Two Games, Two Losses: What We Learned

First off, a quick programming note: Since launching the “5 Things We Learned” format at the start of 2025, we’ve had dozens of installments and learned hundreds of things together.

We’re switching it up – slightly. We’re now going to call it “What We Learned.” Sometimes, it might be fewer, and others, it might be more. We think the change will give us more flexibility and make sure that we’re bringing you the best analysis we can every time we write it.

With that out of the way:

After two months off, the Fire played two games in a week – including team-record singing Robert Lewandowski’s MLS debut, Puso Dithejane’s first MLS goal, and had two losses in a row for just the second time this season, including the team’s second time this season losing a game by multiple goals.

Here’s what we learned from this week’s action in Miami and Charlotte.

The Vibes Are Off

There is one thing that I think we all can agree on: The vibes are off.

Going into the World Cup break, the standard line – we’d said it, voices around the league had said it – is that the Fire, third in the East, fifth in the league, were a very good team but yet really one of the favorites to win a trophy. 

In 16 games across all competitions, the Fire had held a lead in all but two: A 0-0 against Columbus back in March, and a 3-1 loss to the Red Bulls in May. That loss capped the only losing streak across all competitions the Fire have had in 2026.

It wasn’t perfect, but one losing streak through about half the season? Travel back in time and offer that to Fire fans any time in the last decade and they’d take it. Gladly.

The Fire were in a good place going into the break. 

Between Hugo Cuypers’s sudden (and unplanned) departure, Robert Lewandowski’s arrival with little pomp and circumstance, or just two losses that came in a manner that the Fire (and fans) haven’t often experienced in 2026, it no longer feels like they’re in a good place. 

Fire fans are mad at Lewandowski’s arrival (plenty more on this below). Polish media are issuing bone-headed announcements about the perceived lack of quality in the Fire’s squad and MLS as a whole (pretty rich from a group of people who watch the Ekstraklasa every week). And the body language on the pitch throughout the squad hasn’t exactly been fantastic. 

The vibes are clearly off, and no one is happy about it.

Robert Lewandowski won’t be an instant success

Anyone expecting Lewandowski to walk in and score by the bucketload has now had a cold, hard brush with reality. That was always an unrealistic expectation, but it was still one that could be heard from some quarters.

Two games in, he’s had 57 touches, three shots with one on target across 106 Minutes and has yet to have a goal contribution. 

Still, it’s hardly ideal circumstances: By his own admission, he hasn’t been at full fitness, and between Lewandowski’s arrival and kickoff at Yankee Stadium, he and the Fire have had just eight days of training – during which time the team has had to prepare for games against three separate opponents (while facing just two after the match against Vancouver had to be postponed).

If you want to be glass-fraction-empty (and that fraction is probably more than half here), it’s because Lewandowski can’t do the things that Cuypers did the way that he did them, and losing the Fire’s first defender in transition moments, as the Belgian was for the squad, has cost them defensively. 

If you want to be glass-fraction-full? Well, here’s the first thing: The glass is getting fuller, not emptier. Lewandowski felt more involved in the second game than he did in the first, and that shot on target he had? It was his 82nd minute header that registered as 0.65 xGOT per Fotmob. Statistically, he does that twice, he should have a goal.

Here’s more cause for optimism: He had 0.45 xG overall (and Robert Lewandowski is one of very, very few players who has the skill to consistently beat the model), a couple of successful dribbles and showed flashes of elite ball control, just as you’d expect. That’s despite the game being played on a pitch where a lot of the sod looked like it was barely in contact with the ground. He was tied for the most touches in the opposition box with NYCFC’s Malachi Jones, who played 69 minutes to Lewandowski’s 45.

It wasn’t great. But there was more of it than there was the game before.

