Outgoing Mail

Oh hi! I’m Jiggly. And it’s a Tuesday.

About a month ago, I asked for questions from my readers to answer. And boy, did I take my time answering every single question. I called it the mailbag, and it’s honestly something that I can do maybe once a season. So, as someone who only wakes up to FotMob notifications and “Storage Space Insufficient,” I now understand what it’s like to have too much mail. Why should I expect that my message is worth any more than anyone else’s? Well, I do have a column and a platform. So I guess I’m just gonna use it to send out a message to someone who I haven’t heard from in a while.

An Open Letter To Joe Mansueto

Hi, Joe.

I’d say “Mr. Mansueto,” but in everything that I’ve read about you, you seem like a personable enough guy to be cool with me just saying “Joe.” You’re the sort of guy to blend in with a crowd and really mingle with people. And while you made your money among the elite of the investment world, Morningstar also helped to allow the layman access to the sort of asset reports and in-depth analysis that would traditionally only be available to those elites. While I am still very much against the existence of billionaires and the overall state of capitalism, you took actions within the framework of capitalism to make things just a bit more equitable than they would've been if you hadn’t been there. Even Morningstar’s 2005 IPO was done in a way that allowed anyone to invest in the company.

The day you bought the other 51% of the Fire, there was a celebration. I only have four emails that are flagged, so that I can hold onto them as long as I can. There’s my student loan servicer information (kinda against my will more than anything), there’s being informed that one of my scripts was actually given a rank on a screenwriting site thanks to being in a contest, and there’s the notice of sale for both the Chicago Red Stars and the Chicago Fire, the Fire sale being far and away the oldest saved email. When I got the news, I went out and got some pizza and ice cream for myself. I was getting DMs from people left and right. There was genuine excitement in that moment, like a weight had been lifted off the fanbase. We could breathe again, we had hope again, and we could believe in more than we ever could for the past decade. And despite the rebrand, the start of the 2020 season was filled with that same hope. We had lost so much, and we were just happy that the Chicago Fire had a new future. When you showed up to Seattle to be with the fans in the away section, everyone believed that you could be the one to change everything.

You were the chosen one, Joe. That knight in shining armor that we stopped believing was real finally showed up. That feeling that we felt watching Bastian Schweinsteiger, in what would be his and the club’s last game wearing our badge, lead the Fire to an absolute demolition of Orlando City in the final game of the season. You know, we didn’t lose a single game in that badge after you bought the club.

That was about four years ago. We haven’t lost in that badge since. Instead, we lost 28 games in one incredibly poorly received badge and another 33 games in the current one. I added a few U.S. Open Cup and Leagues Cup games in those numbers, but I think it’s still incredibly telling that the Fire were still unable to win more than ten league games in any of those four seasons. The smell of change in the air has soured. There are a lot of questions being asked of your leadership.

It’s nothing new; your predecessor, Andrew Hauptman, faced criticism for a long time. It’s debatable how much of it was warranted, but it’s not like he was faultless. I remember hearing a story about some anonymous coach who asked him one day about what had happened to this club. They remembered when the team was good. They made the conference finals as recently as 2009. Hauptman’s response was something to the effect of “I trusted the wrong people.” And you can see the logic there. He didn’t have cash to throw around to get the very best, and he didn’t really have his own soccer knowledge to fall back on. So, he would just trust people. And looking at the list of those he trusted, there were a lot of misses. And those misses were so hard that even when he did find someone who knew what they were doing, there was just too much of a mess they had to try to dig out of.

To this day, I still question Hauptman’s commitment to the Chicago Fire. The more I learned about his situation, the more some of it made sense to me, but I still believed that he could’ve done more. Because it was more than what was on the pitch, that felt weird. There was the pitch itself, what I called the “Sarlacc Pits,” in front of the goals and spreading all throughout the box on either side, where there was a long protracted battle with the Village of Bridgeview actually to take care of the grass. There was the condescending tone that much of the communication with the club took, from “The Editorial” to literally Nelson Rodriguez’s entire existence. The Wall of Honor was created not as a celebration of fans who had passed but as a way for the club to separate supporters from the club itself. In fact, Brandon Kitchens and Dan Perry were voted to the Ring of Fire, but that was vetoed by Hauptman. There was reason to believe that the club under Hauptman’s vision was not a place where supporters felt seen by management, where we felt like we were part of a club rather than a “franchise.”

You’re not like that, Joe. I know you’re not. Because of all that I said earlier. That you were a guy who believed in the idea of democratizing investing, a guy who has pledged to give away half of his wealth, the kind of guy who could take a shot of Malort with Fire fans. Hell, you’re from northeast Indiana, I bet we can have a long conversation out in the parking lot about Notre Dame football. And you’re not just sitting around causing problems. You’ve flushed out a lot of the bad that was in the club from when you’ve got it. I’ve constantly heard about the massive internal changes that have been made. The people that you’ve brought in on the business side are great, and even if Block Club Chicago refuses to approach the story in good faith, there’s so much to love about the new training facility that it’s a story for another time. You care. I know you do.

