PREFACE: Joe Mansueto reveals his initial ambitions for the Fire. The Fire themselves are in a better position than last week, and the Red Stars are closer to consolidating a playoff spot after getting revenge on both Orlando and Sky Blue FC.
FIRE: We’ll talk about the match first. This team is dependent on fast starts and they made the most of the fast start against Dallas. This was one of those matches were all they needed was the first half like the win against Atlanta. It helps when they finished their chances and Dallas was taken out of the game by the start of the second half.
Now the quest is to win at FC Cincinnati to continue to have a shot at the playoffs. Anything can happen in the last three weeks of the season and the run-in to the end of the regular season is not the most difficult.
RED STARS: The Red Stars entered the Sunday before in 5th place and exited this past Sunday in 2nd after three wins and three clean sheets. They are more in control of their own destiny with Sunday’s win over Sky Blue as neither Utah, nor Reign FC can overtake the Red Stars by winning both their matches in hand on the Red Stars.
A home semifinal is not out of the question, but that will likely require a slip-up by North Carolina. It looks like it’s full steam ahead for the Red Stars. They just need to dot ‘i’s and cross ’t’s against Washington and then Utah—both at home.
MANSUETO: On Monday, new Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto gave an initial idea of what he wants to do. He first wants to see how the team does at Soldier Field before thinking about a new soccer-specific stadium within city limits.
“The focus right now is making Soldier Field work and making it work big time,” said Mansueto. “If you look at what’s going on around the league, Seattle, Portland, L.A., Atlanta, they fill up big stadiums with 50,000 to 60,000 soccer fans. Soldier Field has that potential, too. If we can make that match day experience great, we can fill Soldier Field. Look at recent soccer games in Soldier Field. Two Mexican clubs, Chivas and Club America, played and sold out Soldier Field. The U.S. men’s national team played Mexico in August and sold out Soldier Field. The soccer fans are here, and we could fill that stadium if we do it right. Soccer-specific stadiums are great, too, and we’ll have that optionality down the road if we choose. But the focus right now is let’s make Soldier Field work and work big time for us.”
Mansueto sees the Fire’s near-confirmed move to Soldier Field as part of a way to raise the team’s profile in the city. Mansueto also wants to expand the Fire’s reach via a potential new broadcast deal once the current deal with ESPN+ expires after 2020.
“We’ve had a very good experience on ESPN+. We have one more year remaining on that contract, and I think after it ends we’ll have a number of media outlets who would like to bid for the rights to the Fire. My personal view is I would like to see the Fire more widely available to all Chicagoans either on free broadcast or cable to complement ESPN+. I think we’ve got a great product in the Fire, but more people need to see it. We need to expose them to it.”
One potential outlet would be WGN television (which recently was bought by Nexstar) who is losing the Cubs and White Sox once their seasons conclude and already the Bulls and Blackhawks. In the case of the aforementioned except the Cubs, they are going to be exclusively on NBC Sports Chicago while the Cubs will be on the new Marquee Sports Network which the Cubs will own.
As for President and GM Nelson Rodriguez and head coach Veljko Paunovic, while Mansueto says that he “believes in both of them,” he’ll look as the organization as a whole after the season.
“After the season ends, like any offseason, we’ll take stock,” he said. “I’ve gotten to know both Nelson and Pauno over the past year, they’re terrific people. I believe in both of them. But we’ll look at the whole organization. The message is we want to invest in the club and make sure we’ve got the best people in every role.”
As for a potential rebrand of the team, Mansueto says they he ‘loves’ the Fire name, but will hear what the research team says after they have taken surveys from the fans. That is in contrast to what Rodriguez said in an earlier media roundtable where he felt people were confusing the name with an NBC television show of the same name that debuted in 2012 even though that the Fire hosted a screening of the series premiere that year and expressed confusion as to why a team would name themselves ‘after a disaster.’
For the first time in a while, Fire fans are genuinely optimistic about the team now that there is new, local owner and the hope is he will supply the resources necessary to return the Fire to the elite of Major League Soccer.
