Sigi Schmid is back home in Southern California, assessing his future following his dismissal as the Seattle Sounders' head coach, and he's already itching to get back onto the field.

Major League Soccer's all-time wins leader, who captured MLS Cup titles with the LA Galaxy and Columbus Crew before guiding the Sounders to five trophies in a little more than seven and a half seasons, says he's disappointed with how things played out last week and is eager for the next challenge.

For me, my passion, my desire, my fire is still there to coach. I definitely still want to win another title, win an MLS Cup." - Sigi Schmid

“I definitely want to continue coaching,” Schmid on Thursday told FourFourTwo USA. “I don't think the fire and passion is gone. I've talked to different people about different things. I'm not ready to be a GM, because I know what a GM has to do, and I wouldn't be a good GM, because I would still think I'm better than the head coach, and that's the kind of GM you don't want to work for.

“For me, my passion, my desire, my fire is still there to coach. I definitely still want to win another title, win an MLS Cup. I definitely want to do that. So we'll relax a little bit, wait and see, and look for the right opportunity, and, hopefully, that will present itself.”

The German-born, SoCal-raised Schmid, 63, is among the most storied of American coaches. He's a National Soccer Hall-of-Famer, inducted last year, and tops MLS' list with 228 regular-season victories (and 306 with league clubs in all competitions). He was the first league coach to win titles with different clubs -- the Galaxy in 2002 and the Crew in 2008 -- and had Seattle winning from the outset, with seven successive postseason trips, a Supporters' Shield two years ago (when the Sounders won 20 games), U.S. Open Cup crowns in four of the first six seasons, and four CONCACAF Champions League appearances.

It went wrong this year, when Obafemi Martins' departure for China left a gaping hole in the Sounders' attack. They lost their first three league games, climbed to .500 by early May, then went 2-8-1 before Schmid was relieved of his duties 10 days ago in what was announced as a mutual agreement to part ways. They sat ninth in the West at 6-12-2, with fewer than half the points possessed by Western Conference leader FC Dallas and 10 points out of a playoff spot.

“Obviously, I'm realistic enough to know what our record was ...,” Schmid said. “You just got to move on. I think we had a great run in Seattle, still disappointed about how it ended. I thought there were other options that were possibly available, but you've got to deal with what happens and look forward.”

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There were problems last year, when injuries derailed the Sounders at midseason. They spent nearly two months atop the Western standings, then plummeted to sixth with nine losses in 11 outings, seven by shutout, before finishing fourth and reaching the conference semifinals. A similar tailspin this summer led to Schmid's ouster.

“Last year was a little bit of a strange year, just because we had the injuries in the middle of the season and lost our top three forwards all at the same time so that was pretty significant,” Schmid said. “And this year we never replaced Oba. If we could have replaced him in March or April, I think it would have changed things, and the replacement, obviously, came too late for me.”

Schmid had worked to bring in Uruguayan attacking midfielder Nicolas Lodeiro, whose acquisition as a designated player was revealed the day after Schmid's exit. The return of Uruguayan midfielder Alvaro Fernandez, who was with the Sounders from 2010 through 2012, was announced two days later.

“I was disappointed from the standpoint of the timing of when it happened with the new players coming in,” Schmid said. “I was disappointed in not getting that opportunity to put that team through its paces.”

Anne-Marie Sorvin-USA TODAY Sports

He said he wasn't startled by how great Martins' departure impacted the Sounders fortunes.

“Because the relationship that Oba and Clint [Dempsey] had built up as an important part of our attacking piece,” Schmid said, “then without Oba, it put a lot of pressure on Jordan Morris to be a lot more successful early on. Which is really unfair to Jordan, because he's an excellent talent and is going to be a fantastic player and is working towards that -- and he's having a great rookie season, if you look at it in that vacuum of a rookie season -- but all of a sudden, now his expectations were he had to fill what Oba had done as a 12-, 13-, 14-year veteran of professional soccer, and that was unfair.

“We didn't replace [Martins]. And I knew we needed to replace him and knew we needed one more attacking piece, and we didn't have that.”

Schmid said bounces never seemed to go Seattle's way.

“I think the first three games [home defeats to Sporting Kansas City and Vancouver sandwiched around a loss at Real Salt Lake] were really a microcosm of our season. We ended up taking a red card [to Oniel Fisher just before halftime] in the Kansas City game, and it's at a point we're dominating the game, and Stefan Frei's been an amazingly steady goalkeeper for us, and then he lets in a soft goal, which he doesn't do usually, and we lose.

I've been coaching the game long enough; I've never had a season where I felt my team dominated the opposition so often and came away with nothing.” - Sigi Schmid

“Then we go to Salt Lake, we're away from home, and we're at 1-1, and a rookie goalkeeper [Tyler Miller] makes a mistake that he's got quality that he's not going to make [such mistakes]. So we come away losing, 2-1, and then we play Vancouver, and we get two penalty kicks called against us, both were a little dubious, and now we're 0-3 when we very easily could have been 2-0-1 or 1-1-1.

“It just seemed of all the year that I've coached -- and I don't want this to sound like an excuse; maybe people are going to take it that way -- but I've been coaching the game long enough; I've never had a season where I felt my team dominated the opposition so often and came away with nothing.”

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Schmid is revered for his ability to build winners -- he guided a good Galaxy team to its first trophies, took the Crew from minnow to champion, won from the start with the Sounders -- and says he is “very confident in my ability to produce that.”

Any inquiries?

“It's still early in the process,” he said. “Every day brings something new with it.”

An intriguing prospect would be with Los Angeles FC, which is scheduled to join MLS in 2018. Schmid is soccer royalty in Southern California for winning three NCAA championships while producing dozens of top players at UCLA, his work with the national teams -- he's a former U.S. U-20 coach and was on Bora Milutinovic's staff leading to and during the 1994 World Cup -- and the Galaxy success.

“Certainly having grown up in Southern California and lived here and all my connections, having coached here for all those years, certainly that would be a very comfortable place and also a situation that I think could fit,” Schmid said. “But at the end of the day, it's a decision that their ownership has to come to and feel good about as well, but for me, personally, in an ideal world, this could be a good situation.

“But the main thing for me is I want to coach. I want to have that opportunity again, and sometimes you can't be picky about that, because you've got to take the opportunity that presents itself to you.”

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Scott French is a reporter for FourFourTwo. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJFrench.