PREFACE: Hope everyone out there is enjoying the long Labor Day Weekend. We’ll do something different this weekend with just the Fire playing and the Red Stars off this weekend. It will be vice-versa the next weekend. Let’s take a deep look at the Fire playing off a two-part article from The Athletic’s Guillermo Rivera.
We’ll gloss over last Saturday’s match against Columbus because you know the story by now: The Fire had plenty of chances to win, they don’t take them, they draw when they needed a win, etc.
FIRE: The first part of Mr. Rivera’s article detailed how the Fire have gotten to the position they are in starting from when Ned Grabavoy’s deciding penalty in the 2009 Eastern Conference Final sent Real Salt Lake to MLS Cup at SeatGeek Stadium. (It was a different format back then. Don’t question that.)
It has been downhill ever since then. I have mentioned many of the incidents and poor moments in previous articles here and elsewhere.
The second part is about the future with a potential rebrand and potential move to Soldier Field to be in the city and the hopes to draw fans who cannot get to (or won’t go to) Bridgeview. Bridgeview is not blameless for the current situation, but it’s minor compared to the mismanagement that has been happening with the club over the last decade.
There is no honest way to substantiate Nelson Rodriguez’s claims of viewership on ESPN+ where he said that viewership “has tripled from this time last year” and the team is in the “top five” in MLS in terms of average viewers and new subscribers per game and that they have also doubled the “ratings” from their previous broadcast provider, NBC Sports Chicago. ESPN embargoes such data.
Everything looks like things have been done on the cheap, though that is not necessarily the case. The Fire have the third-highest payroll in MLS, but that it top-heavy on DP’s such as Bastian Schweinsteiger, Nemanja Nikolic, and Aleksandar Katai (the first two are out of contract after this season while there is a club option on Katai among other players). They have also have made additions to the front office staff. However, there still appears to be the mentality and attitude within the club that culture comes from the top down.
This recalls another article I read this week from Ruben Tisch of Hot Time Old Town where he compares the Fire to the White Sox. Both have talented players, but not a good team at the moment. The difference is that the White Sox appear to have a plan and be more on the upswing (they’d be more on the upswing if Tim Anderson learned how to field and some pitchers didn’t five and dive!)
There is another similarity is that both think fans don’t get them. White Sox GM Rick Hahn complained recently about fan negativity (which is understandable when you haven’t made the playoffs since 2008 and the team across town won the World Series three years ago). The Fire have been the same way at times as well.
As much as both teams would like to say winning isn’t the only metric to measure success, it is the most important metric. Neither team has done it recently and that comes from spending money inefficiently, making terrible decisions repeatedly, and treating some fans with contempt. In both cases, winning can cure a lot of ills and that is what the Fire will need to do right out of the gate in 2020—assuming they finalize the deal with Soldier Field—and then maybe actually have a plan to have a stadium of their own within city limits which fans in the city crave—though that was never going to happen with the Daley administration in 2006 and they will need to lobby hard with the Lightfoot administration now.
The Fire need to make up for this lost decade once 2020 begins and need to make the right decisions to start winning again. The club cannot afford another few years of losing and drop further into the abyss of the Chicago sporting landscape. All that said, one wonders if that requires a new owner and new leadership to make that happen even though MLS Commission Don Garber has (way too much) faith in the current regime.
