ST. LOUIS – St. Louis City SC returned home this weekend following a rough road trip to San Diego last Sunday. City welcomed the Seattle Sounders to Energizer Park on a chilly Saturday evening.
Seattle has been a bogey team for St. Louis in their short time in Major League Soccer. City had won just once in their six previous matchups. In their seventh, City never really troubled the Seattle defense, and a lapse in judgment created the game’s only goal, giving Seattle a 1-0 victory.
Yoann Damet’s City side lineup was bolstered by the return of Marcel Hartel, who missed the San Diego match as he awaited the birth of his second child. Unfortunately, City’s midfield maestro Eduard Löwen is still away from the team, as has been the case for the majority of 2026.
Right back/wingback Tomas Totland missed training during the week with an abdomen strain and was left out of the squad, joining center back Fallou Fall (ankle injury), Tomas Ostrak (leg injury), and Tyson Pearce (hip injury) on the injury list.
As has been the case under Damet, City again lined up in a 3-4-3 formation that morphs into a 5-4-1 defensively, with the wingbacks dropping to the backline and the attacking wingers dropping into a lower block when need be.
The defense and midfield saw no changes from the lineups of the first few matches. Rafael Santos started at left wingback, Dante Polvara, Timo Baumgartl, Jaziel Orozco were the three center backs, and Conrad Wallem again manned the right wingback spot. More on that later.
Chris Durkin and Daniel Edelman worked the engine room in midfield. Marcel Hartel rejoined the attack on the left side, Cedric Teuchert replaced Sangbin Jeong on the right as City hunts for more prowess in front of goal. Simon Becher started as the central striker for the third straight game to start the season.
Venezuelan striker Sergio Cordova, who St. Louis City acquired on loan from famous Swiss club BSC Young Boys, joined the team in training this week and made the matchday squad. Off-season signing Mamodou Mbacke also made the matchday squad as he awaits a City debut.
The way the match started for the first five or 10 minutes, it was a shock that only one goal was scored over 90-plus minutes. The opening stage of the game resembled a basketball game more than a soccer game, but both teams eventually came to their senses, and the game settled into a more conservative, pass-heavy rhythm.
Most of the numbers on the score sheet looked pretty good for City after a half of play. Slightly more possession, more passes, more accurate passes, more shots, but the advantage City had on the field was not translating into trouble for Seattle.
City’s best chance to score, perhaps all game, came in the 13th minute when Cedric Teuchert played a pass to Marcel Hartel running into the Sounders’ 18-yard box. The pass did force Hartel into a tight angle, one that he couldn’t compensate for with his shot that was rather comfortably saved by Seattle keeper Andrew Thomas.
That was one of three shots on target for City in the first half, the other two were speculative efforts from Cedric Tuechert, shots the aforementioned Andrew Thomas didn’t have to work too much to stop. To City’s credit defensively, that was more than their opponents had managed to create through the first 45 minutes.
The moment of the match came less than two minutes after the start of the second half. In an attempt to play the ball out of the corner in City’s half, right wingback Conrad Wallem gave the ball up to Seattle’s Jesus Ferreira at the edge of the City 18-yard box close to the corner flag.
Ferreira spotted his teammate Kalani Kossa-Rienzi drifting into the City box, played a sharp pass that Kossa-Rienzi had to pop up and bring down with his chest, and was given the time to do so by a discombobulated St. Louis defense.
Kossa-Rienzi set his feet and smashed a shot to the bottom-right corner beyond a flailing Roman Bürki. There wasn’t much the City captain and goalkeeper could do in that moment other than voice his frustrations of a breakdown by the City defense.
“It’s a game of mistakes. The blame is not on Conrad [Wallem]. I look more at moments,” Yoann Damet said postgame, not wanting to push blame on any individual. “From that moment, we get punished, there are probably some other moments in the game where we don’t get punished. We need to turn these things into a positive for us; so can we learn from those mistakes and make maybe a different decision in the future.”
Right now, again, we are speaking about building, and with building comes different experiences from those games and those moments.
