7 New Year's Resolutions for the Fire in 2025

The New Year is often a time for a fresh start.

For the Chicago Fire, that fresh start started back in October with the hiring of new Director of Football and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. After five years under Georg Heitz, the arrival of Berhalter has reignited excitement for the fanbase and promises to be the start of a new era in Chicago after seven playoff-less seasons.

Here are seven resolutions that the Fire should aim to keep in 2025. If they reach these goals, the season will surely be a memorable one.

1. Establish a recognizable playing identity

Putting it bluntly, the Chicago Fire were bad in 2024. But they also had a complete lack of distinctive style. Tactics were often vague and predictable, and, at many times, players looked completely lost out on the field.

The arrival of Gregg Berhalter as the team’s head coach should dramatically change that, however, as he has a proven track record in establishing a true, recognizable style of play. He did it in Columbus, building a possession-based system that made the Crew one of the most difficult teams to play against in the league. With the U.S. Men’s National Team, he demonstrated more tactical flexibility but remained committed to his principles, terrorizing CONCACAF opponents throughout most of his tenure and building an identity centered around his core players.

Berhalter has said he wants to do the same in Chicago, and while change won’t happen overnight, this season will be a great opportunity to turn the Fire into a team to beat. If the team as a collective can find an identity, players will benefit individually as well, and an attractive style will also draw in more fans.

2. Keep on moving quickly, but not hastily

Under Director of Football Gregg Berhalter, the Fire have been taking care of business earlier than they have in previous years, announcing roster decisions a month earlier than in 2023 and finding a way to move on from Gastón Giménez on Christmas Eve. Those are welcome moves, but a lot more needs to be done to rework a roster that finished 2024 with 30 points and there are less than two months until the start of the regular season.

That needs to happen quickly, but Berhalter and Co. need to avoid falling into the trap that his predecessor Georg Heitz did, rushing to sign three Designated Players and bring in a number of other pieces before the team had played a game. Some of those choices, made in just a few months between the end of December and March, affected the team’s ability to field a competitive roster for years to come, given the nature of MLS’s roster and salary restrictions.

Unlike Heitz, Berhalter has MLS experience and is likely to avoid most of those pitfalls, but the fact of the matter is, there is an inherent tension between the need to build out a competitive roster quickly and holding some of the powder dry to make adjustments, mainly if top targets fall through.

3. Touch the ceiling

The 2024 edition of the Fire had real roster construction issues, and, compounding that, some bad luck with injuries, going most of the season without a true left back.

Even allowing for all of those things, however, many players on the squad still underperformed, falling short of their level. A number are due for a bounceback year – Chris Brady, in particular, fell victim to a defense that wasn’t performing well, a big part of why he went from being one of the top goalies in the league by most statistics through most of 2023 to one towards the bottom by 2024.

Still, we haven’t come close to seeing a number of players on the Fire’s roster live up to their potential. That includes Carlos Terán, whose injury history has kept him from really asserting himself, and Federico Navarro, who clearly has a lot of talent but whose best moments in a Fire uniform to date came years ago, but there’s no one that this applies to more than Brian Gutiérrez. Ahead of last season, he got a new U22 Initiative deal that sees him making just under $900,000 per year – far more than he’d likely earn in Europe at this stage.

Despite the big payday and a career-high six goals, his assist production dried up (down to three from nine a year earlier), and ultimately, he didn’t fail to make a compelling case that he could be a starting-level playmaker in this league – especially on a team trying to contend. The talent level is there, and few players on the Fire’s roster have a higher ceiling than Guti, but so far, he hasn’t really come close to reaching it.

A key challenge for the individual players – and for Berhalter – will be finding ways to help get more out of the talent that is already on the roster. If that can be unlocked, the FIre will be set for a much happier 2025.

4. Build from within

So far this offseason, the Fire have already added three players to the first team who were already within the organization – David Poreba, Omari Glasgow, and Dylan Borso. While those three appear to be clear upgrades on the outgoing dead wood at the bottom of the Fire’s roster, how quickly they adapt to the MLS level remains to be seen.

Berhalter has made it clear that he intends to revitalize the academy and further bridge the gap between the second team and first team. An academy player hasn’t burst out with the first team since the combined efforts of Gaga Slonina and Chris Brady took over the goalkeeper position in 2021, and 2025 is a great opportunity to reset that clock. Justin Reynolds, who appeared in a handful of matches at the end of last season, is also someone who could have a breakout season in his first full season with the first team.

