Analyzing Heitz’s Four Seasons, Part IV: No Excuses

Note: This is the final part of our four part series. If you haven’t already, check out Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Shortly after Georg Heitz’s hiring as Sporting Director of the Chicago Fire was announced in December 2019, he met with the media. He set clear goals. He told Guillermo Rivera of The Athletic, “for sure, we have to make the playoffs.” That was not the end of his ambitions with the team. He told Brian Sandalow of the Chicago Sun-Times, “It is clear that we want to reach the playoffs next season, and from then on, anything is possible.”

When Heitz made that statement, there were 24 teams in MLS, 14 of which made the playoffs that season. Nashville and Miami were due to start playing as expansion teams, bringing the league to 26 teams, but the plan had been to keep the playoffs at 14 teams.

When COVID hit, after restarting play, the league decided to expand the playoffs massively: A total of 18 teams would make the playoffs; only four teams from each conference would miss out. The Fire were one of those teams, falling one point shy of 10th place and the final playoff spot, ending the season with 23 points in 23 games.

Short of the target, despite the target being much larger than planned (Nashville finished in seventh place with 32 points in what would have been the last playoff spot had the format not been expanded).

In the Sun-Times interview in 2019, he told Sandalow, “I have one principle: no excuses, no alibis.”

Four years in, the team has not made the playoffs once, one of two teams in the league along with D.C. United has failed to make the postseason. Since that interview in 2019, five teams have entered the league as expansion franchises. All have made the postseason.

Yet, in a way, Heitz has been true to his word: He has not offered excuses or alibis to the media or, as far as MenInRed97 has been able to determine from speaking to fans and supporters to them. Ultimately, his job is not accountable to us; rather, he reports to owner Joe Mansueto. Has he offered apologies to him? We simply do not know.

The Team Has Been Historically Bad

If the past four years of Fire soccer have seemed unusually bad, it isn’t just you: The team has been bad by historical margins over the past few seasons.

While the team has not finished at the bottom of the standings as it did in 2015 and 2016, the team has still been bad by historical margins: It set a team record for worst goal differential in 2021, conceding 18 more goals than the team scored, eclipsing the team’s 2016 record.

Offense has been incredibly hard to come by over the past few years: The team has now gone four years in a row without scoring 40 goals in a season. Even though the 2020 season was the shortest in league history, prior to 2020, the team had never gone more than two years without scoring at least 40.

The team’s longest stretch of consecutive minutes without scoring a goal stood for years at 401 minutes, set back in 2010, until it was eclipsed by a 441-minute stretch in 2022. That, in turn, was eclipsed this past season, when the team went 511 minutes – just under the equivalent of six full 90-minute games – between scoring goals. That record is good for the eighth-longest in league history.

The chart above shows the team’s points, goals for, and goals against record per season on a per-game basis to adjust for the varying number of games played throughout league history.  The team has been good; the team has been bad, but they have never before had this many years with as consistent of a record as they have under Heitz.  The Wooden Spoon years of 2015 and 2016 were followed up by a strong 2017 year.  Even if the Fire would end up bowing unceremoniously out of the playoffs, there were still a lot of fun moments – 16 wins, 62 goals scored.  Many Fire fans still speak of fun memories from that season.

A common refrain among fans over the past few seasons has been that they feel that the team has lacked an identity, but in a way, that isn’t true: The team’s record has been clear and consistent. It just hasn’t been very good.

Out of Ideas

An apocryphal definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. That certainly seems to describe the situation that the Fire have been in over the past four seasons.

They are one of just two teams in a now-29-team league that failed to make the playoffs in that span, alongside D.C. United. In the time that Heitz has been in his job, D.C. is understood to have had three executives in charge of player recruitment: Dave Kasper (who remains with the organization), Lucy Rushton, and Wayne Rooney, and is now looking for a fourth.

In an interview with The Athletic on his appointment in late 2019, Heitz was clear about the goal in his first season with the team: “For sure, we have to make the playoffs. For sure, we have to be entertaining.”

And as for being entertaining: The team is tied for 26th for goals scored over the past four seasons, tied for fewest of any team that competed in the league all four years. They have had the second fewest wins of any non-expansion team, and are ahead of Toronto’s tally by only two. They have been amongst the worst in the league in virtually every category that could give a fan joy over the past four seasons.

Resources have not been the issue: The team has spent freely over the past few years, and is amongst league leaders for total spend.

And yet, despite Mansueto’s wallet apparently being open, after a flurry of initial signings in his first few months on the job, Heitz has consistently signed fewer players than average, and far fewer than other teams that failed to make the playoffs.

