Article by Dan Santaromita
As a club that has finished last in Major League Soccer for the past two seasons, the Chicago Fire haven’t made many big headlines or splashes in recent years.
That changed last week when the club signed Bastian Schweinsteiger. After months of courting the player and negotiating with Manchester United in order to acquire him without a transfer fee, the Fire officially got the German star on Tuesday.
For those who don’t watch or follow MLS, this sounds like yet another move for an older big name player past his prime. Five years ago, maybe even less, the consensus within the league for this move would have been that it was a big deal. Any time the league could increase its exposure with a big name player at the level of Schweinsteiger, it was received positively by fans and media, regardless of expected on the field performance.
Locally, the Fire have had their own issues in the Chicago market due to a lack of success and a lack of spending. Showing that they are willing to spend money (the contract is reportedly worth $4.5 million for this season), is a step forward, but things have changed in MLS. Fans and media have realized that spending big money and expecting big performance on older players doesn’t always work.
For every Robbie Keane and David Villa that thrived in their mid 30s, there are examples like Rafa Marquez, Torsten Frings and Freddie Ljungberg, who didn’t perform to their pay.
The additions of Sebastian Giovinco (an Italian national teamer), Nicolas Lodeiro (Boca Juniors’ playmaker when Seattle signed him last summer) and Josef Martinez (a 23-year-old who came from Torino) have changed MLS. Winning has become more important than attracting big names and winning is easier with younger players still in the primes, but don’t have international brands.
So when Schweinsteiger joined the Fire, the reception was mixed. Locally, there was cautious optimism that the Fire actually invested big money (by MLS standards) into the team. Nationally, there was skepticism that Schweinsteiger can still perform.
The 32-year-old has had knee injuries in recent years and struggled to get on the field for Manchester United. Of course, as far as MLS has come, a player who can’t get on the field in the Premier League could still be of value to an MLS team. Either way, it was enough to make Fire brass answer questions about whether Schweinsteiger was brought in more for marketing reasons than on-field performance.
“We make decisions for soccer reasons, we make decisions to try to win games on the field,” Fire general manager Nelson Rodriguez said on Tuesday. “We make decisions to try to build a championship program. In this case it would be foolish to deny a lot of ancillary benefits to having a personality, a character, a history that comes with someone like Bastian Schweinsteiger. This is a soccer decision.”
Time will tell if Schweinsteiger can still perform at a high enough level to be a difference maker in MLS. Whatever happens it was a move that only reinforced the ‘retirement league’ image the league has abroad, in a time when some teams in the league have already moved past that.
