Gregg Berhalter begins Chicago Fire chapter: "There's so much potential"

A winter roster overhaul, establishing a clear stylistic identity, a swift end to their seven-year Audi MLS Cup Playoffs drought – and maybe even a site inside the city limits for a soccer-specific stadium of their own someday soon.

Gregg Berhalter and club owner Joe Mansueto have a pretty ambitious to-do list as the former US men’s national team coach takes over the Chicago Fire’s soccer operations. But the duo sounded determined to hew to the “make no little plans” ethos coined by Daniel Burnham, one of the city’s key architects and civic icons, as Berhalter was officially unveiled as the club’s new director of football and head coach on Thursday.

“We want to be a player-first club. We want to be a club that puts the player in the center of everything, and each department works around the player to help maximize their potential,” said Berhalter as he returned to MLS for the first time since a five-year stint in charge of the Columbus Crew from 2013-18.

“In terms of recruitment, we think there's an opportunity this offseason to bring in some high-quality players, to bring in players that can perform in the top 5% of the league, real game changer-type players, and we want to do that because we have the ability to affect the roster in a positive way. And it starts with next season. We’re not saying this is a five-year build; we want to be successful in year one.”

Big plans

This hire may look like an open-and-shut case in retrospect, and indeed, both sides sound certain it’s an ideal match. Yet the path to this point wasn’t as short and straight as that might suggest.

When previous sporting director Georg Heitz notified Mansueto of his desire to return to Europe after the 2024 season, the Fire started with a preliminary slate of some 80 candidates for his replacement, quickly winnowing down to a shortlist of three, two of them domestic contenders and one from overseas.

A three-hour session with Berhalter – “I think he interviewed me as much as I interviewed him,” said Mansueto – convinced the Fire’s decision-makers that the best option was the veteran hand already based in their town thanks to his five-year stint with U.S. Soccer.

“I wanted somebody who wanted this job as much as we wanted them, that they weren't doing it just for the money or for any vacation in the US, that they really wanted this opportunity, that they saw the potential in the Fire,” Mansueto explained. “We're often called the sleeping giant in MLS; we’re a top-three market, we should be up at the top, and we wanted somebody who had a real heart for that. And Gregg really exemplified that.”

The new hire’s immediate devotion to the tasks at hand quickly left the owner feeling content with the choice.

“We made Gregg an offer; fortunately, he accepted. That was on a Friday a couple of weeks ago,” said Mansueto. “Saturday, he came over to my house, spent a couple of hours working on the roster. So as soon as he signed, he was in – over at my house, working on the roster. This guy is all in. So it was super exciting to see the drive and the commitment.”

New opportunity

Berhalter credited an intense phase of grief and self-reflection for his ability to plunge back into the grind just months after his USMNT tenure shuddered to an abrupt end via a group-stage exit at this summer’s Copa América.

“When you get fired as a coach, and I don't want to liken this to life and death at all, because it's not, you're still alive, but it is like mourning a death,” he said. “You wake up the next day and you feel really bad. Your confidence takes a hit, and it's a really difficult moment. For me, it was really about being with my family in those moments and giving myself the time and the freedom and the space to feel sad and feel bad. We didn't perform well in Copa América, and when you don't perform well at a high level, there's consequences. I take full responsibility for that, but it still hurts.

“You get hungry again. During that period when I got hungry, there were a number of opportunities that I was looking at. I kept coming back to Chicago and the potential and the alignment. It's not every day that you get to work for a man like Joe Mansueto, who understands what a top level is and how to build something that's really good and sustainable.”

After that immersive, often-tempestuous half-decade in charge of the national team, many expected Berhalter to explore opportunities abroad. He began his head coaching career in Sweden at Hammarby, and on Thursday did not deny the multiple reports that he was very close to becoming the manager of Mexican giants Club América last year before agreeing on a new contract with U.S. Soccer.

He said the combination of the long-underachieving Fire’s massive upside and the roots his family have laid in the Windy City made staying at home the undeniable choice, though.

“As a player, you're selfish. You always go to the best opportunity, and you're moving and you're moving and you're moving, then you get a coaching job, and you're moving and you're moving your family,” noted Berhalter, a father of four whose oldest child Sebastian is a midfield regular for the Vancouver Whitecaps. “This was a moment where I said, 'This opportunity is so good, there's so much potential in this club, and my family gets to be stable. They get to be in one place.' My daughter gets to graduate from high school. She's a junior now and that was a big part of the decision.

“Europe has always been an ambition of mine, and it's not binary. Just because I came here, it doesn't mean there's never going to be an opportunity in Europe. But right now, this is the best opportunity for me and my family.”

Broad purview

Handing Berhalter both the chief soccer officer and head coaching roles cuts against the wider trends in MLS, where the growing complexity of both tasks has made Sporting Kansas City’s Peter Vermes the only other figure with that level of authority.

It wasn’t Chicago’s original plan.

“Initially we were looking to just fill Georg’s spot,” explained Mansueto. “When we came across Gregg, he expressed a desire to do both, sporting head and head coach. While that was not initially our intention, because of who Gregg is, and he's succeeded in this dual role before, we were confident that it would work under Gregg's leadership.

“If he can do his best work as director of football and head coach so this is a seamless connection, I'm fine with it, and he'll build underneath him an organization to offload the things – obviously he can't do two full-time jobs, but he'll build an organization around him, and I have every confidence he can do that.”

Making a self-deprecating reference to his famously bald head, Berhalter said wearing both of those hats across his stint with the Crew taught him what he can and can’t do on his own.

“I learned a lot of lessons from the Columbus days, working 6 am to 10 at night every day for five years. It aged me; that's why I don't have as much hair as I used to have. You guys can go back and check the pictures out to prove it,” he deadpanned.

“I realized how I need help. And really, part of the alignment part with Joe was saying, 'OK, we want to create this executive leadership team that helps shoulder some of the responsibilities, whether it's player transfers, player negotiations, player recruitment, performance, strategy.' So it's really about creating a team around us that we can pull in the same direction to try to be successful for the club.”

Long-term home

While Berhalter dives into the labor of lifting the Fire out of the on-field doldrums that have dogged them for most of the past decade, the front office is aiming for new levels off the pitch.

The Men in Red will soon move into the Endeavor Health Performance Center, a new training facility on the city’s Near West Side that Berhalter believes is “probably the best, or one of the top one or two or three in Major League Soccer.” And Mansueto, whose first major act after acquiring the club was to spend millions to exit their lease at SeatGeek Stadium in favor of a return to Soldier Field, dropped a head-turning tidbit about the longer-term process of building a new ground in Chicago’s urban core.

“We've been doing site tours, we're looking around. And to me, it's the last piece of the puzzle with this club,” said the founder, majority owner and executive chair of financial services titan Morningstar, listing the inherent challenges the Fire face on Lake Shore Drive as co-tenants with the NFL’s Bears.

“We don’t have the optimal solution there because of the limitations I referenced, and so having our own soccer-specific stadium is what we'd like to see, and so we're actively pursuing that in Chicago. If we can find the right parcel in Chicago, I think we will move forward on it.”