Chicago Fire Return to Soldier Field: This Fan Asks Why?

When Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto took full control of the club in September 2019, he had a vision for making the club as successful as the top clubs in MLS. One of the first items on his to-do list was to extricate the Fire out of their lease with the village of Bridgeview and get the team back to playing in Soldier Field. They made a triumphant return to the heart of the city last Tuesday, pounding feeble FC Cincinnati 3:0 in a match that was not as close as the score might indicate.

But will a change of location be the key factor for making the Chicago Fire successful? Location is a lot less important than the quality of the product on the field and we’ll examine all of the factors. Full disclosure: I have been a season-ticket holder for the Chicago Fire since 1998. I’ve attended nearly every match played at old Soldier Field, new Soldier Field, Naperville, and Bridgeview. I live in Chicago’s northwest suburbs and I drive to wherever the Fire play.

A lot has been made about the importance of MLS teams having a home venue in the heart of the city. Teams like Seattle and Atlanta have been drawing in excess of 40,000 spectators on a regular basis. It’s all about grabbing the attention of urban-dwelling young adults. Therefore, moving the Fire out of Bridgeview was thought to be the first step towards making the team relevant to the Chicago soccer market.

If only the equation were that simple. In the case of the Chicago soccer market, the first thing the Fire have to understand is that the fanbase is somewhere between sophisticated and fickle. Sophisticated, because a lot of them know bad soccer when they see it, and they simply won’t support it. Fickle, because putting a winning team on the field matters.

A personal anecdote will explain what Chicago soccer fans are all about. In the Fire’s inaugural season, the club sought to build relationships with the area’s amateur soccer leagues, who are represented by many thousands of adult players. This was a smart idea because these are the people who will become hard-core fans if you can get them on board. At the time, I was Secretary of the National Soccer League, the second-oldest soccer league in the USA, and I helped set up a meeting with sales and marketing folks from the Fire. Their objective was to create a process to turn the NSL’s clubs into ticket buyers. When we discussed different things that the Fire could do to help cement the relationship with the NSL’s clubs, one of the most attractive ideas was for Fire coach Bob Bradley to conduct a coaching clinic for NSL coaches. When all of the ideas were presented to the leaders of the NSL’s clubs, they scoffed at the value of a coaching clinic led by Bradley. Yes, people who work a regular job Monday to Friday, and who have no coaching pedigree, and who have had little or no training on how to coach soccer thought they knew more about soccer than a professional coach. It was quite clear that the Fire had a huge hill to climb if they wanted to win over Chicago’s soccer community.

The Fire could not have done a better job of putting their best foot forward in 1998. They won the double and a fanbase that had been starved for professional soccer ever since the demise of the North American Soccer League in 1984 came out to Soldier Field in impressive numbers: 17,887 on average. As it turned out, it is a figure that has withstood the test of time and has never been surpassed. Given the size of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Fire’s on-field success in the period 1998-2006, it probably amazes outside observers that the Fire have not drawn higher attendance numbers. 

The novelty effect was in evidence in 1999 and 2000, when attendance decreased to 16,016 and 13,387, respectively. Attendance in 2000 was truly baffling, as the Fire put together a better roster than they had in 1998, and reached the MLS Cup final and won the US Open Cup. 

Although the Fire’s preferred location was downtown, their conditions at Soldier Field were a killer, both on and off the field. The stadium is owned and operated by the Chicago Park District, who seemed to know very little about how to prepare a field for professional soccer. In the early part of the season, the pitch often resembled a potato patch, as the Park District groundskeeper appeared to rely on Mother Nature to get grass to grow there. By the time the field was in decent shape, the Soldier Field crew had to prepare for the football season. The Chicago Bears had the final say on everything happening at Soldier Field during football season, which meant growing the grass longer, a condition poorly suited for soccer. The Bears’ lease with the Park District also gave them the right to force the Park District to reschedule events that conflicted with the Bears’ schedule. The Fire had to rework the latter part of their schedule every year they played in Soldier Field. In 2005, things were totally absurd, as the Fire went 53 days between home games. Add in the fact that the financial terms of the lease were terrible for the Fire, and one doesn’t wonder why the Fire sought to build their own stadium.

The Village of Bridgeview swooped in and offered to build a soccer stadium on their dime. The Fire signed a short-term lease to play in renovated Soldier Field in 2004 and 2005, as they waited for construction of their soccer palace to be completed. The Fire signed a 30-year lease to make Bridgeview their new home. It seemed like a winning idea all around for the Fire: they were the main tenants in a stadium with outstanding sightlines and the field was built to their specifications. With a capacity of 20,000, the Fire hoped to create a scenario of ticket scarcity, which would encourage fans to buy season tickets. The rush to commit to season tickets never materialized.

But the Fire failed to replicate the on-field success they had enjoyed while playing in Soldier Field, winning just one trophy in the Bridgeview years, the US Open Cup in 2006. Their poor play on the field (just six playoff appearances from 2006-19, and only two in the last ten years) was the result of horrendous mismanagement by Andrew Hauptman, who bought the team from Phillip Anschutz in 2007. Over time, Fire fans became disillusioned with the direction of the club and attendance waned, reaching an all-time low of 12,234 in 2019.

We live in an age of instant opinion and analysis, thanks to the reach of social media. Some Fire fans point the finger squarely at Bridgeview being a bad location for the Fire. The stadium is difficult to reach by public transportation, the surrounding neighborhood is not inviting for pregame and postgame socializing, and getting in and out of the stadium parking lot is difficult are among the reasons given for the Fire’s attendance woes. There are, however, two sides to every story. And this story may even have more than two.

