Level Set 17, Chicago Fire FC: A Fresh Angle on the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Could actually be a better team this time...

What follows is a brief history of Chicago Fire FC, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Chicago Fire, aka, Chicago Fire FC, hold still-unbroken record of being the one and only team to win MLS Cup in its 1998 expansion season. 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 Stoichov and Mexican great Cuauhtemoc Blanco, plus 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. Until 2025 (more below), they enjoyed their last “high-water mark” in 2017, when they finished third in the Eastern Conference, but even then they face-planted out of the playoffs 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. 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 (crazy strike-rate) 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.

Getting Reacquainted with Chicago Fire FC, In a Word "Yikes"

Hello Darkness, my old friend.

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

A few posts back, I credited Atlanta United FC as the first expansion team to hit the ground running at full sprint. Goddamn my ahistoricity because the OG title for that clearly belongs to the Chicago Fire, aka, Chicago Fire FC, aka, the most searing disappointment in MLS history. That bold claim demands an explanation, naturally, so here’s my best stab at it.

While it would dry up between (roughly) 2000 and 2007, the “Marquee Player” still applied when Chicago joined the league in its third season (1998) and someone in their front office decided to raid Eastern/Central Europe for talent. At least two players they found – Piotr Nowak and Lubos Kubik – played even with the best talent of the time and heads-and-shoulders above the rest. That’s how the Fire pulled off a feat never replicated before or since – i.e., an expansion team winning MLS Cup in its first season. Hell, they even did the Baby Double by winning the U.S. Open Cup in the same season. Chicago reached MLS Cup two more times over its first seasons of simple existence - in 2000 and again in 2003 - and they won the U.S. Open Cup in both of those season, I don’t know, maybe to rub it in. That string of success and near-success came to a screeching halt in 2004 when the Fire got spanked by its first Wooden Spoon (note the word “first”). The team righted the ship over the next five seasons, finishing high in a slowly-expanding league – their 7th-place finish in 2007 was their worst from that period – while also winning yet another U.S. Open Cup…after which, and with literally two seasons excepted, they became the team MLS fans know today. Outside 2012 and 2017 – and they finished (in context) a crazy impressive third place in the latter – Chicago has missed the post-season every year starting in 2010. The Wooden Spoon stung their little tuchuses twice during that time – back-to-back seasons, in fact (2015 and 2016) - and they’ve finished in 20th place or lower in every season since 2015, save what now must feel like a heartbreaking success in 2017. In a word, yikes.

Best Season(s)

Rather than over-think this, I’m going to roll with 1998, i.e., the Baby Double triumph, but I’m guessing both the organization and its fans always assumed that the team’s best days would return in every season through 2009. Just sit with that for a while. Seriously, it’s hard to remember that Chicago fielded consistently good teams over its first decade-plus in MLS. Look, I can feel the doubt bleeding through my monitor as I type, but these were fun, exciting and interesting teams…hold on, I’m getting a report from future sections in this post telling me to dial that back.

An MLS History Project, 2003: The Ballad of Chris Roner (& The End of Puberty)

This is like that Big Foot photo. Defining.

Some part of my subconscious anticipated that these history posts would eventually reach a point where the talking points start and end with who won what trophy and which players made it possible. I didn’t think it’d happen so soon, but…

Fortunately, that also signals that Major League Soccer had survived its growing pains – the acne (teal uniforms), hair in places that it wasn’t before (going with the Tampa Bay Mutiny), breaking voices (no ties and the shootout) and random boners (I don’t know…the Colorado Rapids?). MLS has been a (probably) viable league (old habits die hard) since then and the panting of The Grim Reaper grew fainter and fainter with every season after 2001 (well, until the COVID). In general terms, the league keeps adding teams and raising the salary cap; fans see only tweaks to the rules of competition, maybe a poorly-scheduled post-season now and again, but they’re not seeing, say, rearranged conferences or the local team evaporating. Starting at a certain point, one very close to 2003, Major League Soccer looked like the same league it was the season before, only with more faces.

2003 didn’t see more faces – expansion hadn’t happened yet (and neither had relocation) – but the competitive rules did evolve a bit. First, they ended the one year experiment of letting teams qualify regardless of conference (see 2002 post); the top four teams in each five-team conference would make the 2003 MLS Cup Playoffs. They also managed the playoffs differently – i.e., for reasons that still don’t make sense, but…sure, only the conference semifinals featured a three-game home-and-away series, while both the conference finals and MLS Cup would be one-and-done. I can’t recall or state with confidence that those choices made anyone happy, but, the 2003 playoffs did include one hell of a powerful argument for the greatest all-time comeback in MLS history. The team that won it was the San Jose Earthquakes, and they’d go on to win 2003 MLS Cup as well, beating a restructured Chicago Fire team 4-2 in what remains one of the highest scoring finals in league history.

The venue is noteworthy too: the Home Depot Center, MLS’s second soccer-specific stadium, opened that season (June 7, 2003) and hosted MLS Cup. It gave the Los Angeles Galaxy a home and, in some ways, a home field for U.S. Soccer as a whole (they only used Crew Stadium when they wanted the closest possible version of a home-field or make Latin American players cold/uncomfortable; related, this is fun, and check out the venue that landed No. 1). I’ve heard a lot of things about this stadium down the years, some good, some bad, but it’s also unquestionably one of the original “cathedrals to the game” for MLS. Anyway, back to the game…