The Chicago Fire are about to end their second consecutive season of woeful soccer and the core reasons for their failure are due to decisions of poor timing and poor judgment. The unavoidable knock-on effect of those decisions doomed them to also-ran status at a time when the club made a big splash by returning to play home matches in Chicago. It comes down to three people: Owner Joe Mansueto, Sporting Director Georg Heitz, and former Head Coach Raphael Wicky. And here is how it spiraled out of control.
Owner Joe Mansueto
Mansueto came into MLS when he bought a 49% stake in the Fire from then-owner Andrew Hauptman. Below is the timeline for start of the Mansueto era:
July 2018: Bought a 49% stake in the Fire.
September 2019: Bought the remaining 51% from Hauptman.
November 2019: Fired Head Coach Veljko Paunovic.
December 2019: Hired Heitz.
December 2019: Heitz hired Wicky.
This timeline is the unfortunate foundation for the Fire’s troubles in the 2020 and 2021 MLS seasons. From the time he gained full control of the club, Mansueto waited too long to dump Paunovic and waited far too long to hire Heitz. With 2020 pre-season training looming, Heitz was set up for failure. Yes, the guy at the top must take responsibility for this mess.
Sporting Director Georg Heitz
Heitz came on board on December 20 and was faced with the daunting task of hiring a coach and building a roster almost from scratch. And he had just a few weeks to do it. Heitz also had to learn the league’s byzantine player acquisition rules on the fly while assembling his squad. To create a competitive team after bringing in 18 new players was never going to be easy.
Heitz’s late arrival was hardly his fault. So, it makes one wonder whether Heitz was Mansueto’s primary target. At the time, rumors abounded that Mansueto coveted Seattle General Manager Garth Lagerwey for the job of running the Chicago Fire. Regardless of the truth of those rumors, Mansueto waited far too long to get his management team in place. Given that he had been part-owner for over a year, he should have had a good idea of who would be retained and who would need to be replaced by the time he was finally in charge in September 2019.
Heitz hired Wicky after just one week on the job. I remain convinced that Wicky’s hiring was one of convenience. The two men knew each other when they both worked for FC Basel and Wicky was already living in Chicago, on staff as a youth coach for US Soccer. It is almost inconceivable that Heitz did a proper vetting process and settled on Wicky as the absolute best candidate for the job in the span of seven days. We have seen Heitz’s current search for Wicky’s replacement involve interviews of several candidates in a timeline that has lasted weeks so far.
The Fire had all three Designated Player slots available when Heitz came on board, and these are the most important decisions any technical director will make. Committing a large chunk of the salary budget to the wrong players can set up a team for disaster for multiple seasons. Heitz signed striker Robert Beric, winger Ignacio Aliseda, and holding midfielder Gaston Gimenez. None have become game-changing players. In 2020, Beric produced solid numbers, scoring 12 goals in 23 matches, which was good enough for third in the league. In 2021, however, the goals dried up for Beric, who has scored just eight times this season.
The second area of deficiency for Heitz was his insistence on keeping together the core of the roster that had won just five times in 23 matches in 2020. While it is true that it is difficult to achieve a winning culture when player turnover is significant year to year, it is also true that keeping together a team that stinks makes little sense. Heitz tried to blame the COVID-induced turbulence on the Fire’s poor showing in 2020, but the fact is that everyone in MLS had to deal with COVID-induced turbulence, and somehow, many teams pushed their way through it and were far more successful than the Fire.
In the last offseason, Heitz moved on from Djordje Mihailovic and CJ Sapong and both players have played well for their new clubs. Heitz brought in striker Chinoso Offor, winger Stanislav Ivanov, and fullback Jhon Espinoza. In mid-season, Heitz introduced defensive midfielder Federico Navarro into the team. Of the four, only Navarro has played consistently well. Offor has scored just once and has failed to hold on to the starting spot when Beric was in the middle of his goal drought. Espinoza has made only 19 appearances this season, unable to wrest the fullback spot away from incumbent Boris Sekulic. Ivanov was injured in pre-season and returned to action in late July. He has featured just ten times since then and has been an unused substitute on many occasions.
Navarro has contributed far more than any newcomer in the brief time since joining the Fire and is easily Heitz’s most successful acquisition. Navarro plays with fearless abandon as a defensive destroyer and appears to have a nose for how to quickly transition from defense to attack.
