The Sounders played their last season at the Starfire Sports Complex in Tukwila, Washington, which would become the training facility for the MLS team.

The club was founded in 1994 and named after the original Seattle Sounders team, which played from 1974 to 1983 in the North American Soccer League.

[1][2] Former coach Alan Hinton had acquired rights to the Sounders name after the club folded and began a campaign to bring an American Professional Soccer League (APSL; later the A-League) team to the city in 1992.

[5] A bid for a new APSL team, to be named the Sounders and owned by former Microsoft executives Scott Oki and Neil Farnsworth, was announced in September 1993.

[7] The Sounders played in the 1996 CONCACAF Champions' Cup and advanced to the final round in Guatemala City, where they finished at the bottom of a four-team group.

[12] They attracted more spectators in Renton, but found group sales had declined and needed more locker room space for their various teams; in 2000, the Sounders returned to Memorial Stadium.

The team also formed a partnership with English side Cambridge United in 2006 due to the shared involvement of Adrian Hanauer, who bought the Sounders in 2002.

[16] In the early 2000s, the team considered plans to build a soccer-specific stadium with approximately 15,000 to 20,000 seats and a complex of fields in various suburbs, including Fife and Kent.

[20] A move to Tacoma or folding the club were also considered in the event that a rival MLS bid won rights to an expansion team in Seattle, according to Hanauer.

Farnsworth and Oki initially stated that they were interested in becoming minority investors in an MLS team and permit use of the Sounders name, rather than being majority owners.

[24] On November 13, 2007, Major League Soccer (MLS) announced that it had selected Seattle as the recipient of an expansion team that would begin play at Qwest Field in 2009.

[25][26] The Sounders made their second consecutive appearance in the U.S. Open Cup semifinals, where they lost to fellow USL-1 club Charleston Battery in a penalty shootout.

[27] Following a regular season that finished with a 10–10–10 record, the second-division team were eliminated from the playoffs in the first round by the Montreal Impact and played their last competitive match on September 28, 2008.

[28] The Sounders played a series of exhibition matches in Argentina against the reserve squads of local clubs as part of a farewell tour in late October 2008.

[32] After opening the 2008 season at Qwest Field, the Sounders played their remaining 14 league home fixtures at Starfire Sports Complex.

Various exhibition matches against A-League and MLS opponents were played at local high schools, including Marysville Pilchuck in 1998 and Mount Vernon in 1999.

[48][49] The team was rebranded as Seattle Sounders Women in 2003 and was sold in 2008 to Tacoma Tides owner Mike Jennings as part of preparations for the USL–MLS transition.