The gesture of comping 2020 season tickets for the 68 fans who’ve had them since the team’s birth represents a nuanced attention to detail. Alvaro Medran looks like the kind of player MLS teams need to compete, and the Fire have generally said the right things about increasing the franchise’s exposure.
Yet Soldier Field, and the other promising signs under Joe Mansueto, will only go so far to turn a soccer market into one that cares deeply about the Fire and MLS after a decade of decay under Andrew Hauptman.
“I think they’ve got to really get focused on returning to their roots and understanding the passion that exists for this sport here in the city,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said. “This is one of the top soccer markets (from) fan research. The fan research we’ve done has shown that this is a top 2 or 3 soccer market in North America, and we’ve seen the success of MLS all-star games and Gold Cup matches and Copa America matches that we’re convinced the market exists.
“The Chicago Fire have to work hard to recapture that interest in their club.”
That means following through on the off-field progress while pairing it with a better on-field product. Though he stopped short of explicitly saying it, Mansueto hinted Tuesday that Paunovic and president and general manager Nelson Rodriguez will return for their fifth season together.
If that’s the case, their results will need to improve. But they aren’t the only people with the Fire who must get better. Mansueto said his “internal” goal is to double the Bridgeview attendance of 12,324, meaning an average crowd of around 25,000 per game.
“Ultimately, I’d like to see numbers well beyond that,” Mansueto said. “To me, I think that’s very achievable and I think there’s a lot of upside from there.”
As Garber and Mansueto know, Chicago has a base of soccer fans, many of whom turned away from the Fire while Seattle, Atlanta and Portland became MLS flagships. Mansueto said there’s no reason the Fire and Chicago can’t equal or surpass those cities as league hotbeds.
“To me, it’s not a question of if. It’s when,” Mansueto said. “The thing I can’t predict is, is that in one year, three years, or five years. To me, there’s no question that it will happen. There’s a rabid fan base here for soccer.”
The Fire haven’t consistently attracted those fans for a long time.
Even with three seasons of Bastian Schweinsteiger, an internationally renowned player who lived up to everything expected of him on and off the field, they continued their decline after a brief blip of success. It’s debatable whether it was poor soccer or the Bridgeview location that truly hindered the Fire – the 2017 playoff team drew 17,383 per game – but Mansueto views Soldier Field as the best way to draw fans.
“This location has I think the shortest commute for the most amount of people,” Mansueto said. “It was just the location on the Southwest side disadvantaged Bridgeview. Otherwise, it’s a fine stadium. It’s a terrific town. It’s just not accessible to all of Chicago.”
Now the Fire must build a franchise attractive to all of Chicago.
