Marko Mitrović may be in his first club head coaching job, but he has transformed the New England Revolution into one of Major League Soccer’s most dangerous teams in 2026.
On Sunday, he returns to the Windy City to take on the Chicago Fire as an opposing coach for the first time, adding another layer of intrigue to a high-stakes matchup between the Eastern Conference’s third- and fourth-placed teams.
Mitrović spent four seasons with the Fire from 2016 to 2019 as Veljko Paunović’s lead assistant before following him to Reading. He later returned to Chicago as a U.S. youth national team head coach, leading the Americans to the quarterfinals at both the 2024 Paris Olympics and the 2025 FIFA U-20 World Cup. Those runs made him a prime candidate for MLS vacancies last offseason, and he joined the Revolution ahead of the 2026 season.
“Everything we do in our lives brings us that experience,” Mitrović said Friday during a downtown press conference. “Especially being around this league with four years with Chicago Fire, it helped me a lot to understand the league, to understand the uniqueness that this league provides us with. I had a really great time and I’m very appreciative for those four years with Chicago Fire.”
Paunović and Mitrović's time with the Fire had its ups and downs, with the high point certainly being the 2017 season; that year, the Men in Red made their only playoff appearance between 2012 and 2025. The Fire finished 3rd in the Eastern Conference, playing some of the league’s most entertaining football along the way.
Although the Fire’s postseason run ended prematurely in 2017, that season remains the club’s benchmark over the last 15 years or so. Second-year Head Coach Gregg Berhalter hopes to set a new standard, with the team in the MLS Cup mix after breaking its playoff drought last season.
“I just remember we constructed a really good squad together,” Revolution defender Matt Polster, who played for the Fire between 2015 and 2018, told MIR97 Media following Friday morning’s training session in Chicago. “We brought in a lot of veteran players and senior players that I got to learn from and gain a lot of experience from.”
“(Bastian) Schweinsteiger, Dax (McCarty), Juninho, those are the guys that stick out to me at the moment, but a great group. We had a great coaching staff with Marko and Pauno, and it was a really fun year. I thought we played really well throughout the entire season. Obviously we wanted to go further that year, but I thought it was a step in the right direction.”
Like the 2017 Fire, the 2026 Revs possess an experienced MLS core, with some of the league’s best players of the last decade now on the roster.
Carles Gil, Matt Turner, Matt Polster, and Diego Fagúndez were experienced pieces Mitrović inherited. Young stars Peyton Miller, Ethan Kohler, and Brooklyn Raines have a platform to perform under a coach they already had national team experience with. New acquisitions Jack Harrison (who was a Fire player for under an hour on draft day in 2016) and Dániel Gazdag (signed from Columbus last week) add further championship-caliber pedigree to the locker room.
That blend of talent, combined with steady improvement over the year, has quietly made the Revolution one of the league’s top teams as the playoffs loom.
“They won in New York, they took third place from us,” Berhalter said of the Revs earlier this week. “That’s a big movement for them. Marko’s been doing a great job, I know Marko really well. Great guy. The Chicago Fire knows him really well from his time here. But they’re doing a great job.”
Mitrović and Berhalter are part of a recent wave of MLS head coaches arriving from U.S. Soccer, alongside San Diego FC’s Mikey Varas and Nashville SC’s Shield-leading B.J. Callaghan. Josh Wolff, Luchi González, and now-Fire assistant Nico Estévez are others from the Berhalter era with the national team who later landed top jobs in MLS.
“There are lots of things that I took away,” Revs youngster Peyton Miller said of his time under Mitrović with the U.S. U-20s and in New England. “The biggest thing for me that I took away was probably mentality. As a group, we have a very strong mentality and personality on the field. So I think for me that’s the biggest thing that he brought to the Revs.”
Mitrović will also see familiar faces on the other side Sunday, having coached Fire players Chris Brady, Sergio Oregel, and Noah Allen with the U.S. youth national teams.
While New England hasn’t attracted the same national attention as the star-studded teams in Miami, Chicago, or L.A., the Revs could prove equally dangerous in the playoffs and, like the Fire, will be hoping to make a statement down the stretch.
Gazdag’s stoppage-time winner against New York City lifted the Revolution into third place, leaving the Fire looking to reclaim that position on Sunday.
Robert Lewandowski is rounding into form and will be leading the line, hoping to ensure that doesn’t happen. He has four goals in four league starts as he continues to settle into MLS. The Fire also hope his experience and presence on the training pitch and in the locker room will lift the group, much as his former FC Bayern München teammate Bastian Schweinsteiger did while Mitrović and Polster were with the club.
“I just think what they bring on the field is just a ton of experience and composure,” Polster said of those kinds of superstars joining MLS. “When you add pieces like that to a squad, I think it just lifts the confidence of the group and you know that you can go into games and dominate games. Lewandowski is a fantastic player. Obviously his track record and résumé shows that. So yeah, they’re doing a great job and they’ve had a great season so far.”
The Fire and Revolution will face off in a Sunday mid-afternoon kickoff at Soldier Field. With New England one point ahead of Chicago in the Eastern Conference standings, the winner this weekend will take sole possession of 3rd place entering the final 10 games of the MLS season.
