Getting Reacquainted with Chicago Fire FC, MLS's Exercise in Meeting Your Unemployed Ex

He may be happy, but it's still putting lipstick on pig.

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 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

Somehow not the solution...

Long-Term Tendencies
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.

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.

Chicago Fire 2-2 Portland Timbers: They Didn’t (And Yet)

When I typed in "goose butt," I had a totally different image in mind.

Which title answers the statement, “I can’t believe Portland’s gonna hold on.” (The rest of this post is about those two words in the parentheses. And the words outside it.)

On the other hand, it not only could have been worse, it almost was. Over the hours and events that passed between the final whistle and all this typing, The Chicago Fire’s late rally sort of faded into a larger personal narrative of two points lost, along with, like, a good, full-handed goose to the team’s confidence. Taking all three points out of the Timbers’ best game of the season so far would have been something…

With this game now in the rear-view, the “would” and “could” in the above paragraph don’t mean a lot because all of that stuff happened - e.g., the high of Sebastian Blanco gifting Timbers fans with one of your more inspired assists (Valeri’s goal looked pretty sharp ‘n’ spiffy, too) and the low of Portland’s defense coming apart too many ways to count on the Chicago goal that erased it. Broadly, the rest of Portland’s game operated between those two poles, and with a respectable portion of it tilting toward Blanco’s high. That, on the other hand, tells only half the story - literally, too.

The Fire have not started 2018 strong. They picked up their first point of the season yesterday - from Portland, for one, but clawing it back probably took a little sting out of losing the other two points - and they have fewer excuses that Portland (who now have two points - can I get a HARRUMPH?). They’ve played two home games and they score with reasonable reliability (2.0 goals/game so far), but (and damn the statistics), I’d argue Portland looked the better? No. Sharper? Meh. I’m going with “The Team Most Likely To” yesterday. That vantage begs the bigger question of Chicago because, if the Timbers, an improving team, came out of the totality of that draw looking like the team more likely to claim all three points, what does that say about the Chicago Fire in these earliest days of 2018?

Then again, when you shine a spotlight into a mirror, it reflect the same amount of light. In other words:

A. The Chicago Fire aren’t a very good team.

B. The Portland Timbers drew the Chicago Fire (if on the road).

C. Man killed God. (Wait. Isn’t that how those always end?)