CARSON, Calif. – The Chicago Fire have made a few of the more notable moves of the MLS offseason, signing a Designated Player striker in Hungarian international Nemanja Nikolic and making another significant addition by trading up in the allocation order to land former LA midfielder Juninho on loan from Tijuana.
For a team that’s missed the playoffs six of the last seven years and finished dead last in MLS in 2016, the signings look like a solid first step on the road back to respectability. Nikolic has had an astronomical goal rate at every stop in his career and Juninho is a proven defensive midfielder. Both will strengthen a spine that needed plenty of improvement after 2016.
According to Chicago general manager Nelson Rodriguez, they might not be the only major signings Chicago make this offseason. The Fire, who have been connected with Manchester United midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger for several months, currently have three DPs on the books in Nikolic, Juninho and David Accam, but Rodriguez said Juninho and Accam can be bought down using targeted allocation money. That would give Chicago the space to add another Designated Player, something Rodriguez and head coach Veljko Paunovic are actively pursuing.
As has been typical of his tenure in Chicago, Rodriguez emphasized that he’ll be patient in the search for another DP.
“If we find the right player at the right price – because we’re not going to be frivolous – we’ll do it,” he told MLSsoccer.com Tuesday at the MLS Combine. “We have the resources to do it. There are players that we are currently looking at that would be – that would have to be DPs. Just based on the economics, they would have to be DPs. It is something that we’re pursuing and investigating.”
Rodriguez, who offered no comment on the Fire’s reported pursuit of Schweinsteiger, said his top priorities are center midfield and center back, in that order.
“Our work is not done,” he said. “Our list is probably a lot longer than our resources allow with the MLS salary budget and everything else, but we’d still like to add another central player, perhaps a center back. If the right midfielder can’t be found or had, then we probably look at another center back.”
One position the Fire won’t be doing any more serious shopping for is goalkeeper. Chicago traded longtime starter Sean Johnson away earlier this winter and announced on Saturday that they’ve signed 35-year-old Uruguayan backstop Jorge Rodrigo Bava to a one-year deal with options for 2018 and 2019. Rodriguez said Bava and Matt Lampson, who started 11 regular-season matches last year, will compete for the starting job in preseason.
One of the larger goals for Chicago in their preseason camp will be to form a stronger on-field identity than they had last year. Rodriguez said that he and Paunovic grew a bit too fixated on making sure their team was able to adapt their playing style last year. In their efforts to be flexible on the field, they failed to establish what he called a “base” – a style that the team knew they could fall back on, no matter the opponent, venue or game state.
He also spoke at length about the balance between trying to find short-term success while having a high hit rate on their acquisitions. Rodriguez has come under criticism from some Fire fans for the slow pace of his rebuild since he took over at the end of the 2015 season. But he remains steadfast in his approach. He’ll continue to be deliberate about all of his moves, and act nimbly when necessary as he and Paunovic attempt to bring the Fire back to relevance.
“There’s no message I can verbally deliver that [Fire fans] should believe or find satisfactory, because they’ve heard it,” he said. “Six out of seven years without the playoffs, they’ve heard it all. To try to spin something isn’t even worth it to me and this might be – I’ll be 52 next month; if I fail at this I could honestly sense that my career in MLS or in professional soccer could be over, because the league and pro sports is trending younger, and this is my one shot at it.
“If it’s not successful, it’s not a good resume to go forward with. So I sense the urgency to win. But I want to sleep well, and I want to know that we have lived up to our values and I want us to be disciplined in the plan that we set forth, recognizing those moments where we need to be nimble.”