Ultimately, the signings from the second team this winter are additions for the bottom of the Fire’s roster with a nod toward the future. But if any of the three can prove themselves valuable role players, it will already be more impactful on the first team than the previous several seasons’ equivalents.

5. Keep the crowds

In last year’s resolutions, we asked that the Fire get consistent attendance above 10,000 fans in MLS matches. It was the only resolution they kept; in 2024, their lowest attendance at home was the crowd of 11,372 that turned out to see the Fire take on Orlando midweek in late May, marking the first time since 2017 that the Fire didn’t have attendance in the four digits for an MLS match.

The team also showed that during weekends on warm weather, they could easily bring good crowds fans to Soldier Field, which combined with the 55,385 that showed up when the team hosted Miami sent the Fire to an average attendance of 21,327 – the first time in team history that attendance eclipsed the team’s inaugural season in 1998.

The elephant in the room, of course, is Messimania, both from the tickets sold for the game against Miami (although the team would still have broken its attendance record even without that game), and the fans who bought ticket packages or even season tickets as a result of the Fire’s clever marketing in 2023. Nonetheless, it’s a good bet that 2025’s attendance will be lower than 2024 – a shame, since the team could legitimately be much better than Fire squads of recent years now that Berhalter is at the helm.

So here’s the challenge: Keep good crowds at Soldier Field (something that the lack of a Leagues Cup break helps). A stretch goal for the team should be an average attendance above 20,000 for the second time in team history, but another goal should just be improving upon last season’s low-water mark of 11,372 fans.

With only one midweek home game, that seems feasible and would demonstrate that the team’s base is continuing to grow.

6. Get a player onto the USMNT

With Berhalter at the wheel, more USMNT eyes are going to be on the Fire than ever before. So why not renew that interest by getting a Chicago player back into the national team picture, especially with the 2026 World Cup just a year and a half away?

The last time an active Fire player stepped on the field for the national team was Djordje Mihailovic when Berhalter gave him a handful of call-ups in 2019 and 2020, but he never played prominent minutes in any meaningful games. Prior to that, a handful of garbage time cameos for Dax McCarty in the 2017 Gold Cup are all the Fire have to show in recent times.

The Gold Cup in 2025 presents a great opportunity for at least one Fire player to break into Mauricio Pochettino’s player pool, however. It could be a renaissance for midfielder Kellyn Acosta, whose last official game was at the 2022 World Cup but was an alternate as recently as last March. If Brian Gutiérrez can refind his best form, he too could emerge as an option, though with Gio Reyna, Malik Tillman, and Djordje Mihailovic playing the same position, that will be difficult. Chris Brady could get a call-up as a backup goalkeeper, or Berhalter could bring in an active member of the national team pool on the transfer market and make this challenge slightly more straightforward to accomplish.

7. Win a trophy

Hear me out on this one. It might seem like a preposterous ask for a team that finished 2024 with 30 points, tying the team’s record for fewest in a season (excluding the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign), but here’s the caveat: I’ll count the Brimstone Cup on this one.

FC Dallas

ut I think the Fire can do more than the Brimstone Cup. Although MLS teams’ participation in the U.S. Open Cup isn’t confirmed, one rumor is that the 11 U.S.-based MLS teams that didn’t make the postseason in 2024 will send first teams. Even if Los Angeles FC is allowed to do the same to defend their title – something Houston was last year – it is still a golden opportunity for the MLS team that considers itself the original Kings of the Cup.

While some of the other teams that would be in the ring will provide stiff opposition – Dallas and the Philadelphia Union are likely to be more competitive next year, St. Louis played better than their record and even Wooden Spoon-winning San Jose shouldn’t be counted out with Bruce Arena taking over and doing his best to reunite as much of his 2021 Revs team that won the Supporters Shield as possible – the fact is, the Fire couldn’t really ask for a much easier path to become the first MLS team to win the Open Cup five times in their history.

If they do, they will tie an old rival – the aforementioned Dallas – for the longest interval between championships in Cup history at 19 seasons, with FC Dallas (then the Burn) winning the trophy in 1997 and 2016. A trophy win and a berth in the CONCACAF Champions Cup for the first time in its current format for the Fire would go a long, long way to returning the Fire to their original glory and soothing many of the aches that fans have had to endure for far too many seasons.