Gregg Berhalter's Chicago Fire Defeat Inter Miami To Secure Playoff Place
The win was a big deal for the Chicago Fire under its new head coach / director of football.
Inter Miami Defeat Dents Supporters’ Shield Chances
But what about Chicago Fire?
The Fire continued their impressive away form in 2025 with a 5-3 win in Fort Lauderdale against Inter Miami on Tuesday night.
It saw Chicago qualify for the playoffs for the first time since 2017, and marks a successful season under the former United States men’s national team coach, Gregg Berhalter.
The back-and-forth affair that played out between these two teams should perhaps have been expected given they are first and second for goals scored in MLS, but also have defenses among the worst in the league.
After Inter Miami's Luis Suárez had made it 3-3 with a second-half brace, it was anyone’s game, but two of the Fire’s homegrown players, Justin Reynolds and Brian Gutiérrez, each stepped up to score in the last ten minutes to give the Fire the win.
Much of the focus was on the home team's defeat and how it affected its quest to catch the Philadelphia Union at the top of the table. It means Inter Miami is now unlikely to achieve that, but on the other side of the result, this was a big deal for the Fire.
They are the second-best team in the Eastern Conference on the road this season. Only FC Cincinnati has won more games (10) than the Fire’s nine away from home this season, and this has played a big part in its best league finish since 2019, when it finished eighth in the East.
Chicago currently sits in eighth position with two games to go in the 2025 season, and could still finish much higher, though is unlikely to get as high as the third-place achieved in 2017.
The five goals scored in Fort Lauderdale mean the Fire are also the second-highest scoring team in all of MLS with 64 goals in total, just four behind Inter Miami themselves.
Hugo Cuypers leads the team’s scoring charts with 17 goals, building on a fairly impressive debut MLS season in an unimpressive team in 2024, when he scored 10.
He has had much more support from elsewhere in the team this time around, and those involved with beginning the rebuilding job at the club deserve credit for this.
Aside from the players, much of this credit can be given to head coach and director of football Berhalter.
When an MLS team is run using the standard sporting director or director of football and head coach combination, praise for the development of players and the success of signings is shared between the two.
Berhalter holds both roles in Chicago, so can take plenty of credit for any successes, just as he would have to take blame for any failures.
Though Berhalter has taken great responsibility at the franchise as it looks to turn things around, he does have support. In an unusual dynamic, the organisation has a sporting director, Gregg Broughton, on top of Berhalter’s role as director of football. There is also a head of recruitment, Michael Stephens, so there is still a team there doing work under Berhalter.
But in assuming the joint director of football and head coach role, Berhalter is effectively saying, good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, this is on me.
And the 2025 season for Chicago Fire has been good. It represents a big improvement over previous years and shows promising signs that it could make a further step next season. If a team can add a little more defensive stability to good attacking numbers, it can soon find itself in the upper reaches of the MLS table.
