Today the Chicago Fire Soccer Club unveiled their new head coach, whose name came as a surprise to nearly everyone who was paying attention. The club has brought on Veljko Paunovic, the 38 year old manager who recently won the 2015 Under-20 World Cup with Serbia. There are some reasons to be apprehensive about the hire, especially given the ongoing coaching carousel in Bridgeview. Those concerns should be outweighed for now by the positives, especially the refreshingly competent and transparent approach taken by new Fire General Manager Nelson Rodriguez.
Here are several reasons why “Pauno” may be the perfect choice to re-ignite the Fire, if you will:
Chicago Fire Get it Right with Paunovic
This is a forward thinking hire
Paunovic is a student of the game and played in La Liga. He is a World Champion coach at the U-20 level. He has fresh ideas about soccer, modern tactics in his mind, and experience at high levels both playing and coaching. He is young; detail oriented, and impressed Rodriguez with “copious notes” and video files on Major League Soccer teams, Chicago’s roster, and even the Fire’s academy products and prospects. Attention to detail and intelligent analysis of the game are vital to the success of any modern soccer club and Paunovic appears to practice both.
The fact that he has experience working at the elite youth level is also important, as MLS is still a league with many young players, and a league charged with developing talent for the United States national teams. It’s easy to imagine players like Collin Fernandez and Matt Polster benefiting from a coach who values player development as well as three points on the weekend. (And he was the kind of player Harry Shipp is, playing as a midfielder or withdrawn striker…)
Another important factor, often overlooked in soccer, is that Paunovic is fluent in six languages, including Spanish and English. He will be able to communicate directly with players of different backgrounds, as well as local Spanish and Serbian media in Chicago. Language barriers have been a problem for many coaches, notably Carlos de los Cobos with the Fire.
Recent success, not fading glory
How many coaches have lifted a World Cup trophy in the past year? Veljko Paunovic has. While he has not coached a professional team, he has had immediate success very soon after his retirement from playing. The fact that he was lifting a trophy while Chicago was playing their worst season in history is more than notable.
Recent Fire coaches have been underwhelming just by the conservative nature of the hires, and almost none of them had any championship pedigree or success before getting the job. Frank Klopas won championships as a player, but had almost no head coaching experience when he took the reins in Bridgeview. Frank Yallop won MLS Cups, and was hired with that resume, but they came in 2001 and 2003 when the league was much different. He also benefitted from having both Landon Donovan and Dwayne DeRosario in their prime on his San Jose team, something nearly unstoppable in the MLS of 14 years ago.
Paunovic contrasts sharply with Yallop in many aspects, but his recent track record may be the most important. In fact, the Fire coach whose career trajectory his resembles the most is Bob Bradley, who led successful college teams and the United States U-23s before taking the Chicago job in 1998 as his first professional club gig.
A foreign coach WILL win in MLS at some point- Pauno may be the most likely yet
One of the most tired tropes in Major League Soccer is that foreign coaches can’t cut it in America. In this case, it’s true – so far.
Paunovic is an interesting case in that he played for Philadelphia Union in his last year as a pro, and experienced the locker rooms, NFL stadia, grueling travel, and varied field and weather conditions of MLS. This may give him an edge compared to someone like Hans Backe, Carlos de los Cobos, Ruud Gullit, or any number of imported coaches who struggled with the league’s quirks before losing their jobs.
Nelson Rodriguez is also going to help Paunovic’s transition significantly. As GM, and as an MLS company man, he will handle most of the Byzantine league rules and player acquisition mechanisms, potentially allowing his coaching staff to handle the essentials of their jobs without getting bogged down in re-entry drafts and blind draws.
Rodriguez has also emphasized Pauno’s emphasis on individual relationships with players, something that would be difficult for him to achieve without at least that year of experience playing in MLS. And the fact that he apparently had video files of “nearly every team in the league” before he was hired speaks to his preparedness for the position.
Nelson Rodriguez looks confident and effective
When Rodriguez took this job, he knew it was going to be tough. Not only was the club coming off its worst ever season on the field, the locker room and front office were both described as “dysfunctional” and “toxic” by former employees. So after firing a massive number of people last week, and causing minor panic on the #cf97 hashtag, Rodriguez looked much better announcing this hire.
For starters, he set a deadline publically and met it. The stated goal of having a coach by Thanksgiving has been accomplished. This alone is a refreshing development, which shows just how far the Fire have regressed as of late.
He was also very deliberate in his search and assembled a huge pool of coaching candidates from around the world, and did a thorough job finding his man. The leaked list of candidates which trickled out into the press in the past month was already large, and it was surely even longer than that. He stated that he had “11 characteristics” he was looking for in a head coach, and evaluated each candidate based on those.
The detail has also emerged that former Technical Director Brian Bliss has not been fired, and is staying with the club for now, which will reassure some fans.
But most importantly, Rodriguez let us know what he was doing. He talked to local and national press, and appeared on Comcast SportsNet and the wildly popular Soccer Morning show on Sirius XM. He gave gracious, informative interviews which were easy to understand, clearly well rehearsed, and appeared genuinely honest. This is vitally important to a fanbase which has cried out for transparency from management for nearly a decade. Both fans and media in Chicago have wished for years that someone in the Fire’s front office would communicate more clearly with the public, and so far that has happened with Rodriguez in a very refreshing way.
If the culture of a club is created by its leaders, Rodriguez and Paunovic appear to be very good candidates to start a cultural revolution in Bridgeview.
Changing a losing culture? Changing the appearance of MLS?
Maybe, just maybe, Rodriguez and Paunovic can change the “toxic” atmosphere in Chicago. Paunovic is reminiscent of Oscar Pareja, in that he has strong convictions about style of play, youth development, sportsmanship, and one-on-one coaching and mentoring. He is open minded and obsessed with progress and education, something often lacking in MLS coaching ranks. He and Rodriguez are also zeroing in on accountability at the personal level, something lacking in the Fire locker room for a long time.
Rodriguez spoke in his press conference about Paunovic’s plans to create individual progress tracks for every player on the roster, with a “commitment to individual improvement” emphasized. He also spoke about the need for a coach who exuded energy, positivity, and led vocally in the locker room. If there were ever a coach to turn a negative, complacent locker room on its head it sounds like he may be the man. Many have also spoken about Paunovic’s dedication to sportsmanship and fair play, which are noble causes that also give hints about what kinds of players to expect him to bring in. (Read: nobody from the Carlos Ruiz School of Dark Arts)
Perhaps the most exciting quote for all MLS fans from today’s announcements was Nelson Rodriguez’s claim that Major League Soccer is now a “league of choice” for coaches as well as players. Veljko Paunovic was recently offered the manager position at Panathanaikos, a frequent Champions League club and one of the most successful clubs in Greek history, and still chose the Fire. He believed the worst team in MLS to be a better opportunity. That fact alone should encourage not only Chicago Fire fans, but fans of American soccer in general. There is a new era beginning not only in Chicago but all over Major League Soccer, as coaches like Jesse Marsch, Oscar Pareja, Gregg Berhalter, and Caleb Porter have taken the reins from the old guard and advanced to the MLS Cup Semifinals. Time will tell if Veljko Paunovic adds his name to that list, or if he becomes just another name in the long list of Fire head coaches that didn’t make the cut.
