The Chicago Fire front office has a lot of work to do – and not a whole lot of time to do it.
Numerous offseason departures decimated the Fire’s roster, leaving them with just 19 players under contract – 11 players short of the roster size limit of 30. Chicago will want to fill out the majority of their squad before preseason training begins later this month. They’ll resume that process on Thursday, when they’ll head into the MLS SuperDraft with four valuable picks.
Chicago have the No. 9 pick overall, as well as picks at Nos. 45, 49 and 51.
“We need to add players,” said Fire technical cirector Frank Klopas, who is in South Florida scouting potential draft targets at the Combine. “We’ve lost players in the front line, we’ve lost players in the back line and we’ve lost players in the middle, so we need to replace those players and the draft is one way to do that.”
Klopas said that he was impressed with the quality of play at the Combine, but that he’ll base his draft-day decisions on far more than the three-day camp.
“There are a lot of good players here, but thankfully we’ve seen almost all them before, which I think is really important," he said. "If you try to base your decision-making on everything you see here, you’ll get it wrong because a lot of the guys are not at their best fitness levels, so I think the good thing for us is that we’ve been able to scout heavily beforehand and we put that information in and we share the information and analyze before we get here and then we arrive and get to see the players for a few more days and rank them accordingly.”
The Fire lost eight players who started at one time during the 2010 season, including stars Brian McBride (retirement), Freddie Ljungberg (signed with Celtic FC) and Wilman Conde (signed with Atlas). Fire captain CJ Brown also retired, while midfielders John Thorrington and Peter Lowry were both snatched up in the Expansion Draft.
The team also parted ways with defender Krysztof Krol and striker Collins John. They added former New England Revolution defender Corey Gibbs in the Re-Entry Draft before scooping up Daniel Paladini (Carolina Railhawks) and Josep Mikulic (NK Zagreb) on Tuesday.
Though the Fire are looking dangerously thin at forward after the McBride and John losses, Klopas indicated that the club will draft the best available player – regardless of position – with all four of their selections.
“We lost players in every line,” he said. “Which way we go with our pick – whether it’s a guy in the back or in the front – is going to depend on the player available at that moment.”
Sam Stejskal covers the Chicago Fire for MLSsoccer.com. Email him at sam.h.stejskal@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @samstejskal.
