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Tasked with overhauling a roster that finished 28th out of 29 teams in MLS, it would have been understandable if Gregg Berhalter, Gregg Broughton and the team’s sporting department focused their attention during MLS’s short offseason on reworking the first team, leaving Fire II, the team’s reserve side largely untouched.
After all, the MLS NEXT Pro side featured David Poreba, a Chicago-area native that won both the league MVP and Golden Boot alongside players like Omari Glasgow, now Guyana’s all-time leading international goalscorer at just 21 years of age, playing under a head coach who delivered consecutive years of improved results all while playing a recognizable, fun brand of soccer in Ludovic Tallandier.
Yet the Fire II are likely to look very different next year: Tallandier is gone, as is Patrick Nyarko, an assistant who, like some of the players on the squad, jumped to the new NEXT Pro side from the U-19 academy team. Glasgow is now out of contract without a team option for next season, one of more than half a dozen Fire II players whose deals conclude at the end of the year. Although some of those players will likely return with new deals, many others will likely not be returning.
Despite climbing in the standings year after year and advancing in the playoffs for the first time in team history, by some measures, the Fire II’s success in 2024 was limited: Although Omari Glasgow made his MLS debut, he was restricted to playing on the first time on short-term agreements that limited the young winger to just four matchday rosters and no more than two appearances, and no player has successfully parlayed Fire II success into regular appearances for the first team. Poreba, despite his scoring prowess in NEXT Pro, was called up the maximum of four times that the league allows without appearing for the first team.
That has limited the utility of Fire II to the organization as a whole, unlike teams like the Columbus Crew 2, where players like Mohamed Farsi, Patrick Schulte and Jacen Russell-Rowe (the 2022 MLS NEXT Pro Golden Boot winner) all successfully parlayed NEXT Pro experience into regular minutes (and, for Farsi and Schulte, regular starts) in MLS. (Chris Brady did make 10 appearances with Fire II before transitioning to MLS.)
That is something that is likely to change with Berhalter at the helm. Speaking to MenInRed97, Berhalter said that the approach with Fire II is “creating this vertical integration of the entire club from top to bottom. The methodology, the way we’re playing on the field, the profile of players we’re creating, we’re looking to streamline that. You know, the second team, we’re going to really have a deep dive in coming up with an appropriate strategy to get players from the second team to the first or create revenue from the second.”
The Fire’s ability to do that to date, however, has been limited because of congestion on the first team roster. Throughout the majority of the 2024 season, the Fire had no available first-team roster spots. Although the team loaned out Victor Bezerra, Bryan Dowd, Missael Rodríguez and Laurence Wootton, all of whom were on first-team deals, last season, none of the the loans met the requirements to clear the roster spot, and because of a particularly obscure MLS roster rule, neither did the team’s loan of Justin Reynolds to sister club FC Lugano earlier in the season.
The dearth of available roster spots left the Fire unable to give first team deals to promising NEXT Pro players, and as a result, several prominent players from the team’s 2024 squad, including Glasgow alongside Christian Koffi, Luka Prpa and Lamonth Rochester are in danger of departing on free transfers unless they can be given new deals with Fire II or the first team. Glasgow, in particular, may be likely to depart given the prominent role he has played in the Golden Jaguars’ ascent in CONCACAF and connections through the Guyanese national team.
If the Fire do lose key players to free transfers, it’s unlikely to be a situation the team will want to repeat in the future, and the clock is already ticking on other Fire II players like Poreba, technically here on loan from Stal Mielec in the Ekstraklasa. The team has an option to keep home with Fire II through 2025 but after that, keeping him in red will require a new deal for the newly-minted Golden Boot winner.
The team has already cleared a number of spots on the supplemental roster by moving on from players like Bezerra, Rodríguez and Wootton, and the team will likely be making more moves to clear roster space before the 2025 season begins.
Still, movement from Fire II to the first team is far from guaranteed. Although the level of NEXT Pro has improved notably over the league’s three seasons in existence, as Berhalter noted to MenInRed97, “there’s a gap, a considerable gap” between the level of the reserve side and MLS. To help bridge the gap, Berhalter and Broughton now have the ability to pick a coach to lead the NEXT Pro team that will match the style and tactics, as closely as possible, that Berhalter envisions the first team playing.
As such, the success of Fire II might be best measured not in the team’s place in the standings or performance in the playoffs, but rather, through the team’s ability to grow talent and generate, as Berhalter said, either players capable of contributing to the first team or generating revenue for the organization through transfers.