After that initial window, Heitz has had seven separate windows in which he could make changes to the roster, and yet, like God in Genesis, when he’s reflected upon his work so far, he’s judged it to be good: A full 45.1% of the team’s minutes this past season came from players that came to the team at or before his first window in charge of the team.

The chart below shows the total player signings for every non-expansion team in MLS from 2021-2023, along with the number of playoff appearances from 2020-2023. As with previous data, expansion teams over that period are excluded, as they needed to fill an entire roster in that span.

Unsurprisingly, teams with fewer playoff appearances typically made more changes. D.C. United, the only team other than the Fire to fail to make the playoffs in the past four years, has signed 48 players over the past three years.

Miami, actively working to rebuild their roster after bringing in Chris Henderson as sporting director before the 2021 season, signed a total of 56 players. Atlanta, working to regain the form that saw them win MLS Cup, brought in 47 players. Of teams who only made the playoffs once in the past four years, no team made fewer signings than Houston’s 37.  They grabbed the fourth seed in the Western Conference and won the U.S. Open Cup this year.

The Fire signed 24 players in that timeframe. That is half of D.C. United’s total and 32 fewer than Miami. The lack of signings cannot be explained by the number of players brought in in 2020: In that season, Miami was an expansion team, and so every player was new to their roster. Nashville was also new to the league and still signed 30 players over the past three years, even as the team made the playoffs every year.

Unwilling – or unable – to see where the roster is deficient, he has actually offered new deals to many of the players on the roster, including no fewer than three to Gastón Giménez, a player who has widely failed to live up to the sums spent on his services to date.

Rather than move him within the league, sell him outside of it, or let his deal expire, Giménez’s deals have now been restructured so that he will still be a significant earner (and drain on the salary cap) through the end of the 2025 season, which will be his sixth with the team.

It seems that Heitz is simply out of ideas.

He might get a mulligan for 2020 (in fact, we all might get one – there is a reason it was decided not to award the Wooden Spoon for that year). Perhaps consistency in 2021 was an understandable idea, at least in the opening window, but by the opening of the summer window, the need for change should have been clear (just a couple of months later, the team decided to relieve then Head Coach Raphaël Wicky of his duties), but actual changes were thin on the ground: Federico Navarro was a welcome addition, but he (obviously) did not significantly change the team’s fortunes.

The following season brought significant changes to the roster, including bringing a new Head Coach in Ezra Hendrickson and Xherdan Shaqiri on a team-record deal, but it did not significantly change the team’s fortunes.

Further roster changes were made in 2023 (though, significantly, a number of them were made as loans). While just under half of the team’s minutes came from 2019 and 2020 signings this past year, just over half came from signings from the past two seasons: The Fire’s roster has been half-replaced over the past seasons, but like the Ship of Theseus, the end product looks eerily similar, and the team managed just one more point in 2023 than it did the year prior.

Heitz Has Had An Above-Average Tenure At The Helm

While it may feel like Heitz is still relatively new to the league, he is not new to his job. Next month will mark his four-year anniversary as Sporting Director of the team.

That puts his tenure at just under 47 months, which is actually above average for the league. The titles of people in Heitz’s position vary throughout the league: General Manager, Sporting Director, and Chief Soccer Officer are the most common, but most have been in their job for less time than Heitz has.

The longest-tenured person in an equivalent position is Peter Vermes, who took control of the team in November 2006 – 204 months ago – and has held on since. Other long-term executives still in their posts include John Thorrington at Los Angeles FC (95 months; his tenure predates the team’s first season on the pitch by over two years), Minnesota United’s Manny Lagos, and Nashville’s Mike Jacobs (who was given his job in October 2017, 73 months ago, although the team did not enter the league until the 2020 season).

(As a note: Dave Kasper is technically listed as President of Soccer Operations & Sporting Director, but over the past year, their Head Coach Wayne Rooney is understood to have been the primary driving force in player selection; prior to that, Lucy Rushton was named General Manager and is understood to have been primarily in charge of player recruitment.)

Heitz is actually the 12th-longest serving person in his role throughout the league, just behind Vancouver’s Axel Schuster, who entered his job just a month before Heitz and a few days ahead of Charlotte’s Zoran Krneta (who was named to his post on New Year's Eve 2019 though the team did not begin play until the 2021 season).

Other than Heitz, every MLS Sporting Director, General Manager, or equivalent title who has been in their position for four or more seasons of play (excluding Krneta, whose team has only played two years) has made the playoffs at least twice.

