Chicago Fire Midweek Training: 3 takeaways from Week 9

1. Management failure

So, over the past two points, you can see that the main thing that I’m trying to say is that Veljko Paunovic needs to go. He is now going into his fourth season and we have seen no true improvement in his coaching style. The problem with this is that we know for a fact that he is not ‘on the hot seat’.

The moment that Chicago Fire general manager Nelson Rodriguez called him his ‘soccer soulmate’, their fates were sealed. They win and lose together. There is no going back. If Rodriguez walks back that statement and fires Paunovic, he looks stupid for ever saying that in the first place. For Paunovic, there is no escaping either because there is really nowhere else he can go, especially with his career coaching record looking the way it does.

When Rodriguez announced the contract extension this past offseason, he preached about consistency in management. Is accountability in management not more pertinent, though? To put into perspective what the past looks like for the club, the Chicago Fire’s last coach was Frank Yallop, who coached the team for 63 games to a record of 13 wins, 24 draws, and 26 losses before being fired in the middle of the season. Before him was Frank Klopas, who was fired after 76 games with a record of 34 wins, 17 draws, and 25 losses. Paunovic has now coached the Fire for 111 MLS games, picking up 33 wins, 28 draws, and 50 losses. He has been the most consistent coach that the team has had in the past decade and that consistency has shown no results, just a single collapse in the knockout round of the playoffs.

If you take a coach in a sport where draws are possible and almost 50% of their games are losses, that coach should not stick around. But instead, we’re stuck at an impasse unless Nelson Rodriguez swallows his pride and lets his soulmate go or the upper management deals with them both. Until then, I hope that the number in the wins column goes up but it is highly unlikely considering past results.