The Fire went to Atlanta and for the first time in MLS play, came back with a win after coming heartbreakingly close a year ago, just to settle for their first road point off a late heartbreaker. This time, the Fire got the win, and for the first time in 2026, did so despite conceding multiple goals.
It’s not all sunshine coming back from the Peach State, though, as 14th place Atlanta still managed to make it a real game against the Fire.
Here’s what we learned last night at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
The back pass rule is still in effect
Let’s start off with a happier one and a trip down memory lane: After time wasting reached epidemic proportions during the 1990 World Cup in Italy, IFAB created the back pass rule which awards an indirect free kick to the attacking team if a goalkeeper picks up the ball after it's deliberately passed to them by a teammate.
the pass back leading to the indirect free kick:
— Colin (@ufcol.in) 8:20 PM · Oct 24, 2026
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It has widely been hailed as the “best rule change” in the sport, and it has done wonders to change the way the game has played: Games sped up, goalies got better with their feet, and it’s just become such a fabric of the sport that you basically never see it at professional levels. That makes you wonder: has it become soccer’s version of those archaic laws that somehow still stay on the books but are never enforced, because they never need to be? Think laws regulating the size of horse troughs on public streets (or Chicago’s more than 4,000 words regulating street cars).
Turns out, the rule is still in effect, as both of Chicago’s pro soccer teams found out over the past couple days. On Friday, the Stars’s Alyssa Naeher picked up a ball sent to her by Bea Franklin, and yesterday in Atlanta, a sprawling Lucas Hoyos picked up a ball sent to him by Paulo Díaz. Both plays resulted in goals. “I think you rarely see it,” Fire Head Coach Gregg Berhalter said after the game, “but it was very clear and very obvious. I'm glad the referee called it."
In the Fire’s case, Anton Salétros “took” the free kick, sending the ball a couple inches towards Philip Zinckernagel who sent it to the top of the net for his seventh goal of the season.
Salétros, meanwhile, got his fourth assist for his part in the goal. You love to see that kind of perfectly-weighted pass get rewarded. I asked Zinckernagel about the pass post game, jokingly, but, after a smirk from the Danish attacker, got a serious answer: “It's actually tricky because you don't want to touch the ball too early. So you don't want to give the defender or the keeper time. The timing was perfect, actually. He timed it just before I hit the ball. So, big assist from him.”
The defense needs to get it together
The Fire started a back line of Noah Allen, Mbekezli Mbokazi, Andreas Hanche-Olsen and Jonathan Dean at kickoff.
As John pointed out before kickoff, that combination has played together once, for 23 minutes, and during that time, the Fire allowed three goals. Those are not great numbers! (They were also playing down a man, which is important context that must have slipped John’s mind.)
With 11-v-11 soccer, a planned start for Hanche-Olsen (who looked good in his first start), and against an Atlanta attack that has been bad all year (they were 29th in goalscoring coming into this one), there were ample reasons to think that this time around, the combination might do better. They didn’t.
Atlanta didn’t have a lot of opportunities going forward, but when they did, they made the Fire’s defense look little better than traffic cones, carving through Fire lines in transition moments.
Miguel Almirón, who overall has been a shadow of his former self since coming back to Atlanta last year once again looked like the Best XI attacker that he was before he left for the Premier League in 2019. Breel Embolo looked like a player that was worth his eight-figure transfer fee for possibly the first time since arriving over the summer, scoring his third MLS goal to make it a competitive game and almost leveling it for Atlanta. And Fafà Picault looked like a guy that should have been getting USMNT callups, not late-career callups by Haiti.
It was just the fourth time this season that Atlanta scored multiple goals against a team currently in a postseason spot (including an early-season win over Philadelphia, when that was an easy thing to do). Sure, there’s a chance that Tata Martino finally figured out how to get Atlanta’s attack to play like its price tag. But it’s far more likely that the Fire’s defense is responsible.
Center back Noah Allen has looked like a decent pickup for the Fire since arriving (technically on loan, but with a well-understood option to buy), but left back Noah Allen has failed to impress in the opportunities he’s been given. Hanche-Olsen showed good game awareness and poise (he had a great toe kick in the 65th minute, ending a dangerous attack from Atlanta), but with the Fire playing a high line, was caught forward too much and couldn’t make up the ground quickly enough.