For every city-dwelling fan who complains about Bridgeview’s location, there is a suburban fan who complains about Soldier Field’s location. While it’s true that a city dweller without a car will have a hard time commuting to Bridgeview, the Fire successfully ran their Pub To Pitch program for several years. It’s a very simple concept; fans gather at one of several PTP locations, get on a bus that drops them off at the stadium, and then the bus shuttles them back to the pub at the conclusion of the match.

Having driven to both venues many times, I would much rather drive to Bridgeview than to downtown Chicago to watch the Fire. The distance to Bridgeview is a little farther than the distance downtown, but the hassles of downtown congestion and the general ineptitude of the Soldier Field parking attendants are big inconveniences. Traffic congestion can be a factor in Bridgeview also. With only two streets allowing access to the parking lots, a lot of coordination is required to keep traffic flowing smoothly. It was a situation that was poor when the stadium first opened and got better over time.

The notion that location is the driving factor for Chicago Fire attendance is belied by the numbers. For purposes of this discussion, the Fire’s two seasons in Naperville (all of 2002 and most of 2003), while Soldier Field was being renovated, are omitted from the analysis. 

The Fire played six full seasons in Soldier Field, along with a handful of games at the end of the 2003 season. Their average attendance for regular season matches was 16,345, using official numbers. The Fire played 14 seasons in Bridgeview and averaged 15.458. 

The attendance figures for the 2004 and 2005 seasons, played in new Soldier Field, were skewed to a significant degree due to a handful of Fire matches being scheduled as doubleheaders involving high-profile clubs and national teams. In 2004, the Fire were part of at least three such doubleheaders: USA v Poland (39,529 attendance), Morelia v Necaxa (20,754), and Club America v Pachuca (34,444). They benefited from two massive doubleheaders the following year: Mexico v Poland (54,427) and Real Madrid v Chivas (54,432). Removing these figures as obvious outliers, the 2004 attendance is revised down from 17,153 to 13,547. Similarly, the 2005 figure is reduced from 17,238 to 11,219.

As a result, the Fire’s aggregate attendance during the Soldier Field years is a more honest 14,741. Despite the Fire’s best years of on-field performance coming during the Soldier Field era, the team’s aggregate attendance in Bridgeview was slightly higher, by 717 fans

Digging a little deeper, we can examine the very best attended seasons. The table below sorts the top ten seasons of Chicago Fire attendance in descending order. The numbers show that the best years at the box office were higher in Bridgeview than at Soldier Field seven times out of ten.

On-field performance is a much better indicator of attendance. The following table shows the Fire’s top five seasons with respect to points, excluding the 2003 season played mostly in Naperville. All but one of these (2000) occurred during those ten best attended seasons.

Poor performance has some connection with poor attendance. The table below shows the Fire’s six worst seasons with respect to points, with their worst season listed first. Three of those seasons (2004, 2106, 2018) occurred during  the Fire’s ten worst attended seasons. The consecutive Wooden Spoon seasons of 2015 and 2016 set the stage for a significant decline in attendance for the final two seasons in Bridgeview. The Fire had their second-highest attendance in history in 2017, based on earning the league’s third-highest point total. They followed that up with a horrendous 2018 season, garnering just 32 points. By 2019, the fans had seen enough and attendance cratered.

The conclusions from this analysis tell us the following.

1. The Chicago-area soccer market’s appetite for the Chicago Fire (and possibly, for the quality of MLS in general) is not large. The Fire’s highest attendance in their history occurred in their first year. Much of the interest that year might have been fueled by the novelty of professional soccer returning to Chicago. Further, the Chicago Fire’s season-ticket base is poor. Although the club has never revealed the number of season-ticket holders year to year, there isn’t a waiting list for season tickets, as is the case for many MLS teams.
2. Chicago-area soccer fans have generally turned out for the Fire when the team has been successful and have stayed away when the team has been poor. The seasons during which the soccer has been poor and the attendance numbers have been relatively good are a tribute to the club’s sales staff. A bad team will have poor attendance, regardless of the location of the stadium.
3. The location of the stadium may have little to do with making the Fire relevant to Chicago’s soccer fans. Aggregate average attendance at Bridgeview has been slightly higher than that at Soldier Field.
4. The Chicago-area soccer market is big and will come to watch quality soccer. Large crowds have turned out for the World Cup, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, and international friendly matches. One-off events, however, are not an indication that fans will commit to attending matches consistently, week after week. Could the Fire (or MLS) provide the kind of quality that is needed to drive attendance?

The obstacles that the Chicago Fire faced in 1998 when they began playing in Soldier Field are what motivated them to build their own soccer stadium. Moving to Bridgeview gave the Fire control of revenue, control of the playing surface, and control of game dates. That decision took them away from downtown, always their preferred location. But an offer of a fully funded stadium from Bridgeview was far more preferable than spending $100 million (or more) of their own money to build a soccer stadium in the city. There are enough data from attendance in both locations to tell the Fire that roughly the same number of fans will follow them whether they play in Soldier Field or whether they play in Bridgeview. Whether those fans are hipsters who live in Bucktown, or whether they are driving in from the suburbs is immaterial. All of them are ticket buyers. It becomes the Fire’s responsibility to give fans a reason to buy tickets to watch their team.

Photo: (wgntv.com)