It’s Getting Late Early for the Fire’s Season with Crucial Week Looming

Following Saturday’s loss in St. Louis, Fire Head Coach Frank Klopas said “The results haven’t been there, that’s for sure, but for me, it’s early in the season.” It was a statement echoed by team captain Xherdan Shaqiri, who said “I think it’s still early in the season and anything can happen. We know MLS, if you win two or three games, you are up there again.”

With all due respect to the coach and Swiss star – it isn’t that early. With 12 games played, more than a third of the team’s season is already in the books. Still, there’s a reason for their sentiment: MLS has an incredibly permissive playoff setup that sees 62% of teams making it to the postseason. Sporting Kansas City failed to win any of their opening ten games last season but managed to punch their ticket to the playoffs thanks to strong play starting in their 11th match.

For the Fire, however, to quote the great American philosopher Yogi Berra, “it gets late early out there,” and the team’s two home matches are now absolutely critical to the fate of the season.

Today, the team is in a hole – the team’s two wins and four draws (alongside six losses) are good for 10 points and 14th place in the 15 team Eastern Conference, and 28th of the 29 team league behind the New England Revolution, who have a game in hand (two Western Conference teams, like the Fire, have 10 points but both are ahead on tiebreakers). But without results in his week’s two home matches, the team goes from being in a hole to being in a hole at the base of a cliff.

Last season, 43 points saw teams into a wildcard berth in the Eastern Conference; in the West, it took 44. Looking through previous seasons, aiming for 44 points gives a team a reasonable shot – though not a guarantee – at a wildcard berth.

Given the Fire’s 10 points in 12 games so far, that means that from here on out, they need to average 1.54 points per game (ppg) to have reasonable confidence in a postseason spot. That’s far more than the team has averaged in recent years, but it’s a pace that seven teams met or bettered over the course of last year’s 34 game season – it works out, approximately, to LAFC or Atlanta United’s performance.

With two wins this week, the team would need to average just 1.4 ppg from here on out, something 13 teams – almost half the league – did last year over the course of the season; that’s about the performance that Vancouver, FC Dallas and Nashville managed last year.

If the team loses both matches, however? Needing 34 points in 20 games, they’d need to average 1.7 ppg from here on out to get a shot at a wildcard spot, an average that works out to just under 58 points over the course of a season. Only two teams in MLS managed that last year: Orlando City (63 points) and the Supporters Shield-winning FC Cincinnati (69 points).

More than just the results, however, is the schedule: The team’s home games are loaded early in the season, so as to avoid conflicting with concerts in the summer and Bears games in the fall at Soldier Field. The team has already played six of seventeen matches at home this season; after hosting Charlotte on Wednesday and Columbus on Saturday, they’ll have hosted eight, just under half of their total. That’s significant in a league where wins at home come almost twice as often as they do on the road.

That Kansas City team that was winless in their first 10 games and made a run to the postseason – something so remarkable that it gained notoriety around the league? After 12 games, that team had nine points, just one fewer than the Fire. They went on a run that saw the team lose just once between May 7th, when they got their first win of the season, and June 10th, when they beat Austin FC 401 at home, and the team only had one stretch where they dropped points in three consecutive matches – the weeklong stretch that ended on June 24 with their loss to the Fire.

Those are the kinds of results the team needs to put together from here on out if they want to end the longest active postseason drought in the league. The Fire can turn their season around, but they better start yawing now.