Home Is Where The Heart and Soul of the Team Is

Sunday's thrilling comeback win for the Fire helped to at least temporarily relieve concerns about the team's performance at home this season, but once the euphoria wears off, there's still a big elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Why is the Chicago Fire so poor at home?

I reject the notion that the team itself just isn't trying hard enough. These are professional athletes, and the notion that they might look at a home match and think they don't have to work hard is pretty absurd on its face.

I do have a couple of other theories, though, so I decided to take a look at the numbers to see if any of them are borne out. First up is home performance by year. The percentage is the number of points gained at home (regular season and playoffs) divided by the total number of points available -- the number of matches multiplied by three. I was able to convert the first two seasons to W-L-T by changing shootout results to draws.

So it definitely looks like there's a downward trend, but this is a tough one to explain. Is the team just getting worse at home over time? If you had all the same players and they were getting older, maybe, but that's obviously not the case (note to self: look at average age of team by year).

One hypothesis is that the team is worse in the suburbs, but while that holds up in aggregate, Cardinal Stadium in Naperville, while not the "fortress" of the old Soldier Field, was pretty darn good.

This also breaks the chronological pattern slightly, with New Soldier Field doing worse than its successor out in Bridgeview. I think there's a geographic component to what's gone wrong -- I'll get to what I think later -- but it's not obvious from the data.

The next hypothesis would be head coach. This basically smooths out the annual data, and makes Denis Hamlett look bad. Are Fire head coaches getting progressively worse? Is this some sort of indictment of the availability of coaching talent?

I don't think so. Personally, I think Denis Hamlett is a good coach, mostly because the team's away form balances the equation back into his favor. That's a topic for a different post, though. There is one other factor that corresponds to changes in the organization over time, and that's who was running the whole ship.

This is, for me, the least surprising finding of this whole exercise, mostly because there are huge implications. The biggest of these, I think, is the relationship between the front office and the fans. I've been toying with the notion that Section 8 should bear some of the responsibility for the team's home form, but I was hard-pressed to come up with a compelling reason as to why. When you look at it through the lens of the relationship with the front office, though, it starts to make more sense.

Once Peter Wilt was fired, the aims of the supporters and the aims of the front office started to diverge. The tone changed. Peter always showed personal sympathy for what we were doing in Section 8, and that flat-out disappeared. Things became more adversarial, and if you ask the Section 8 leadership today, I suspect they would tell you that they feel tolerated, at best, and persecuted at worst. So my claim is that the support coming out of the section during games is going to reflect that. At the risk of turning this into a "back in the day" nostalgia trip, there seemed to be more joy coming from the section in the first half of the team's existence, and that seems to have gone away. Section 8 seems like an angrier place to me, but I'll admit that I'm not in the section anymore and that I may have some lingering personal issues that could be clouding my judgment here.

Some of this could also be self-selection bias, in that the type of person in the supporters section has changed once the team moved to Bridgeview. You could attract a certain sort of young, urban, "casual but intense" fan when you're playing within the city, and those fans might not have, you know, cars. Somehow Peter Wilt was able to overcome this in Naperville, which makes his firing in advance of the launch of Toyota Park that much more unforgivable.

This is NOT to say that all the Fire's problems would simply be solved if they just had more urban twenty- and thirty-somethings in the stands. MLS crowds are an ongoing experiment in alchemy, and it's more about having the right population to draw from. This strikes me as the fundamental thing that John Guppy and Dave Greeley have struggled with, and this, more than anything else, is why I think the downtown stadiums in Toronto and Seattle have been so successful. There are several different target demographics that MLS and the Fire are after, and when you add in a certain degree of difficulty in getting to the stadium, I think there's a greater gulf between those constituencies as they become more homogeneous within their silos.

Fixing this becomes problematic, though, because I think the Fire really bungled the launch of Toyota Park. There was, I think, an implicit assumption that the passionate fans would find their way down there by hook or by crook, when in reality, only a portion of them did, which is how that "self-selection bias" comes in. The team has to find ways to make the stadium more accessible to slightly less passionate fans, because they're the ones who add heft to the core support coming from Section 8, and this I can say pretty definitively as a former "capo" in the section. That, along with some real progress in the relationship between the supporters and the front office, might help reverse the team's fortunes at home better than any other efforts short of moving the team back into the city.

Just to prove that I turned over all the stones I could here, I created a plot of home performance against the percentage of total minutes for the season played by perennial whipping boy Logan Pause. Obviously, this only goes back to 2003, but I think it's clear from the chart that this is NOT Logan's fault.

Finally, there is one more cut of the data I might look at, which is some measure of attendance against home form. That's going to be tricky because of the differences in venue capacities, so I have to figure out a way to level that out first.