Lewandowski’s Play So Far Is a Footballing Rorschach Test

After the Fire’s loss to Miami, Polish media were asking pointed questions about a lack of service into the box for Lewandowski. After the loss to NYCFC, they were saying stuff like this: 

Fire fans, meanwhile, mourning the loss of Hugo Cuypers from the squad, have talked about Lewandowski’s comparatively slower movement and lack of pressing compared to the striker they’d known and grown to love – while zeroing in on the fact that regardless of whether or not that was the plan, the Fire essentially swapped the two strikers.

You know what? Both sides have points. The Fire didn’t intend Lewandowski to be a like-for-like swap for Cuypers – they genuinely hoped to keep both – but that’s what ended up happening. Both of the men who have worn the no. 9 for the Fire this year are excellent players – but they’re not the same player.

So here’s an ink-blot diagram for our test: On several occasions last night in New York, Lewandowski was gesturing at his teammates. Was he being a good teammate, orchestrating to help the squad? Or because he’s frustrated at the shift in quality from Bayern Munich and Barcelona to MLS?

There isn’t an answer, although he has done the same thing many times while playing for the Polish National Team. If you want to take the positive side of this, in his introductory press a couple weeks back, he said that “I try to help everyone in the Club if I can. So I can always say what I see, what I’m thinking, if that can help the team, if that can help someone; if I do this, I am doing it with pleasure.”

If you want to take the other side? Several Fire fans who were in New York for the game told me that they felt like Lewandowski spent far more time with the fans in Poland’s red than the Fire’s.

Neither side is ever going to admit they were wrong, but when – and for me, right now, that’s a “when” not an “if” – Lewandowski gets more fully integrated into the squad. 

Here’s what Berhalter said about it:  “It's very, very early into this. And we have high expectations for him just like you do, just like everybody does. But we just need a little bit of patience and understanding where he's at. He was off for seven weeks and now he's working his way back. And we have full confidence he’s going to get there.”

The Fire are really, really missing Mbokazi (and they will for a while)

Between Miami and New York, the Fire have conceded five goals. Looking through all of them, it’s hard to say that Mbekezeli Mbokazi’s absence wasn’t felt in basically all of them. Even the penalty that became Miami’s opening goal as a result of Jack Elliott, playing in the left center back spot, mistiming a sliding challenge that brought down David Ruíz. If Mbokazi had been on the field, he, not Elliott, would have been there and it’s hard to think that the play would have unfolded in that exact same manner. 

There are other issues with the Fire, but one thing the team has had going for it all year has been a backline that can clean those mistakes up before they hurt the team. 

Mbokazi has been a huge, huge part of that, and the Fire have clearly missed him this week. As odd as it is to say that a 20-year-old center back’s absence has had a bigger impact on the Fire than moving Hugo Cuypers or bringing in Robert Lewandowski, it’s true. 

And they’ll keep on missing him, with Gregg Berhalter telling us after the game that he suffered a thigh tear in training and will be out “months” after I asked him for a status update after saying that his absence would be “a new normal”

 It’s really tough luck for the young center back, who was one of the highlights of a successful World Cup campaign by South Africa that saw the team make it to the knockouts for the first time in program history. 

Over time, Jack Elliott and Joel Waterman will establish the chemistry that we saw developing last year, but even then, the Fire are pretty short on backups: Sam Rogers is next up on the depth chart, and Christopher Cupps, now 17 with 326 MLS minutes to his credit, is the only other player the Fire have in the spot. Joe Chatz asked him afterwards whether the Fire’s lack of depth at the position will affect the team’s transfer strategy this summer, the Fire head coach said that “That’s the question, right? We don’t have an answer for it right now.” 

The 4-4-2 isn’t working

Lewandowski hasn’t been as involved as many hoped he would be. Neither Robin Lod (more on him in a minute) nor Maren Haile-Selassie had a lot of service either, and going the other way? 

The Fire are letting things like this happen. 

More than once.

Some of the issues came down to individuals here – Djé D’Avilla, what are you doing and why are you doing it so slowly – but some of it’s structural. 

