Best off-season move is Fire taking games to WGN-TV
Quick, name the best move the Chicago Fire has made this off-season.
Hint: The club announced it Wednesday.
No, not the signing of 19-year-old Argentine winger Ignacio Aliseda as a young designated player. In fact this move matters more than any other player signing by the Fire this season. Maybe if Chicharito had come to Chicago we could say otherwise.
Yes, putting the Fire's local broadcasts on WGN is a big deal. It will put 24 of the club's 34 games this season on local TV, 18 in prime time. The other 10 games will be televised nationally.
The Fire still won't come close to filling 61,500-seat Soldier Field, but it should help down the line put a few more bodies in the seats. If only the Fire had been on WGN the past few years - and, you know, won a playoff game occasionally - maybe it wouldn't have felt a need to abandon SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview.
This puts the Fire in front of more Chicago-area eyeballs than streaming only on ESPN+ ever could. Showing games only online was a mistake. It put the team out of view of many fans or would-be fans the past two seasons. New owner Joe Mansueto realized it immediately and did something about it, to his credit.
This is a club that needs to make peace with its supporters groups and find a way to attract new fans. It doesn't matter whether they are Europhiles who prefer La Liga or the Premier League, Chicago millennials who prefer to take public transportation to games or (gasp!) suburbanites, even if they will find it more difficult and costly to get to games downtown.
Putting games on free airwaves can only help.
It might even offset the off-season club rebrand, as popular with supporters as the flu.
Yes, this might mean more even than belatedly hiring sporting director Georg Heitz and coach Raphael Wicky in late December, especially if they don't have more success than the last few Fire technical staffs.
Still to be announced are the names of the new TV voices of the club. The club let go popular play-by-play man and all-around good guy Dan Kelly last fall after 10 seasons. His partner, former coach and technical director Frank Klopas, returned to the sidelines as an assistant to Wicky.
This is not the icing on the cake for the Fire. There is a lot of work yet to be done to make the club relevant again in Chicago and in Major League Soccer.
But it sure is good to point to a smart move and hope it becomes a trend.