And Mbekezeli Mbokazi is just not the same player he was pre-injury. The positioning issues that we talked about earlier in the year are still there, but he doesn't presently possess the speed to negate that issue the way he did earlier in the year. Against Atlanta at home back in April, he was doing things like this:
Outstanding tackle from Mbokazi on Lobjanidze in the corner #cf97 https://t.co/njI6nepklN pic.twitter.com/gHfDe0cLi1
— Colin (@ufcolin) April 12, 2026
In this one, Mbokazi didn’t have that kind of split second accuracy with tackles, so instead, he wound up doing this
Mbokazi picks up a yellow and will also be suspended against Orlando #cf97
— Colin (@ufcol.in) 8:25 PM · Oct 24, 2026
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As a result, Mbokazi will miss the Fire’s game against Orlando on Wednesday due to card accumulation, as will Djé D’Avilla, his second suspension this month after receiving two yellows against New York CIty on the 10th.
As for Jonathan Dean: here’s what Zinckernagel had to say about him: “I love playing with Johnny. He's played. He always does the right stuff. He works hard. He always gives me the ball in the right moments and he never complains. He's just a fantastic guy and a very underrated defender in this league, in my opinion.”
What would I do, if I were Gregg? Move the line of confrontation back, particularly against if a team is looking that dangerous in transition moments. Atlanta’s attack could just move at a speed the Fire’s defense couldn’t match. And I’d start Andrew Gutman unless he’s injured. The Fire looked notably better after he came on against his former team, and we have enough tape at this point on how the alternatives play out.
Anzor Mekvabishvili can ball
So there’s a new player in Chicago wearing the no. 23 jersey. And it turns out he can ball. Coming in at half for D’Avilla, Mekvabishvili had his longest stretch yet with the Fire and looked more than capable.
Coaches have said that they have confidence that players can walk into MLS from some leagues – northern European leagues outside the top five, like Belgium and Norway often feature heavily – and have a much higher likelihood of acclimating quickly. Romania and Georgia, where Mekvabishvili played before joining the Fire, have not been amongst the countries I’ve heard listed in those conversations.
That, plus Mekvabishvili’s late arrival to the team, made it an open question of how much – and, frankly, if – he’d be able to contribute to the team in 2026.
The answer, as it turns out, is “a lot” and “surprisingly fast.” Playing out of the role that D’Avilla vacated, he got into good spaces, was proficient defensively and his smart heads-up play led to a goal (which viewers on Apple TV eventually got to see after the broadcast missed it live).
It’s still early days, but he was smart on both sides of the ball (small sample sizes but it’s technically correct that he’s got more than a goal per 90 minutes he’s played).
The Fire got two goals from deeper-lying midfielders in this one: Mekvabishvili’s and Salétros’s from the top of the box.
That gives the Fire’s offense a dimension that it hasn’t always had this year. “It's very important for us that we have different types of goal scorers,” Zinckernagel said postmatch. “We have guys from the midfield that can score. We have potentially fullbacks who also can score goals, and it's a good strength of ours now, and I think we have actually more to see. We look dangerous again on set pieces. I think we are going in the right direction, and yeah, I think we will see in the next few games maybe a few goals from the defenders, also, in these set pieces, and it's something that can bring us some confidence going into the playoffs.”
We’re running out of time to get a lot of key questions answered
In the background of John’s recent piece of the state of the Fire heading into the playoffs is the notion that we really don’t have a great idea of what the team’s on-pitch identity will be at the start of the playoffs.
With one quarter of the Fire’s remaining schedule played since then, we’re really no closer to having answers to a lot of those questions. (Tack on the defensive questions discussed above to the top of this list.)
Lewandowski is nearing (or on!) a record goalless drought
Robert Lewandowski is on his longest goalless streak since the 2010-2011 season, his first with Borussia Dortmund, which extended to nine league games (10 games across all competitions).
In league minutes only, this is the most minutes he’s gone between goals since leaving Poland:
He’s played 570 minutes (and counting) since scoring against Inter Miami in September; that stretch with Dortmund lasted 562 minutes between scoring Nürnberg December 5, 2010 and a 44th minute tally against Köln on March 4, 2011.
Overall, I think that Lewandowski just hasn’t been getting the service he was accustomed to in his previous stops. That was going to be inevitable: from the time he joined Lech Poznań in 2008, he has played for teams that were expected to come at or near the top of the table. Before joining the Fire, the only time his club hasn’t finished first or second in their respective leagues was his first season in Poznań, when they finished third.
