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| He may be happy, but it's still putting lipstick on pig. |
Chicago Fire, aka, Chicago Fire FC, hold still-unbroken record of being the one and only team to win MLS Cup in its expansion season, 1998. And, as if to announce their hell, yes arrival, they won the U.S. Open Cup in the same season. The Fire remained highly-competitive nearly every season through 2009, reaching the semifinals of the playoffs or higher in eight of those twelve seasons (i.e., they reached MLS Cups in 2000 and 2003, so higher) – and winning the 2003 Supporters’ Shield, plus four U.S. Open Cups. The Fire went into their first twelve seasons in MLS looking like a contender and generally backing it up. Some of that followed from the “Marquee Player” rule still applying when Chicago joined the league in its third season (1998). When someone in Chicago’s front office went knocking around Eastern/Central Europe for talent, they found Piotr Nowak and Jerzy Podbrozny, both Polish, and a Czech sweeper named Lubos Kubik. With those three leading the way, the Fire played even with MLS’s best talent of the time and heads-and-shoulders above the rest. When those players left, and in surprisingly short order (in the order I listed them above, they left after 2002, 1999, and 2000, respectively), Chicago still had to one of the best, U.S.-based cores on an MLS roster, including Zach Thornton in goal (through 2006), (yes, that) Chris Armas in midfield (until 2007), Ante Razov banging in goals up top (in stints split between 1998-2000, and 2001-2004), and C. J. Brown keeping things steady in defense until 2010. A cast of characters rotated around those players in seasons to come – the standouts included Bulgarian legend(ary asshole) Hristo Stoichkov and Mexican great Cuauhtemoc Blanco and on-again-off-again rising attacking talents like Justin Mapp and Patrick Nyarko. Those last two players actually open the path to a distinction: Mapp, as the smooth, genuinely productive winger, who played with Chicago through the back-end of its best seasons (2003-2010), Nyarko, as a hard-to-place forward/winger hybrid, who played at the end of their best seasons and through a lot of their worst (2008-2015). Head to head, Mapp blows Nyarko out of the water in terms of raw numbers…but you have to wonder how much Mapp benefitted from playing on a better team/in a better system than Nyarko. The worst possible version of that same question has haunted the Chicago franchise with the vengeance of a curse since the 2010 season. That same season they started their existence as the searing disappointment that Chicago fans endure and most MLS fans ignore. They enjoyed their last “high-water mark” in 2017, when they finished third in the Eastern Conference (true story), but even then they face-planted out of the playoffs to to Red Bull New York in the knockout round of one of MLS’s patented bloated playoff schemes. Everything on both sides of that has been literal carnage – up to and including back-to-back Wooden Spoons in 2015 and 2016, and a whole lotta missing the playoffs. In fact, that head-fake/fuck of a 2017 season aside, the Fire have finished 20th or lower in the MLS-wide standings for every season since 2015 – a run that includes a 28th-place finish in 2024. (Spoiler. Whoops.) That brings me to the main thing that should keep fans of every other MLS team from drooping into an easy sleep: it’s not like Chicago hasn’t thrown money and effort at saving the ever-sinking ship – e.g., they had Serbian forward Nemanja Nikolic and German great, Bastian Schweinsteiger, between 2017 and 2019, and, as recently as last season, they took pretty big swings on Swiss hot-shot Xherdan Shaqiri and Belgian forward Hugo Cuypers. As evidenced by the above, all of that balanced out to a broad, “nah.” All of the stoutly average around those signings almost certainly played a role, but…all that started to feel like a gutted club/team culture years before those players arrived. The open question is the extent to which they’re a symptom (i.e., the players around them make them worse) or the cause (i.e., they just weren’t good/the right signings). Don't let the Joy Points fool you on this one, because Chicago ain't good.
Total Joy Points: 18
How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2003
MLS Cup: 1998
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2000, 2003
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 1999, 2002, 2006
Wooden Spoon: 2004, 2015, 2016
U.S. Open Cup: 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 2004
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| Somehow not the solution... |
Much like DC United (see previous chapter), Chicago provides another unsurprising example of a team having good numbers when they're, y’know, good, and bad numbers when they're not. Entirely related, Chicago’s knack for building more good defenses than bad ones over those early seasons carried them through leaner-attacking times that characterized their latter, less successful seasons (i.e., the second half of the 2000s). While it’s not so cut-and-dry as the defenses since 2010 just plain sucking, going over the average for goals allowed (five times), or even very over that same average (also, five times), has been the Fire’s normal since the 2013 season, aka, a fucking minute for their fans. The attack has rarely been up to the task of lifting them up – in fact, they’ve gone over the league average for goals scored just four times over that same period and only well over once (in…you guessed it, 2017!) – and those combined basic, even fundamental, facts tell the story of a bad team. The Fire simply haven’t been good. Quelle surprise.
How 2024 Measured Up
In a phrase hinted it with supporting documentation above, really badly. Chicago finished 2024 dead-last in the East, 10 points out of the playoff picture and rarely looking like even their fans should bother with them by…I’m going with somewhere around June. And, in keeping with the recent trends noted above, they fell well on the wrong side of average on both sides of the goals equation (i.e., the were 13.5 below the averaged on goals scored and 8.5 goals above average on goals allowed). Being someone who tries to squeeze in as much meaningful action as I can in any given week, the Fire didn’t give me much incentive to watch them. That said, I have seen Chicago players do good and useful things on the field and on a consistent basis – e.g., Gaston Gimenez presents as a two-way midfielder with a strong bite on both sides of the ball, Bryan Gutierrez has skills to die for at age 21, even if the numbers haven’t entirely come-around, and…yeah, I guess that sums it up. Shaqiri missed most of the season and just seemed to complicate things when he showed up, and, based on what little I know and have watched, Cuypers suffered from a lack of a strong supporting cast? Maybe? This is me asking you, honestly.
Questions for Their 2025 Season
This one’s more statement than question, but here goes: Chicago has been so bad for so long that no reasonable person has any reason to believe they will improve next season. Only one theory explains the Fire’s comparatively long history of failing to get things right: they are bad at what they do. Until further notice, it’s that simple.
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