The Fire go from facing the league with the second-longest playoff drought (after the Fire) to facing the team with the longest playoff streak in the league as they host the New York Red Bulls on Saturday.

Few teams are as synonymous with a style of play as the Red Bulls, but they’ve evolved tactically under Head Coach Sandro Schwarz. Early on, results were going the team’s way but they’ve since stalled out, with just one win in their past 10 games across all competitions.

Note: For a more general overview of the Red Bulls tactics and style of play, check out the tactical preview from when the Fire played them back in April, available here.

New York Red Bulls

Treading Water Without Forsberg

The Red Bulls have become the example of a perennial playoff team but through the team’s history dating to their time as the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, they’ve never won MLS Cup, and it’s felt in recent years like  ownership in Europe seemed to lose an interest in keeping up with the league elite.

This past offseason, ownership promised change and brought in Emil Forsberg alongside Schwarz. When the Fire faced the team seven games into the season, the Red Bulls had won four and lost only one and were looking like a team that was maybe a piece or two away from being competitive with the league’s elite.

Then Forsberg went down with an injury and hasn’t played since a brief cameo at the end of June after missing most of that month.

Since his last appearance, the Red Bulls have one just one game: A 3-1 victory over FC Cincinnati on July 20th, not coincidentally, the same banged-up squad that the Fire beat three days prior in what is, to date, also the Fire’s most recent win.

Incredibly, though, they’ve been holding on to home field advantage in the first round of the playoffs, thanks largely to the fact that they also have just one loss in MLS play over that stretch, but their cross-state rivals are nipping at their heels, and the Red Bulls need to start getting wins to ensure they won’t lose home field advantage and face a team like the Crew in the first round.

Progress, Haltingly

Even before Forsberg’s injury, many commentators were saying that the Red Bulls looked better but were clearly a step or two behind the elite teams in the league like Inter Miami, the Columbus Crew or FC Cincinnati.

Bringing in Forsberg from sister club RB Leipzig in the Bundesliga was a step in the right direction. The team’s academy continues to produce talent at a high level, but the squad still lacked top-end attacking talent: Dante Vanzeir, who arrived before the 2023 season, simply has not produced at anything close to the level that you’d want from a Designated Player (DP) attacker even if his underlying numbers are slightly better than his production.

Red Bulls fans were hopeful that the front office would remedy the situation by filling the team’s open DP spot with a proven goalscorer in the summer, but instead, the team sold midfielder Frankie Amaya to Toluca in Liga MX for a reported $3 million fee and used the open DP spot to bring in a replacement in 27-year-old Uruguayan international Felipe Carballo.

The move is a loan with a purchase option and in two appearances off the bench so far, he’s looked like an adequate replacement for Amaya, but now the team have less roster flexibility and still look like they need a top-level No. 9 attacker.

The team’s tactical evolution under Schwarz has continued: They still press, they still play the ball quickly and prefer short, direct play to intricate sequences, but now they’re less afraid of having the ball and they’re now middle-of-the-pack with 52 build up attacks per Opta.

That’s good for 18th in the league but more to the point, it’s a far cry from teams like St. Louis or D.C. that remain dedicated toi “OG” Red Bull Style-ball (with 17 and 23 build up attacks, respectively), but without someone to finish off chances (and they could probably use someone better at hold up play in the final third as well), it feels more like Schwarz has raised the ceiling for the team, rather than breaking through it.

New York Red Bulls Starting Lineup Prediction

Sandro Schwarz has been committed to playing out of a 4-4-2 for most of the season, with two central midfielders playing as a kind of double pivot and the two outside midfielders playing like wingers.

Lewis Morgan is the most dangerous player offensively, and he, along with center back Noah Eile and GK Carlos Coronel should all be back from international duty. That puts Morgan at the left wing, opposite, likely Cameron Harper.

In the central midfield, 21-year-old homegrown Daniel Edelman, the team’s minutes leader so far this season, should get the nod. I suspect that this may be Carballo’s first start with the Red Bulls after two bench appearances so far.

Dante Vanzier has mostly been partnered with Elias Manoel up top. I get the meme potential in starting Cory Burke, who has scored eight goals in 10 career games against the Fire, including one last year at Soldier Field, the 32 year-old’s only start this year came last week when Schwarz had to juggle the lineup due to multiple absences.

Instead, he’s been getting minutes off the bench, and while I wouldn’t be surprised for him to get more than the 14 minutes he’s been averaging in his 16 bench appearances this season when facing the Fire, I would be surprised if Schwarz didn’t stick to as close to his best XI lineups that he can muster when the team is searching for its first win in nearly two months.

