Chicago Fire Second-Class Citizens in Soldier Field – Again

The Chicago Fire’s tortured relationship with Soldier Field has been examined in great detail on this blog. Now that the Fire are set to open their first full MLS season under the ownership of Joe Mansueto, it’s clear that one of the original problems in the Fire’s two previous tenures at Soldier Field remains inescapably unresolved: the Fire’s schedule has a lower level of priority than the Chicago Bears’ schedule. And that places the Fire at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Longtime Fire supporters will remember the old days at Soldier Field and how the club’s operations were affected by the Bears on multiple levels. One of the most egregiously notorious aspects was the Fire having to re-work their schedule every spring following the announcement of the NFL schedule in April. It reached its laughable best (or worst) in 2005, when the Fire went 53 days between home matches because of in-season schedule changes.

This season will be no different, except that the people at the Fire in charge of liaising with MLS schedule makers made sure right off the bat that the number of home games at the back end of the season were minimized, thus reducing the probability of announcing significant schedule changes midway through the season. In their final 17 matches, the Fire will play at home just six times. In the stretch run to qualify for the playoffs, the Fire will host just four of their final 12 matches. This structure places the Fire at a competitive disadvantage during the playoff push and forces the squad to gel in the early part of the season, so that as many points as possible can be accumulated in those 11 first-half home games. The worst stretch of this soccer minefield lasts 43 days; the Fire play six consecutive away matches between August 14 and September 26.

A wise MLS veteran once told me that it takes about ten matches before a coach knows what kind of a team he really has. That leaves 24 games to get things right and position a team to play its best soccer at the crucial point in the season. Coach Raphael Wicky unfortunately does not have the luxury of watching his team round into form. With a backlog of away matches awaiting a team that has been a rather poor road team of late, the Fire may well miss the post-season if they are not well above the Red Line by August. One can only hope that the millennials who have been expected to fill Soldier Field will not have lost interest by then.

The Fire are not the only team that shares its home field with an NFL team. The others are Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, and New England. What is interesting is that Seattle and Nashville have similar scheduling woes in the second half of the season, while Atlanta and New England have relatively normal schedules, with a roughly equal distribution of home and away games. The following table shows how the second-half schedule stacks up for these teams.

How is it that Atlanta and New England have such a nice second-half schedule, while Chicago, Nashville and Seattle will be on the road so frequently? In Atlanta and New England, the guy who owns the football team also owns the soccer team. What’s more, New England Patriots and Revolution owner Robert Kraft also owns the stadium. Although Atlanta Falcons and United owner Arthur Blank does not own Mercedes Benz Stadium, his company manages the venue for state of Georgia. It is a lot easier to formulate a normal schedule when the soccer team is not in an adversarial relationship with the football team.

In the case of Nashville, they will be moving into their own stadium in 2022 and will only have to endure one more season of scheduling shenanigans. For Seattle, they are likely stuck at Lumen Field. Because they average more than 40,000 fans per game, they would probably have to build a stadium that is comparable in size to their current home. Given that the Sounders have faced these obstacles every year since they came into the league in 2009, they likely will continue to take the bad with the good and reap the rewards of having one of the largest and most loyal fanbases in MLS.

For the Chicago Fire, the situation is a tragedy. They got out from under all the problems associated with being a second-class tenant in Soldier Field when the village of Bridgeview built them a stadium. Mansueto and his group have concluded that a downtown venue is essential to success, so the Fire are back in the city center, after Mansueto wrote a $65 million check to Bridgeview to be released from the Fire’s 30-year lease. Playing in a location that is attractive to millennials is one thing, but having to push the large fraction of away matches to the crunch-time portion of the season is not the way to set up the team to be successful. One can only imagine the response from Wicky and his players when asked how they will feel to have a 43-day gap between home matches.

If Mansueto wants Soldier Field brimming with fans from the younger generation (or any generation, for that matter), the Fire need to be a consistently winning team. This messy scheduling scenario could well be a major impediment to that end.

(Photo credit: Jonathan Daniel – Getty Images)