So here’s the problem: The team on the pitch SUCKS. As I’ve detailed over the course of this second half of the season, there are a lot of different ways to look at this problem. The thing that I’ve landed on is that we’ve got a bunch of pleasant guys who are being put in some bad situations. This means that we end up with a fairly boring image and some fairly boring soccer. That boring soccer has not won enough games. As I pointed out, the stats and metrics look really bad and as Tim pointed out, the very mathematical fact that we have not made the playoffs since you bought the team looks really bad. And in another article, Tim is working on, there’s one big thing that we should be looking at when asking how this keeps happening. I think you know where I’m going.

Loyalty is important. It’s the reason I’m still here. It’s the reason why any of us are still here after the nightmare roller coaster that has been the past decade-plus. I love this club more than anything. As my friend Adnan likes to point out, this is where I start sprinkling in my “cries for help” in my writing, but seriously. The Chicago Fire are really the only thing I care about at this point in my life. Sure, it says a lot about how my life is going, but it also says a lot about how much emphasis I put into every word I write about this club. I speak so that I can be heard. And I want you to hear this.

We’ve got to move on from Georg Heitz.

I have written so much about this, and I think that, at this point, it’s pretty obvious. We heard earlier in the season that he was going, but now we’re hearing you’re a lot more hesitant now. I think that your instinct to hesitate isn’t wrong. I mean, I literally said in that column I linked that I couldn’t come up with a single name other than Peter Wilt’s and my own. There’s no perfect answer to this question. But what is an answer that will give relief, an answer that can provide that same sort of hope that your purchase announcement gave? It is moving on from Georg.

Georg is a solid guy, I don’t dislike him. In fact, I’m not against him having that dual role between Lugano and Chicago, leading the overall structure of the two clubs and taking on more of a focus on the scouting infrastructure. He knows what he’s doing there. But in MLS? There are no longer questions. There’s evidence that he’s just not right for that job. And you need to make that hard choice to move on and embrace the challenge of finding someone who is right for the job.

That problem that plagued Hauptman, the trap of “trusting the wrong people,” is avoidable. I said that his problem in that aspect was a lack of soccer knowledge and a lack of cash. Honestly, I’d need to have a full conversation with you in order to figure out that first point, but what’s undeniable is the money you’ve got. You can spend big on a position like this, and you should. I know that there’s been some backdoor stuff that prevented certain things from happening, but I think that there’s more that we can do. If we can’t get Garth Lagerway, why not club legend John Thorrington? Sure, he’s in a comfy spot, but a good pitch and the right number can do wonders. Same for someone like Jesse Marsch as both GM and coach. I’m sure there are different angles you can take to your pitch. There are also other MLS veterans, guys who genuinely understand this league and have proven success, that are out there. Find them (just not Frank Yallop, I cannot stress that enough).

Or, I guess, there’s still me. Honestly, I don’t think you’ll read this. You have better things to do, probably. And I know that I’d be an incredibly stupid hire, so I’m not exactly saying that with any belief that I could get the job. But my invitation for a conversation is real. My schedule is pretty damn open, seeing as I’m still unemployed, so I’m available whenever to talk. You can probably ask most of the people on staff where to contact me and they will know how to get a hold of me. I don’t want an interview; I’ll leave that to Alex or your fellow University of Chicago grad, Tim.

I’m not gonna actually pitch myself as GM; that’d be incredibly stupid. I just want to talk to you about the Fire. What they mean to me, what they mean to my family, the supporters. We both want to create a better community and a better Chicago. But no matter how much we build that framework, it won’t matter if there’s nothing to rally around on the pitch. And maybe we can talk about some other things too. Despite how I talk nowadays, I was very into investment banking when I was younger (I was a weird 12-year-old) and would love to learn more about the way it’s done. Or we can just talk about how Notre Dame’s offense constantly feels like they haven’t quite gotten up to speed with the modern game.

At the end of the day, Joe, I just want you to handle this club with care. You’re at a key moment in your stewardship. I hope you can make the right decision. I still believe in you.

<3, Jiggly

Miscellaneous Notes

Point and Laugh. We can all laugh at St. Louis now. It’s fine. They deserve it. We are still the greatest expansion team of all time. Central Division champs, you’ll never sing that.

So Close. I got really excited when I saw Emma Hayes was leaving Chelsea because for a moment I thought that she could be coming to coach the Fire. But her as USWNT coach honestly makes me interested in the team for the first time in a while.

Who Are You People? Okay, but seriously, where did all of these random QBs come from this week in the NFL? I swear, the Giants had a kid from Backyard Football out there at some point.

Offseason Mode. I finished a script I’d been working on for a few months this past week. Also, I’m trying to start working on music again. Just trying to find distractions this offseason.

I love you.

And I’ll see you next week.