The most important thing about understanding Major League Soccer is that you don’t understand Major League Soccer. A big market team that failed to make the playoffs and fired their coach in 2021?They won his 2022 Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup. The club, who won his CONCACAF Champions League for the first time from MLS last May, watched the postseason from home in the fall. Predicting MLS is almost hopeless. The league grows faster than its forecast.
Unless you’re talking about Chicago Fire.
Once one of the most successful teams in MLS, the Fire have been a downright terrifying team for over a decade. At this point, all the mistakes they’ve made begin to bleed together and become a big dark cloud of despair that lingers in the club no matter how much money is spent or who’s running the show.
The Fire have missed the playoffs once in their first 12 years in the league. In the 13 seasons that followed, they qualified only twice. Cincinnati, Austin and Charlotte are the only MLS teams to make the postseason less than the Fire in that span, and those three teams together have him in the league for seven seasons.
There was a glimmer of hope for Fire last year. The club embarked on a full-scale rebuilding in the off-season, with sports his director Georg Heitz replacing his head coach Rafael Wicky, with whom he worked at his FC his Basel in his native Switzerland, MLS. We have longtime assistant Ezra Hendrickson. The change was accompanied by big-ticket deals for Swiss star Xherdan Shaqiri and up-and-coming Mexican talent Jairo Torres. Overall, owner Joe Mansuet spent more on player salaries than all but his four other ownership groups in 2022.
The Fire reached the homestretch of the season in solid positions, occupying the seventh and final playoff spot in the East by the end of August, but the new face ultimately produced the same result. Chicago finished the season in 24th place overall and missed the playoffs for the fifth straight year by scoring 9 points in their final 10 games.
It’s been quiet this winter, at least when it comes to additions. Chicago made his two headline-grabbing sales in the past six months, moving his 18-year-old hometown goalkeeper Gagaslonina to Chelsea and 19-year-old striker John Duran to Aston at his villa. Transferred for a minimum total of $28 million. It’s a big business. According to Sportico data, combined revenue from the two sales surpasses Fire generated in commercial revenue in 2020 or 2021.
Chicago has yet to return that money to the team. This is mainly due to lack of space on the roster. Fire entered this offseason with his 21 players under contract for 2023, and immediately after last season ended, he took his two other 2023 options from the 2022 team. selected.
Only four new players have signed this winter, and only one of them, fullback Arnaud Souqet, looks like a potential starter this season. A few more additions are likely to come, but the most notable is the striker, whose Fire is still looking for a designated player. Sources familiar with Chicago’s roster plans, but not authorized to discuss them, said the club could sell that spot, two vacant U-22 Initiative spots, and the rest before the key transfer window closes in April. Chicago are still trying to move striker Kappel Pusibirko, who was part of last year’s spending frenzy, according to sources, but he’s only 25 games away. He scored only five goals.
So, while the team looks the same as it did in 2022, Heights has seen growth in the individuals on the roster, the return of players like Torres and Gaston Jimenez to full health, and the level of familiarity between the team and Hendrickson. Hope it brings improvement. Improved results.
That’s a big bet. Heitz and Deputy Chief of Staff Sebastian Pelzer are out of contract at the end of the season. There are no option years left on the contract. Hendrickson, meanwhile, is entering his final season with a guaranteed contract.
“Every year we say we want to make the playoffs. We definitely want to make the playoffs,” Heights said. athletic in January. “I also hope that some of the players come back from injuries. They are sharp and they look good. , many players are adjusting to the league and their first season in this league is always difficult.
“Now we really need to add the right pieces. It’s nice to see a lot of news about Duran’s transfer, but in the end we do this to win. The owners also want to be successful.” That’s why we do all this: making money is nice, but making money isn’t the number one priority.”
The Fire could rebound in 2023, but at this stage it’s hard to share Heitz’s sense of optimism. Chicago still seem to be in a bit of a hole for reasons far beyond the lack of turnovers from a team that underperformed for most of last season.
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“Any mistake you make will pay the price in the long run.”
Heights found himself in a very difficult situation when he joined Chicago in December 2019.
There was pressure on the club to make a big splash in the face of the looming return to downtown Soldier Field, but the team had great fluidity. The Fire did not have a head coach, a single DP or a captain when Heights’ hiring was officially announced. It took him less than a month to put some pieces in place before the preseason started in January 2020.
Heights hired Wickie as head coach, signed Jimenez, striker Robert Bellick and winger Ignacio Ariseda to DP deals, added a number of young players from South America and Eastern Europe, and expanded the back-end of the roster into the teens. Filled with locals. A total of 17 were added between the start of the offseason and the start of his MLS is Back tournament in June 2020. Of those, he was the only three who had league experience and came to the club. Many, at least he was signed by the end of 2021.