On both ends of the pitch, the 4-4-2 hasn’t really been working: They haven’t had the ability to get service into the box, particularly against better opponents (and before the break, they had Mbokazi to paper over a lot of the cracks), and they’ve been too easy to play against the other way. It’s asked for Djé D’Avilla to stray from his comfort zone (if he had been in his happy place, he wouldn’t have been at the touchline halfway across the field on that play), Anton Salétros to be more mobile than he can be, and it just has never been convincing.

(I’ve also been asked if it’s “really a 4-4-2” the Fire are playing, and this is why I don’t like talking about formations too much: Not in the traditional sense. The Fire aren’t playing four midfielders, like you’d think of in either a flat or box four midfield. They’re playing two midfielders and two wingers. But the important thing is that the Fire have two forwards playing centrally: Neither Robin Lod nor Maren Haile-Selassie have been playing like midfielders in the past two games.

I asked Berhalter about the lack of midfield control against New York City, and he pushed back, noting that “we had 35 balls won in the attacking half today. So when you talk about midfield dominance, I think we established it.”  Nice try, Gregg, but all of us saw those goals.

I think we’ll see a change next week against Charlotte, now that the team has a full week to prepare for the game. (I think with Cuypers gone, the 4-4-2’s days were numbered regardless, but the compressed schedule limited the ability for the Fire to shift).

With four center backs in total available, it won’t be to a back three. Instead, I think we’ll see a 4-3-3 that sees D’Avilla drop back and join the center backs in moments, enabling the two full backs to function more as wingbacks behind a single striker. That might return D’Avilla to his comfort zone more and enable him to resume the progression that we’ve seen 

Will the starter be Lewandowski? I wouldn’t be surprised, but I wouldn’t expect him to go 90. And speaking of the bench…

It’s not clear what guys have to do to get off the bench

On Wednesday, Puso Dithejane came off the bench, provided a spark and scored a goal – his first in MLS – in the 27 minutes he was given. With rotation necessary due to the team being on short rest, he saw his minutes cut back by a third to 19.

In the 212 minutes he’s been given, he’s shown a lot of things the Fire need – speed, dynamism, and high-level ball control. Do I think he can be an out-and-out starter? No. He clearly has a lot to learn. 

But to learn it, he needs minutes. To everyone’s credit, other than a two minute “get the debut out of the way” cameo against the Dynamo in the Fire’s season opener and a one minute “get the butterflies out” game before his first start in the U.S. Open Cup against lower-league Detroit, he has been getting minutes, and has appeared in all of the Fire’s last six games. 

Another player that needs minutes? Jason Shokalook, who’s had just 40 league minutes (he had a quick debut last season). If the Fire are going to play a two striker system, they need a player who has the speed and ability to press that Lewandowski just doesn’t at 37. That is not what Robin Lod had brought.

Shokalook is the reigning MLS Next Pro Golden Boot winner, and something Matt Doyle has said time and time again is that that’s a skill that’s translated up. He’s shown he can do it at that level. In his one start in a first team uniform, Shokalook scored two goals against Detroit City, showing he can do it against second division teams. 

Do I think that he will come in and instantly be successful every game in MLS? No. But I think he has skills and attributes that the team could use right now, and I’m not sure why he hasn’t been getting the chance.

The same goes to Sergio Oregel Jr., who had 25 starts last year but whose last minutes came against the Red Bulls on May 9th. Oregel’s game isn’t perfect – on advanced stats, his defensive numbers will not impress any coach – but he grew tremendously over the course of the season and hasn’t had the opportunity for further growth this year.

Overall, Gregg Berhalter has a reputation – including in coaching circles – of doing a great job with player development. He also has a reputation for being a guy that finds his core group and sticks with them. It looks like the later is winning out so far in 2026.

The Fire coach forgets more about this stuff between breakfast and lunch than I’ll ever know, but I don’t get it.