Only one executive on the list – Los Angeles FC’s John Thorrington, whose team won both the Supporters Shield and MLS Cup last year, and who have made the playoffs three of the past four seasons, has had a higher roster spend over the past four seasons ($69.62 million compared to the Fire’s $65.44 million). And keep in mind: The gulf between high spenders like LAFC and the Fire to teams with lower spends is probably undercut significantly by focusing only on MLS Players Association salary data, as transfer fees are not included; the Fire (and LAFC) have spent significantly on such fees in recent years.

Of the 12 teams whose general manager has been in place at least four seasons, four have won trophies in that span (Columbus and LAFC, MLS Cup; Orlando, U.S. Open Cup; Vancouver, 2x Canadian Championship winners). An additional four have either topped their conference in the regular season (Sporting KC, 2020; Colorado, 2021; Philadelphia 2022) or made it to a competition final (Philadelphia, MLS Cup 2022; Nashville, Leagues Cup 2023). In total, seven teams on the list have qualified for continental competition (Colorado, Columbus, Los Angeles FC, Nashville, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Vancouver).

Every team has earned at least 30 points more than the Fire over the past four regular seasons except for Colorado, whose roster spend has been less than two-thirds what the Fire’s has, and the Rapids still managed to top the Western Conference in 2021. Despite that (relatively) recent success, the poor results this season caused Rapids supporters to walk out of their match against the Revolution this past September in protest.

Realistic Goals Are Not Enough

In his relatively few interviews every year since his first season, Heitz has repeatedly identified making the playoffs as the goal.

That was an understandable goal in 2020 for a team that had missed out on the postseason two years in a row prior to that.

It seems, on one hand, to be a reasonable goal for 2024, given that it is a mark the team has again failed to make now for six years running; on the other hand, every team save one – including five expansion teams – have managed to make the postseason in that timeframe.  Assuming the same expanded playoff field, the overarching chances of a team in the Eastern Conference missing the playoffs five years in a row are under 1.2%.

Still, making the playoffs – being one of the top 60% of the teams in the league that season – one year out of five also feels like a woefully inadequate goal after five years and what will clearly be over $100m in player expenses once transfer fees are factored in.

And yet, expecting more than narrowly making the playoffs from this team, which has been the most consistent in its results over the past four years, seems unrealistic. There have been two permanent head coaches (and one long-term interim), there has been significant roster continuity, and yet, there is also more than enough time for changes. The roster has seen turnover, and there have been changes, but ultimately, the results have been maddeningly similar.

Over the past four years, the team has gone from a 34-point-a-season pace to 39 in 2022 and 40 this past season.  At that rate of progress, the team will be competing for the Supporters Shield in 2038.

That, more than anything else, is giving Heitz more time in charge of the roster seems foolhardy, not because the results have been bad, but because the results have been consistently bad to an extent that seems almost unfathomable in a league with this much parity.

Success Need Not Be Far Away

Despite the Fire’s poor run of results over the past few years, there are templates that the team could follow.

The Fire’s six-season playoff drought is second in league history only to Toronto’s from 2007-2014.

In that span, Toronto tried several different head coaches and sporting directors before naming Tim Bezbatchenko to the post at the end of the 2013 season. The team failed to make the playoffs in 2014 but did in 2015. The team lost their debut playoff game that year.

The next year, Toronto lost to the Sounders in the MLS Cup Final. A year later, they beat the Sounders in a rematch, claiming MLS Cup as part of a domestic treble that included a Canadian Championship and Supporters Shield win.

FC Cincinnati is often cited as another template, but their Hell is Real rivals Columbus provide another model: The Columbus Crew finished 2019 in 10th place in the Esat, four points (and two spots) behind the Fire.

The next season, under new coach Caleb Porter, the team finished third in the East and won MLS Cup.

Both Toronto and Columbus found success with Tim Bezbatchenko operating as Sporting Director.  Bezbatchenko remade the roster, finding successful high-end talent but also managing to find value – players whose contribution exceeded their salary cap hit, which is essential in a league with the restrictions that MLS places on spending.

FC Cincinnati, similarly, was a laughing stock during its first seasons in the league, winning a total of just 14 games across its first three seasons and amassing a -105 goal differential before bringing in Chris Albright following the 2021 season.

A year later, Cincinnati made the playoffs, and in 2023, they won 20 games (more than their first three years combined) and captured the Supporters Shield in the process.

In all three examples, the turnaround didn’t take long: Bezbatchenko’s teams missed the playoffs both of their first years; Cincinnati managed to make it theirs, but in both cases, the teams had results just a year later.

