The Fire are back at Soldier Field as they host Atlanta United, a team that once again came into the year with much promise but who once again have struggled to translate talent on paper to results on the pitch.

Despite the lack of results, Atlanta have plenty of talent on the roster, any of whom could be dangerous, but they’ll be doing it this week without head coach Tata Martino in the dugout after he received a red card late in the team’s 3-1 loss to Columbus last Saturday.

“I'm sad about that because I always love coaching with Tata,” Fire Head Coach Gregg Berhalter said on Thursday. “I think he's a great human being, great coach. It's been fun to see his impact on Major League Soccer and the Mexican national team and his long and storied career.”

As for what that means for the game plan, however? “Nothing changes,” the Fire boss said. “We expect him to still have a heavy influence in the game. If he travels, he'll be able to potentially communicate what's happening on the sideline. Sometimes there's even more of an impulse for the team because they know that they need to take care of it by themselves.”

From the Fire’s end, they’ll be looking to continue winning, after wins over bottom-of-the-table Philadelphia and top-of-the-table Nashville in the past two weeks. In both those games, the Fire broke streaks, getting their first victory in Philadelphia in 13 years, and their second-ever win against Nashville.

This week, they’ll be looking to preserve a streak: Atlanta’s only away win against the Fire came back in 2018, and the team has never won at Soldier Field. In fact, they’ve only held the lead at the lakeside stadium once, getting the first goals in what became a 3-3 draw on May 20th, 2023. Opening the scoring for Atlanta in that one was Andrew Gutman, shortly after then-Fire midfielder Federico Navarro was sent off with his second yellow of the game, putting the Fire down to 10 men.

What to Expect

Atlanta United

Out of every MLS team, the only one that has a where the phrase “good old days” rings nearly as true as Chicago (winning the double in their first year) has to be Atlanta, who rewrote the script on how successful an expansion team could be in the DP era and won MLS Cup in 2018, their second season in the league. A year later, Atlanta lost out in the conference finals.

After that, they faded, and their only playoff victory since came in 2024, as they bested Inter Miami in a best-of-three that saw Messi’s first MLS playoff experience end in defeat.

That’s a pretty good asterisk, but in the interim? They’ve bounced around between missing the playoffs and making it in as a lower seed ‒ and that comes despite being a team that has regularly broken incoming MLS transfer records and fielded some of the most expensive teams in league history. Of the top 15 most expensive incoming transfers in MLS history, six have been to Atlanta, including current striker Emmanuel Latte Lath and midfielder Aleksey Miranchuk. The only other team with multiple entries on that list is Cincinnati, with two (Kévin Denkey and Evander).

With that kind of spending, Atlanta have often been preseason darlings, one of the teams projected to make a lot with their new signings. And since 2019, the results, despite the spending, have been disappointing, and Atlanta’s often looked like a mismatched collection of parts.

To try to right that wrong, Atlanta has decided to go back to the future: Last year, they brought back winger Miguel Almirón, who played with the team in their first two years before being sold to Newcastle in 2019. This year, they reunited him with Tata Martino, the team’s original head coach.

So far, it hasn’t worked. Atlanta have just one win on the year, over a very hapless Union team. That’s the only game so far this year where the team has managed to score multiple goals. After a couple weeks where it looked like Martino had figured out a way to get Almirón, Latte Lath and Miranchuk to get on the same page together, things again fell apart and it isn’t clear that this current group — despite their cost — has what it takes to get things together.

That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, however, and any of the trio can create a goal, with Berhalter noting that the squad has “top-end offensive quality, and it will be a good test for our collective defending.”

Chicago Fire

That defending has been even more collective than usual recently, with Berhalter having to once again rejigger the lineup with a late injury to Joel Waterman in the leadup to the match. 

Calling both his availability as well as without striker Hugo Cuypers a “wait-and-see type thing,” Berhalter noted that Waterman has been training this week – as has fellow center back Sam Rogers. “With Hugo, he hasn't progressed so far to that stage. But there's still a little bit of time, and we'll see what happens.”

That sounds like the Fire will once again have something close to their choice XI taking the pitch on Saturday. In their first six games, the Fire have yet to play the same starting XI two games in a row. Berhalter was philosophical about the availability issues that have faced the team so far, saying  “every season has its story to tell, and every game and every week has a story to tell. It's been interesting, some of the adversity that we've had to go through so far this year. And having said that, we still picked up 10 points and won three games and had three shutouts. So there's a lot of positive going on. I think it shows the resilience of the group, the mindset of the group. These guys are fighters, and these guys don't give up.”

One of those fighters is Chris Brady, whose 100th MLS start between 98 regular season games and two in the postseason happened last Saturday. After it was pointed out to Brady that he’d hit the century appearances mark, he said it had been an important personal goal for him, saying “I didn't realize I hit was that 100-game milestone. That to me was important because it shows dedication and commitment to the position, to remain healthy as long as I have and to continue playing at a high level.”

As to what he’d have told himself now, with just under 9,000 MLS minutes of experience?

”I would say continue to remain positive no matter what. I think early on, we faced a lot of results that didn't obviously go our way, and me being so young in the goal for those games was difficult. I think sometimes I lost my head a little bit in those first few years. But knowing what I know now, just remaining positive and continuing to work hard is the biggest thing that I think would have helped me back then. Yeah, that's kind of it. It's crazy, it's like night and day.”

Another night-and-day change is the Fire’s improved defensive performance with, as Berhalter noted, three clean sheets and just five goals conceded through six games. That’s just one more than the Fire allowed in their first game of the season in 2025. Improvements in the squad account for some of the difference, but that’s not the only change.

“We went over the goals that we wanted to set for ourselves this year, and there was a big emphasis on the amount of goals we conceded in the first five, last five, first five and last five of each game,” Brady said referring to the first and final minutes of each half of the game. “So to us, that felt like a moment that we could really change because to us, those moments are more about mentality than anything. You either haven't built yourself into the game yet or are thinking about getting into halftime with that given result or getting out of the game with that given result.”

It hasn’t been perfect - the most recent goal against the Fire was Milan Iloski’s strike for the Philadelphia Union deep in first-half stoppage time, and the Fire’s most recent loss, to D.C. United, came because of a late penalty scored by Tai Baribo, but it’s been much better — and that’s been powering the Fire’s results.

Against Atlanta, the Fire netminder says the plan is to build on the team’s two previous wins. “They're positive results,” Brady said of the wins, “but for us, they were some ultra defensive games, and I think one thing going into this week is we've had a main focus on possessing and valuing the ball a little more because I think there are some areas we feel like we can hurt Atlanta. In those last weeks, the results are obviously positive, and the way we've battled out the results were positive, but we continue to set a higher standard for ourselves, and we know that with the ball we can do a lot more.”

Predicted Lineup and How to Watch