The parity in MLS means that there simply aren’t teams that dominate the league the way that the teams he played for over the past two decades have. Lewandowski helped great teams be better. He wasn’t asked to turn a good team into a great team.
Part of it is the way Lewandowski has been utilized: He’s been used more in build up, and he’s shown skill on the ball that you’d expect from one of the game’s greats, even if you wouldn’t necessarily expect it from a guy who had to fight off the “poacher” label. That excuses some of the lack of production, but not all of it.
Lewandowski has had chances – after last week’s loss to the Revs, here’s what Berhalter said when asked about his lack of production: “a guy like him, he needs one or two opportunities to score a goal. Today, he probably had four or five good looks at goal.” There’s a logical disconnect there (which I think Berhalter realized as he was saying it), and every striker, including Lewy, will have and has had off games.
At the same time, it isn’t great that by some measures, Johan Gómez was able to get more involvement in 22 minutes than Lewandowski was in 68 (Gómez finished with three more touches than Lewandowski, and was better on duels, though didn’t get any touches in the box.)
Gómez may not be a big goal scoring threat, but he does a lot of the other stuff really well, and at this exact moment, you could argue that Lewy isn’t exactly much of a goal scoring threat either.
I still think this is a solvable problem – and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the first draft of the solution came out on Wednesday with shifts in the midfield (more on that in a second).
If you want some optimism: In both Poznań and Dortmund, his longest goalless stretches both came during his first year with the club. Both of those teams represented bigger changes for Lewandowski – Lech Poznań was his first move to a club with title and European ambitions, Dortmund his first stop in a top five league – than his moves to Bayern Munich or even, in many ways, Barcelona. MLS may not be the same level as the Bundesliga or La Liga, but it is still the biggest adjustment Lewandowski has had to make since his move to Germany 16 years ago.
Djé D’Avilla is a liability for a playoff team
After D’Avilla picked up that yellow card, I received multiple messages from people that cover the Fire and the overarching theme was that if the Fire wanted to finish this game with 11 men, he needed to come off. I thought waiting for half was the right call; one person was of the opinion that leaving D’Avilla out for the ten minutes or so it’d take to get to the break once stoppage was factored in was actually a pretty big risk.
Dje D'Avilla picks up a yellow and will be suspended for Wednesday vs. Orlando #cf97
— Colin (@ufcol.in) 7:20 PM · Oct 24, 2026
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That should not be the conversation about a starting no. 6 defensive midfielder for a playoff team that is trying to push itself into “contender” status.
We’ve talked a lot about D’Avilla’s talent level – which is sky high – and the fact that he came to Chicago with very little high-level experience in the sport. The Fire knew they were getting a potential project – one who chose to wear the number of countryman Yaya Touré, the famous midfielder. D’Avilla has a ceiling that wouldn’t honestly make the use of the number seem like an idol tribute – if he hits it.
Since then, he’s been woefully inconsistent for the Fire. Earlier this summer, it felt like he was finally hitting his stride. And then a few weeks ago, he put on one of his worst performances for the Fire (and received the cards to prove it). Since then, he’s again looked inconsistent, and often, ineffective. A great defensive midfielder is often the rock and the metronome of championship-caliber teams: Think of what Busquets did for Barcelona (or Miami), or what Rodri did for Manchester City (and now Barça).
D’Avilla might one day become that. But he isn’t that today, and we’re frankly out of time for him to become that in 2026. And a player that might be a safe harbor in a storm or might be rocking the boat himself is just too much of a liability.
The Fire have other options at the position – Anzor Mekvabishvili can play there or a variety of midfield roles, Mauricio Pineda’s ceiling may not be as high but you have a much higher degree of confidence in what the Fire veteran will give you.
Because of his second suspension in recent weeks, we know we won’t be seeing D’Avilla against Orlando. Mekvabishvili replaced him on Saturday, with Berhalter explaining post match that it was in part to “prepare him” for the next match. It seems like he’ll be the starter against Antoine Griezmann and Orlando. He might not give up the role after that.
So: questions about the midfield, forward, and defense. The Fire have three games left. None of the issues the Fire have are that deep, and this is a good team, but to be a team that can get results consistently against other good teams (e.g. “the playoffs”), they need to sort those things out.
