Kass: Chicago needs a second soccer team – Chicago Tribune

Is there room in the Chicago area for two professional soccer teams?

Ye gods, I hope so.

Yeah, that’s right, I just used the word “soccer,” and if you don’t like it, please let me tell you who does like it:

People like the 200 or so fans — young and urban and eager, many with beards, many who are fans of the Chicago Fire — who packed The Globe Pub on West Irving Park Road the other night to hear a dream about another team coming to Chicago.

There are thousands more just like them, soccer fans ignored by the media and tired of the beautiful game being irrelevant in this town.

The dream of a second Chicago team was spun out by Peter Wilt, one of the most influential figures in the sport in Chicago. Before he left Chicago, Wilt built the Fire into champions in Major League Soccer with legendary players and teams. But that’s history.

These days, we Fire fans aren’t happy. The chasm between fans and management has grown so large that you could stuff a few planets in there and still have room for a couple of moons.

And now comes Wilt’s plan to bring a North American Soccer League team to Chicago. What perfect timing.

“We can do this,” Wilt said, standing behind the bar at The Globe, the prime soccer pub in Chicago. “There are enough fans for two teams. We can have a city team, one that makes soccer relevant again.”

Wilt’s plan: a Chicago NASL team playing in the city, perhaps Soldier Field. Investors are lined up, he says, and the new franchise could also be helped along by fans through crowdfunding.

That would allow fans a chance to own a piece of the club, and give their representatives access to board meetings and decisions about the team, Wilt said.

“Like the Green Bay Packers, except Green Bay fans just have a plaque on the wall, and our Chicago NASL fans will have real input. Our fans won’t be afterthoughts. They’ll be a part of things.”

Here’s what I’d like to see: the NASL and the MLS put into some sort of promotion and relegation grouping by the U.S. Soccer Federation.

You don’t know about promotion and relegation? How sad. It’s done by civilized sports cultures throughout the world. If baseball had it, hundreds of thousands of Cubs fans wouldn’t have had to die over the last century before the team felt pressure to make a real run at the title.

Ideally, at the end of the season, the bottom three teams in the MLS would be dropped, or relegated to the NASL, and the top three teams in the NASL would be promoted to the MLS.

If teams don’t produce for their fans, they drop down into the lesser league. That way, other teams get a chance. This is how it’s done in many nations.

Soccer people here tell me I’m smoking some killer futbol hopium even to dream of promotion and relegation. But if you wish to move a mountain, don’t you first carry a small stone?

“The MLS won’t allow relegation,” said Adrian Lewis, general manager at The Globe. “A second team will put pressure on the Fire, relegation or not. If Peter Wilt can get a team here, a city team that fans can get to on the ‘L,’ hit the pubs and go to the games as in Europe, that will definitely wake the Fire up. Most definitely.”

Here’s how sleepy the Fire have become.

The Fire are about to open the season in Bridgeview on March 6 against New York City FC. And they just traded Chicago’s young homegrown star Harry Shipp to Montreal.

Shipp grew up in the Chicago area, played for the Fire’s youth academy and then for Notre Dame. He’s been a Fire fan all his life. He’s even got Fire paraphernalia on the walls of his bedroom at home. Hardly anyone in Chicago — except for Fire fans — knew Harry was gone.

Wilt’s new team probably won’t be called The Sting, the name of the soccer team owned by Lee Stern, who kick-started professional soccer in Chicago years ago.

“We’re thinking of several names,” Wilt told me.

How about The Chicago Outfit?

“I don’t think so,” Wilt said.

Chicago Politicians?

“I don’t know,” Wilt said.

Chicago Indictments? Chicago Chumbalones? No. How about The Chicago Dibs?

At least I hope Wilt’s new team doesn’t have a mascot like the Fire’s “Sparky,” a hapless joker trapped in a sweaty Dalmatian costume.

Last season’s last place team was so pitiful, with Sparky sweating in misery, that I had to come up with a peppier mascot:

Death.

Not the Grim Reaper, exactly, but more like a pasty faced Death in a black hoodie, like the one unforgettably played by Bengt Ekerot in the riveting Ingmar Bergman film “The Seventh Seal.”

Set during the Black Death of the Middle Ages, there’s hardly any action in this film. Nobody talks much. A disillusioned Swedish knight, played by Max von Sydow, sits down for a game of chess with Death.

Yes, the film is slow and so gloomy you want pull your head off in the middle of it and scream for someone to shoot you. So it’s rather like watching the Fire play last year.

Happily, Death isn’t the new Fire mascot, and I’m told things will be better this season. Let’s hope.

Because Peter Wilt is coming back to town, and he wants to build a team.

Listen to the “The Chicago Way with John Kass and Jeff Carlin”: www.wgnplus.com/category/thechicagoway.

jskass@tribpub.com

Twitter @John_Kass