When the Chicago Fire open their season on Sunday against Zlatan Ibrahimovic and the L.A. Galaxy they will do so with a new player added to the roster. Thursday saw Chinese Super League club Dalian Yifang announce the transfer of Nicolas Gaitan to the Major League Soccer side.
“Nicholas Gaitan joined the US Fireworks Chicago Fire Team. The club expressed its heartfelt gratitude to Gaitan for his contribution to the team during the Dalian period,” the post on the official Dalian website reads.
The post headline reads “Gaitan Joins the Chicago Flame Team” (Don’t you just love fun with translations?)
The 31-year-old Gaitan, whose previous career stops include Atletico Madrid, Benfica and Boca Juniors (where has combined to score 42 goals in 275 appearances), provides support to Bastian Schweinsteiger, 34, and Dax McCarty, 31, in the Chicago Fire midfield.
The middle of the park figures to be where the strength of the club will be this season, and it truly conveys the “win now” mode that the Fire are currently in. Given the ages of the aforementioned players the window for winning in MLS with this core won’t be open for too long.
There has been chatter, among those who first broke the story, the Fire may prefer to place Gaitan in a central attacking position though, instead of the midfield.
As of Thursday night, the Fire have yet to officially confirm the Gaitan signing. The Fire also plan to get more business done to addition to the transfer of the Argentinian international.
According to the official MLS site, #CF97 are working on acquiring 25-year-old Swedish centreback Joakim Nilsson from IF Elfsborg.
That would make sense given how central defense is their biggest position of need, and it is also the position that GM Nelson Rodriguez said, just over a month ago that he was prioritizing the most.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
He also contributes sociopolitical essays to Chicago Now. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. The content of his cat’s Instagram account is unquestionably superior to his.