona squadron of coach Javier Mascherano, striker Luis Suarez and playmaker Lionel Messi made Seattle's largely homegrown lineup look positively quaint by comparison.

That comparison suited Seattle coach Brian Schmetzer just fine. As MLS' longest-tenured coach by a mile — he's led the Sounders since their second-division days in the early 2000s — Schmetzer knew what his young players were capable of, even if Miami and the rest of the American soccer fandom didn't.

"Messi is arguably the best player the world has ever seen," Schmetzer deadpanned before the match. "But we have Paul Rothrock."

Rothrock, a local talent from Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, is no international superstar — and that turned Schmetzer's words into a rallying cry for Seattle. The club even offered to exchange people's pink Messi jerseys for green Rothrock ones in honor of Schmetzer's unyielding faith in his man. 

And what an offer it wound up being: Rothrock delivered the game-clinching third goal in the 90th minute that handed Seattle the Leagues Cup trophy. Anyone who swapped their Messi jersey for Rothrock's wound up getting a pretty good deal.

Seattle focused its Leagues Cup attack on a particular area of strength: aerial play. Miami is a rich, talented and intelligent team, but it is demonstrably not a tall one, and it has always struggled to handle floated overhead set pieces. Its tallest player, defender Ian Fray, is just 6-foot, and its technically gifted midfielders are shorter still. None of them is particularly adept at winning headers.

Seattle knew that, and it fielded a series of tall, aerially gifted players (6-foot-2 defender Yeimar, 6-foot-6 defender Jackson Ragen, and 6-foot striker Osaze De Rosario) to take advantage of Miami's weakness. Seattle worked hard to create attacking scenarios that ended in headers, and it was one of those scenarios that opened the scoring in the 26th minute. 

Seattle forward Jesus Ferreira, sitting deeper in midfield, played a beautiful ball out to full back Roldan on the far right flank, who floated a perfect overhead ball into Miami's penalty box. De Rosario out-leapt everyone in the Miami box and slammed the ball into the back of the net.

De Rosario was the perfect player to open the scoring for Seattle. Forget international superstars: despite being the son of beloved MLS legend Dwayne De Rosario, Seattle's De Rosario Junior started this season with the Tacoma Defiance, Seattle's lower-division feeder team. He only appeared in Seattle's Leagues Cup team because its first-choice striker, Jordan Morris, was injured and its second-choice striker, Danny Musovski, was suspended. 

On paper, no one on the Leagues Cup final field was further away from being a champion than De Rosario was. 

But the game isn't played on paper, and champions aren't made in spreadsheets. At the end of the day, it was De Rosario — and his humble, creative and utterly deserving Seattle team — who played like a champion in the Leagues Cup final.

Miami, meanwhile? It ended the match by starting a fistfight with Seattle's joyous players. Miami might be stacked with international superstars, but its actions made it clear that the right team — the real champions — won out.

Now that the Leagues Cup has ended, Seattle will return to MLS action on Sept. 13 against Los Angeles Galaxy. Miami will return to MLS action on the same day against Charlotte FC.