With a $650 Million Self-Funded Stadium,...

Even with a championship pedigree, a growing fanbase, and a privately financed new stadium on the horizon, Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire FC still needed some marketing power to convince fans and brands to follow it to its new home.

In June, the club announced that it will build a $650 million, 22,000-seat, soccer-specific stadium right in the middle of The 78, the 62-acre project by developer Related Midwest that will comprise Chicago’s 78th alderman-assigned neighborhood. Designed by Gensler to be a brick, steel, and glass tribute to the city’s warehouses, the stadium is being financed in full by the Fire’s owner and chairman, billionaire and financial data firm Morningstar’s founder Joe Mansueto.

Slated to open in 2028, the stadium provides a stable home for the Fire, who, since their founding in 1997, have shuffled from venue to venue. The team started at Soldier Field, the home of the NFL’s Chicago Bears. Then, it moved to North Central College’s Cardinal Stadium in Naperville in 2002 and 2003, while Soldier Field was being remodeled; Soldier Field again from 2004 through 2005; and Toyota Park in Bridgeview from 2006 through 2019, eventually moving back to Soldier Field in 2020.

The new facility also follows Mansueto’s overhaul of the club, which took it out of Naperville, gave it a significant rebrand in 2019, and overhauled the brand again with fan input in 2021 after receiving significant backlash. While the Fire saw attendance in the suburbs dwindle to 12,234 per game in 2019, the team’s efforts since Mansueto’s takeover—including the hiring of former U.S. Men’s National Team coach Gregg Berhalter—have resulted in back-to-back seasons of record attendance in 2023 and 2024, topping out at 21,327 per game.

Not bad for a team that’s qualified for the MLS playoffs just twice in the last 15 years, while finishing dead-last in its conference three times during that span.

“It’s an ongoing joke that we know we’ve cracked it when SEO can put Chicago Fire Football Club ahead of the Chicago Fire CBS show,” said Fire CMO Dan Moriarity, who joined the club in December 2023. “We talk a lot internally about the idea that we are Chicago Fire Football Club—we’re not Chicago Fire football team. A club is bigger than just us, and the club not having its own home in its 27-year history, we’ve always been a tenant in other people’s homes. [The new stadium] was something that we were excited about, but we had to figure out how we communicate that to loyal fans.”

But it wasn’t just ticket buyers that the Fire were trying to reach: It was anyone in the city who’d be introduced to The 78 for the first time. For the stadium’s announcement, Mansueto bought full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, spelling out the plan and addressing it simply, “Dear Chicago.”