Down a goal at home and searching for answers in attacking areas, Yoann Damet brought on Sergio Cordova for his first minutes in a City shirt. He wore number 16, the number some fans may remember worn by former City striker Sam Adeniran.
Cordova came on for Cedric Teuchert, who, in his own words following the defeat in San Diego, is still working back to full match fitness. Teuchert was presumably on a minutes limit, having only played as a substitute in 2026 before Saturday night.
Cordova has been brought in to be the guy who offers a different dimension to the City attack than someone like Simon Becher or Brendan McSorley or Cedric Teuchert. Cordova is more of a “traditional” striker, a bigger body, a more physical presence that a defense has to worry about.
But by the time Cordova was on the field, Seattle had decided to defend their lead with everything and everyone they had, crowding the edge of their 18-yard box, forcing City to try to play around them. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity for City’s new striker to make an imprint on the game.
“It’s very difficult to assess Sergio [Cordova] on the time he played because we played against a very low block,” Damet assessed. “The defense was quite compact. Probably not much space, but what he had to do, I felt like he did well. He’s going to give something different for us, and I’m happy we’re able to get him some minutes tonight.”
Cordova wasn’t alone in being frustrated by the Seattle defense throughout the evening Saturday. City as a whole spent most of the second half poking and prodding around the low block of the Sounders.
The best chance for St. Louis in the second half, like the first, was a Marcel Hartel shot attempt that was parried away by Andrew Thomas. This time, Hartel found space at the top of the 18-yard box, picking up a second ball off an errant cross. Hartel’s strike was true, but it was a shot Andrew Thomas had under control the whole way.
When referee Timothy Ford blew his whistle for full time after 96 minutes, boos rang out in Energizer Park. For all their possession and passing, the attack was passive, and a 1-0 defeat was probably the score City deserved.
Again, the numbers on the score sheet looked quite good for City. 62 percent possession, 607 passes to Seattle’s 385, 12 shots to Seattle’s eight. All the numbers were good except the number that’s most important.
“At the end of the day, it’s about the outcome, and you need to score goals to win a game,” said City defender Timo Baumgartl postgame. “That’s our lack in the first three games, we’ve scored one goal. I think we did a decent job in defending. We did a decent job also in playing into the final third, but we were not clinical enough to score.”
Yoann Damet likes the process and the performance he’s seen from his team, but understands the results have to be there.
“I think we created a lot of danger that we didn’t convert enough into clear opportunities,” Damet said following the defeat. “So that’s my way to look back at the game. Looking at the performance, I’m quite happy with where we’re at tonight, so it’s a little bit of a mixed feeling between the performance of the group, and of course the result.
“We controlled the performance, which I’m proud of, the guys worked truly hard. They pushed. I think there are moments that we need to be more decisive. That’s the goal. But there are, again, a lot of positives, which is difficult to say when you don’t see the result.”
With another defeat, City stays in 14th place in the early MLS Western Conference standings. City and cross-state rival Sporting Kansas City are the only two teams in the West to have not won a game yet this season. Kansas City’s worse goal differential is the only thing keeping City off the bottom of the conference.
But this is a long season, and there’s no need to give up just three games in.
“We’re three games into the season, if we throw our heads down now and say everything is lost, I think that’s not the right mentality,” Timo Baumgartl expressed Saturday night. “I’m a generally positive human being. That’s why I’m looking forward now.”
Chris Durkin spoke of wanting to play better at Energizer Park to reward the support of the fans, who have stuck by the team through thick and (mostly) thin times since the team’s debut.
“The two home games, for sure, are extremely frustrating (not getting results),” said Durkin. “But as always, the support from the fans has been incredible. We feel that on the pitch. We’ve said it’s up to us to continue to create the energy for the fans, not the fans creating energy for us. And I think we did that for large stretches of the game. We just got to turn these into three points.”
St. Louis City SC’s search for a first win of 2026 does not get any easier next week as they head to Los Angeles to play one of the best teams in MLS, the undefeated LAFC.