Sad to say, Heitz achieved the continuity he was seeking, but it’s the wrong kind. In 2020, the Fire earned 23 points from 23 matches. In 2021, they have 34 points from 33.
Fans can wonder why Heitz is still on the job and is being allowed to choose the next coach and retool the roster. The truth is, he deserves another opportunity from Mansueto, who put him in this difficult position in the first place. He won’t have much wiggle room, however. His choice of coach must hit the bullseye this time and if new Designated Players are on the horizon, they must at least be the game-changers that the Fire lack. And if they are the type of players that can attract fans into Soldier Field, all the better.
Head Coach Raphael Wicky
Wicky received his marching orders on September 30, winning just 12 matches out of 51 over parts of two seasons. The Fire are no different than any other professional soccer club; when the results are not there, the coach is the first to go.
Wicky may well have been given a flawed roster lacking any substantial star power, but he can only be judged by what he got out of his players. His results are not good; the whole is much less than the sum of the parts.
Any coach’s fundamental responsibility is to make sure that he is getting the best 11 players on the field, and this is Wicky’s biggest failure. When Heitz declared his desire to maintain continuity going into the 2021 season, the Fire should have come roaring out of the gate. There was a small roar in the home opener, when the Fire banged home two early goals against New England in a match that ended in a 2:2 draw.
Whatever magic the Fire created in that opening half hour dissipated quite rapidly. In their first nine matches, the Fire went 1-1-7, scoring just four goals in that span and conceding 14. Following the home opener, the Fire never scored more than one goal in any of the next eight matches and were blanked six times. This is not the hot start that was envisioned by maintaining roster continuity. This might have been the right time for Heitz to dig into his list of potential coaching candidates.
It’s hard to concede playoff qualification after just nine matches, but the Fire were facing an unenviable uphill climb after their wretched start. Following Week 2 of the season, the Fire were never higher than 10th place in the MLS Eastern Conference. Any talk of reviving playoff hopes after a mini spurt of three games where the Fire scored nine goals and amassed seven points in late June and early July was merely a dream. No team averaging roughly one point per game has any business talking about playoffs.
Wicky changed lineups and formations more often than a dancer changes outfits in a Broadway show. None of it worked. The team was ultimately undone by its inability to score goals. The Fire have scored 36 times going into the season finale. Only CF Miami and expansionists Austin FC have scored fewer, each with 35.
Beric’s lost season came alive when his late surge of goals increased his total to eight tallies. Midfielder Luka Stojanovic also contributed eight goals, but he was inexplicably ignored by Wicky for long stretches of the season. He has started just 15 matches out of 27 and his omission from the starting 11 is utterly baffling. How many teams in any league transform their top scorer into a bench player?
Instead, Wicky (and interim coach Frank Klopas) has given a piano mover like Fabian Herbers 22 starts this season. Despite Herbers’ frequency in the starting lineup, he has yet to score a goal this season. In fact, Wicky tried Herbers, Offor, Aliseda, and Ivanov at the forward position at various times this season. That group scored fewer goals COMBINED than Stojanovic. This is criminally incompetent.
The only bright spot on Wicky’s resume for the 2021 season was the insertion of Gabriel Slonina into the starting lineup for an extended run of games. The teenager has earned his stripes and has shown poise, maturity, and command of his penalty area at a level far beyond expectations. Wicky and his staff deserve credit for not preventing a young player from blossoming at the expense of giving meaningless games to journeyman goalkeeper Bobby Shuttleworth.
While it is clear that the Fire’s roster isn’t ready to contend for MLS Cup, Wicky failed to get the most out of his players. At the very least, they should have been within sight of the Red Line. Instead, they stumbled out of the gate and failed to take advantage of a first-half schedule loaded with home games. Wicky spent the middle part of the season fumbling with his lineup like someone trying to find a matching pair of socks in the dark. He stayed in the job far too long and his dismissal was inevitable and necessary.
Summary
Mansueto’s decision to allow Heitz to sit in the big chair might work out eventually, given Heitz’s previous track record identifying talent. But these first two seasons have been calamitous, thanks to Mansueto’s late hiring of Heitz, which resulted in the dominoes collapsing in the wrong direction. If Mansueto believes that 25,000 fans will come into Soldier Field regularly to watch the Fire, then the on-field product has to improve. A LOT. Will Heitz be the person to get them there?
(Image courtesy of chicagofirefc.com.)
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