In retrospect, it’s clear that it was too much and too fast. Heitz didn’t even know what he didn’t know about MLS, yet he committed himself and the club to a string of big money moves. Given the circumstances, the decision was understandable, but it would cost the Fires a lot over the next few seasons.
“I’ve learned that when you make a mistake, it pays off in the long run,” Heitz said this year.
As a group, the new contractors struggled to adapt to the tough travels and varying climates of the MLS. Also, they didn’t fit well. Midfield is a good example. His starting trio of Jimenez, Lukastojanovic and Alvaro Medran as regulars for 2021 were quite good technically but not high in athleticism or defensive discipline. In a league like MLS, where fast and powerful attackers are plentiful and the emphasis is on moving forward quickly, this combination has always struggled to keep teams from punching through their opponents.
Others were simply not up to par. Aliseda struggled a lot after the 2021 season before being sent to Swiss club FC Lugano, also owned by Mansuet. Boris Secric has never stood out at right-back. The attacks around Berwick lacked talent. Service-hungry Berwick has taken a real step in 2020-2021 and he has also been off-roaded. The club will work with talented homegrown midfielder Djorje Mihajlović, who was sent to Montreal after the 2020 season, spent two seasons in Canada and was sold to Dutch club AZ Alkmaar for $6 million this winter. I couldn’t.
Heights’ initial approach to building the roster did not give the club any functional depth. While it’s good to emphasize that the team develops its players through its academy, the majority of homegrown players acquired by the Fire have been insignificant on the field since Heights arrived. Slonina performed well before moving to Chelsea, with midfielder/defender Mauricio Pineda, signed after four years at the University of North Carolina, a solid member of the roster, and midfielder Brian Gutierrez showing promise. but the remaining members of the group have nothing added in MLS. Fire typically got near-zero contributions from the last 10 or so spots on the roster, and it wasn’t a small incident either. is difficult.
This general situation led to two disappointing results for the Fire, placing 11th in the Eastern Conference in 2020 and 12th in 2021.
“Maybe one of my main mistakes was wanting too much in the beginning,” says Heitz. “We wanted an exciting young player who could be marketed later and be successful at the same time. With a stable team and a team with some experience in the league, we might be able to do this. It’s important.”
More Talent, Same Old Struggle
Chicago fired Wickie towards the end of its second season. After a series of teams hired former MLS assistants as head coaches, they continued that trend by hiring Hendrickson as manager ahead of the 2022 campaign.
Fire went out and signed a number of quality talents to take charge of his first season. In addition to one, they sent $6 million to Liga MX club Atlas to sign Torres and add two more promising U-22 initiative players to Durán. And Federico Navarro bolstered his backline by poaching FC Cologne starting centre-back Rafael Chichos, traded a $1 million-plus allocation for Philadelphia for Philadelphia, and Chicago native Chris Mueller returned to MLS after a short stint in Scotland.
Chicago no longer operated with the same talent shortage it did in 2020 or 2021, but Fire still hadn’t figured out how to make it all work in 2022. Second fewest goals in MLS.
Shaqiri did not live up to expectations, scoring just three goals without penalties and shooting on target with a shockingly low 16. Torres wasn’t entirely healthy, but he wasn’t as effective as he didn’t score a single goal in 14 appearances and he had just one assist. Notably, he lined up almost exclusively on the wing of his Fire. This is a little different than when he was mostly in a central role during his last 18 months at Atlas. His two strikers in the Union, Przybirko, who played in his system, was a fiasco as a single forward, losing his starting job to Durán by the end of the year.
It felt like there was a little disconnect between tactics and talent. Hendrickson mostly lines up in his 4-2-3-1 formation. This formation usually relies on the wingers darting in the back and serving the strikers and rushing midfielders. That plan didn’t work for his Fire, as their attacker didn’t have enough speed to threaten the opponent’s backline with this kind of traverse. Primarily lined up as No. 10, Shaqiri wasn’t good on the ball enough to make up for his shortcomings elsewhere.
Organizations like Philadelphia and LAFC, the smartest teams in the MLS recruit according to their tactics. Develop your preferred play system and recruit the best players for that system. For years Fire has struggled to achieve that.
In addition to Heights’ initial misstep from early in his tenure, it’s easy to see why Chicago has struggled over the past three seasons. , it’s hard to imagine Fire making a big step forward in 2023.
(Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