On the back line, John Tolkin, a Fire fan favorite for jeers (and this was before some of Tolkin’s social media likes became public) should start at the left wingback and the Neilis brothers – Sean at center back and Dylan playing wingback outside.

Chicago Fire

Use the ball

A lot has been written about the Red Bulls tactical evolution under Schwarz this season, but they’ve still been averaging 44.3% possession, a shade above San Jose, last place in that metric.

When the teams last met, the Fire had 66% possession, still their season high though they came close last week against D.C., where they had 65%. In those two games, the Fire had 0.6 and 0.5 xG, respectively.

Against D.C last week, the team succeeded in playing through D.C.’s press effectively, and had 129 touches in the final third, versus just 82 for D.C., but D.C. had more touches than the Fire in the attacking penalty area (12 to 10) and outshot the Fire nine to six, with six of D.C.’s shots coming before the Fire’s first.

Some of the Fire’s possession advantage can be explained by game state – with up by two goals, D.C. knew they could sit back and counter – but it was a similar pattern when the Fire played the Red Bulls in April, a game that finished as a 0-0 draw. In that game, the Fire had 71% more touches in the final third than the Red Bulls (193 to 113), yet just three-quarters as many touches in the attacking penalty area (18 to 24), and the Fire were outshot 19 to nine.

After the loss against D.C. United, Fire Head Coach Frank Klopas said that “We get in good spots, and then our ability in the final 25 yards from goal, whether it's just making a play, the quality of the crosses coming in, connecting, we get in really good spots and we need to be better and sharper in the final third… play the ball quicker and take advantage of the numerical superiority that we have. You attract on one side, how quickly can we get to the other?”

And that’s more or less the issue: The Fire get the ball into the final third but then don’t have a good plan for what to do with it. The match against the Red Bulls is instructive: Xherdan Shaqiri played that game as a true No. 10 central attacking midfielder and had the most touches in the final third, but did precious little with them. After that, most final third touches went to Arnaud Souquet and Allan Arigoni, playing as wingbacks.

The Fire were getting the ball into the final third and sending it wide, settling for crosses that often came too late rather than incisive attacking play. The Fire have more or less stopped playing with a No. 10 – partly because Brian Gutiérrez hasn’t really stepped into the role consistently, even if he played relatively well last week – but that just makes the Fire’s attack even more predictable.

The goal isn’t to hold the ball in the final third, it’s to score, and to do that, it helps if you connect passes into attackers playing centrally or in the channels. If every attack ends up going to a player near the touchline, opposition teams figure that out fast and the entire offense becomes far too predictable.

Chicago Fire Starting XI and Formation Prediction

Klopas at least has more or less his preferred starting XI available: Rafael Czchios is back from his one-game suspension for yellow card accumulation, and midweek, the Fire head coach confirmed that both Ariel Lassiter and Georgios Koutsias will be back from international duty and available for the game.

Arigoni left the game against D.C. with a minor ankle injury, but removing from the game seemed precautionary and Klopas explained that taking him off enabled him to bring on an additional forward for the second half, so he should also be available.

While I don’t expect either to start, I wouldn’t be surprised to see both Tom Barlow and Federico Navarro get serious minutes in this match. Navarro looked more like the young, fast, dogged shutdown No. 6 central midfielder that came to the Fire than what he had been playing like more recently when he started against Inter Miami, and he could match up well with the Red Bulls speedy midfield. Barlow, meanwhile, is still searching for his first game of the season and he’d certainly love for it to be against the team that traded him away.

I wouldn’t expect Koutsias to start, but he scored with the Greek U-21 squad on Tuesday in the kind of goal that shows that he’s continued to grow, and that his three recent goals for the Fire, including the team’s only two tallies in the Leagues Cup, weren’t a mistake. He still likely figures to be a bench option, and taking him off would likely mean removing Maren Haile-Selassie from the XI, who can work more as a creator and connector for striker Hugo Cuypers than Koutsias can.

The hope from the Fire – if possibly not quite the plan – is likely to get on the board, protect the lead, and then bring on Barlow and Koutsias to see out the game in favor of Cuypers and Haile-Selassie.

The Fire haven’t been able to string together strong 90 minute performances, but if they do that against the Red Bulls, well, as Arnaud Souquet told reporters before the game:  “Against Red Bulls, if you are strong in the back and we don't concede goal, we have the quality to score and to create something. But for sure the most important thing is we need to be better with the ball. When we don't have the ball, and we have to defend, and you stay compact to be ready because this team loves to let the ball to the other team and waits for the first mistake to punish us. So, we need to be alert about that, but we have to play our game, too. We cannot just play the long ball all the time and wait.”

If the Fire do that, they can close out their three game homestand with three points and keep the dream of a postseason spot alive.