{"id":2943,"date":"2016-12-20T18:13:07","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T23:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsoccer.com\/?p=2943"},"modified":"2016-12-20T18:13:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T23:13:07","slug":"chicago-fire-sign-nemanja-nikolic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/2016\/12\/20\/chicago-fire-sign-nemanja-nikolic\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicago Fire Sign Nemanja Nikolic from Legia Warsaw"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chicago Fire <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicago-fire.com\/post\/2016\/12\/20\/chicago-fire-sign-nemanja-nikolic-designated-player\/?\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have signed Hungarian international striker<\/a> Nemanja Nikolic to a three year Designated Player contract. Nikolic will be 29 on New Years Eve and is currently one of the hottest strikers in Poland&#8217;s Ekstraliga. He led the league in goals during the 2015-16 season and was on top of the scoring pile for the league this year before departing for Chicago.<\/p>\n<h2>Chicago Fire Sign Nemanja Nikolic from Legia Warsaw<\/h2>\n<p>Nikolic has UEFA Champions League experience with Legia. He had one goal during the group stage of this campaign and has scored six in the Champions League in his career. He has also scored three career goals for the Hungarian National Team and made two substitute appearances for his country during this past summer&#8217;s European Championships.<\/p>\n<p>Although he represents Hungary on the national stage, he was born in Senta, Serbia. Therefore, he shares a national origin with Chicago&#8217;s Manager\u00a0Veljko Paunovi\u0107. He began his professional career with Hungarian club Barcsi SC in 2006. After stops at three other Hungarian clubs, he came to Legia Warsaw in 2015. Since his arrival, he has scored 40 goals in only 56 matches with the Polish champions.<\/p>\n<p>He seems pretty happy to be joining the last place club in MLS.\u201cI am very happy to be joining Chicago Fire. From the moment the club expressed interest and especially after speaking with manager Veljko Paunovic, and although I had other offers, this is where I wanted to be,\u201d he said through a Chicago Fire press release.<\/p>\n<p>He looks to add\u00a0a strong scoring punch to a Chicago front line that has struggled to score lately. They were last in the Eastern Conference last year with only 42 goals scored. That was also third fewest in all of MLS. In addition to that, no player on the Fire has scored more than ten\u00a0goals in the last three seasons. Nikolic looks like the striker Chicago needs to break that trend.<\/p>\n<div class=\"getty embed image\" style=\"background-color: #fff; display: inline-block; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; color: #a7a7a7; font-size: 11px; width: 100%; max-width: 594px;\">\n<div style=\"padding: 0; margin: 0; text-align: left;\"><a style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/626634604\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/div>\n<div style=\"overflow: hidden; position: relative; height: 0; padding: 66.498316% 0 0 0; width: 100%;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display: inline-block; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; margin: 0;\" src=\"\/\/embed.gettyimages.com\/embed\/626634604?et=VX18FjQxRaRRcCCLXnxrTA&amp;viewMoreLink=off&amp;sig=3zZu6GQ-oL6t_h1POHIWur5L7cHZ4DqJHYFwpxEjddo=&amp;caption=true\" width=\"594\" height=\"395\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin: 0;\">\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chicago Fire have signed Hungarian international striker Nemanja Nikolic to a three year Designated Player contract. Nikolic will be 29 on New Years Eve and is currently one of the hottest strikers in Poland&#8217;s Ekstraliga. He led the league in goals during the 2015-16 season and was on top of the scoring pile for the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":721,"featured_media":2944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,119,3],"tags":[86,697,458],"class_list":["post-2943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fire","category-mls","category-news","tag-chicago-fire","tag-nemanja-nikolic","tag-veljko-paunovic"],"modified_by":"Joe Hojnacki","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/721"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/soccer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}