The key was hiring an executive who knew the league and understood its mechanics. Cincinnati’s Chris Albright served seven years in the Philadelphia Union organization, starting just as they hired current Head Coach Jim Curtin. Bezbatchenko spent several years at MLS headquarters prior to his time in Toronto, and LAFC’s first and only sporting director, John Thorrington (a former Fire player), worked at the MLS Players’ Union prior to being named to his post.

There are exceptions (the closest Lutz Pfannenstiel at St. Louis came to MLS before being named to his position was with spending a year with the Calgary Mustangs in 2004 and a year as an assistant coach with the Cuban national team over a decade ago), but MLS experience, combined with the substantial budget that Mansueto has provided mean that finding success need not be a long term project.

What The Fire Need to Be Successful

Regardless of who Fire’s Sporting Director is for the next season, the job is the same: The team needs to find a way to overhaul the roster.

Heitz has had some successes: The team has been one of the most successful in the league at selling players to Europe, including Gaga Slonina and Jhon Durán, but also Przemysław Frankowski. Even if the team arguably did not get the return that it could have from Frankowski’s sale (selling him at $2.5 million compared to his now $9.6 million value, per Transfermarkt), the move was, especially at the time, novel for MLS. While the league had become known as a source for young American and Canadian talent, MLS was not known (especially at that time) as a source of prime-aged international talent going to the Top Five leagues in Europe.

Those sales should help the Fire with recruiting young, promising players: Come play in Chicago, and the team can be your pathway to teams in top Europe – even ones playing Champions League football.

Clearly, the Fire needs to bring in more talent; teams make an average of just over 12 signings per season. The Fire has averaged eight over the past three years.  Given the results, that simply hasn’t been enough turnover.

As a rule of thumb: If the team brings ten or more new players in the offseason, including several in impact spots such as Designated Players or U-22 slots, someone is trying. If not, the results are unlikely to be significantly different.

One issue that has plagued the Fire is the lack of value throughout the roster: Though many Fire fans consider Rafael Czichos to be one of the league’s best center backs, he is paid accordingly. That is fine – and given no player should ever leave money on the table, given how short and uncertain their careers can be  – but it simply means that the team needs to find value elsewhere.

The team has been able to do that with homegrown players but precious few other places over the past few years. Boris Sekulić’s $668,900 salary was often cited as an example of poor spending.  His performance was adequate for a right back in MLS, but his wages were between 30-50% higher than players of comparable quality throughout the league. He was replaced in 2023 by Arnaud Souquet, a player who had an up-and-down season but largely appeared to be of similar quality.

Souquet made $679,667 guaranteed in 2023.

Other teams have found ways to move on from players who underperform their wages – for virtually every signing, a player must be moved on in the league.

One tool the team has not taken full advantage of is the contract buy-out, which allows the team to essentially pay a player to terminate his contract and move on. In the creative world of MLS Salary Budget accounting, the player’s salary cap hit disappears as a result.

The team simply must find ways to move on from players that underperform their deals.  Souquet is on that list, but he is not at the top of it. First and foremost, the Fire simply must find a way to move on from Jairo Torres and free up the Designated Player spot he occupies. Even if he has been hampered by injury issues, he has had two full seasons, and it is clear that he is not set to thrive in Chicago.  Similarly, Kacper Przybyłko earns too much to be a bench player and has not shown production since coming to Chicago to be worth anything close to his deal. Gastón Giménez is no longer a DP, but paradoxically, his salary budget hit has increased as a result.

Xherdan Shaqiri has also not performed at a DP level. However, in 2024, it would be difficult, so the Fire’s next head coach should have clear ideas on how to maximize his production while also giving minutes to players like Brian Gutiérrez and (assuming he returns) Maren Haile-Selassie.

The Fire feel like they are in a very similar position to 2019: With need throughout virtually every position. Unlike 2019, however, the team does not have a lot of empty roster spots, making the task even more difficult.

The Fire can be successful – not just sneaking into the playoffs, as one more win would have done this year, but truly successful – if they take full advantage of the means available to them: Every DP signing must be an impact player. The team must sign more U-22 players who have a good chance of making a real impact, like Jhon Durán, rather than longer-term projects with less certain returns like Alonso Aceves.

The team should look for proven talent within the league more often, including picking up players from waivers or the re-entry draft.  D.C. United’s 48 signings over the past three seasons prove that roster changes do not guarantee success, but the Fire’s consistently bad results with half that many signings also shows that results will not change with the same roster.

The tools are there for the team to find success.  The question is whether there is the will and ability.