Chicago Stars Hand the Rebuild to Vlatko Andonovski: A Gamble at the Bottom of the NWSL

On the NWSL table, the name Chicago Stars sits at the very bottom of the 16-team league: 17 points from 24 matches, a record of 5 wins, 17 losses and 2 draws. I wrote that number into my notebook one evening while watching a round of fixtures, and what made me pause was not the standing. What made me pause was the distance between the name Mallory Swanson on the team sheet and the rest of the collective. A club that owns a national-team star while sitting bottom of the table is not a story about talent. It is a story about rhythm.

On September 18, Chicago Stars announced the appointment of Vlatko Andonovski as chief soccer officer. He had left Kansas City Current only 10 days earlier. The original report came from Field Level Media, distributed via Thomson Reuters, citing The Athletic and ESPN. For a club touching bottom, this is a gamble — and a gamble worth analysing beat by beat.

Context: a club with no road back

NWSL is a closed league, with no promotion or relegation. That means Chicago Stars will not lose their place because of a last-place finish. But what they lose is bigger than a place: it is sporting prestige, commercial pull and the ability to recruit players. A club sitting bottom of 16 teams will struggle to convince a national-team player at the peak of her career to sign, unless she can see a path.

That path is being drawn by the Chicago board through a full restructure. This year the club fired its general manager in May and its head coach in August. Two changes in the hot seat inside a single season is the sign of an organisation that has lost its direction, not a minor adjustment. Owner Laura Ricketts met Andonovski directly during the recruitment process, while club president Karen Leetzow made the strategy explicit: find people who have already worked with him, to shorten the bedding-in period.

At the other end of the table, Kansas City Current are the obvious benchmark. That side won the NWSL Shield with 21 wins and 65 points — numbers at record level for a regular season. Same league, same rulebook, one team touching the highest ceiling and one sitting at the floor. That gap cannot be explained by luck; it is explained by operational quality.

Based on my experience watching matches, rebuilds like this are usually misjudged in their early phase. Outsiders look at the news and see a name. People sitting at the training ground look at the tempo of sessions and know how far the team still is. Listen to the rhythm from the observation seat, where tactics first fall out of time — and in Chicago, the rhythm went out of time long before Andonovski put pen to paper.

Analysis: two résumés, two ways to read them

Andonovski's record has two distinct faces, and any assessment that looks at only one of them is incomplete.

The first face is Kansas City Current. During his time in charge there, he took the club to the best regular season in its history: 21 wins, 65 points, and the prestigious NWSL Shield. That is not the lucky form of a few weeks. It is the output of a system that ran steadily across an entire season, with sensible rotation and a defensive structure solid enough not to collapse during a congested run.

The second face is the United States women's national team. He left the head coach role after the worst Women's World Cup in the team's history, exiting in the round of 16. A national team once regarded as the benchmark of women's football, with almost unmatched resources, went out early. That event has followed Andonovski to this day, and will follow him into every press conference in Chicago.

There is a detail here worth thinking about. At Kansas City Current, his team won 21 regular-season matches but lost in the playoff quarterfinals. With the national team, his side cleared the group stage before falling in the knockout round. The pattern repeats: effective across a long series, short of gas at the decisive moment. For a club whose stated goal is to reach the playoffs, that is a question to raise from the outset — not to criticise, but to plan.

The key point is that Andonovski has been given authority not to coach, but to build the machine: he will choose the head coach, choose the technical director, and take responsibility for the squad. In a league with a salary cap, that authority does not mean unlimited money; it means every resource-allocation decision carries one person's signature.

One more detail: former Kansas City Current technical staffers Kate Cohen and Garga Caserta have already moved to Chicago. That shows the board is not merely buying a name but buying an operating model. Yet Andonovski's long-time assistant, Milan Ivanovic, has not yet appeared in Chicago and is reported to be a candidate for other NWSL roles. If Ivanovic does not come, Andonovski loses his most attuned collaborator — the person who, across long training sessions, holds a structure a head coach cannot observe alone. The slow rhythm of the training ground is something the crowd never sees from the stands.

What stands out is that the staffing structure Chicago is building has no clearly independent counterweight. When the whole room comes from the same place, decision speed rises, but the ability to catch mistakes early falls. For a club touching bottom, time is the most expensive commodity, and a mistake discovered late costs double.

The contrarian angle: a contract of trust or of convenience?

This story has a flip side the news cycle rarely tells. Chicago Stars did not pick a chief soccer officer already proven in that exact role. They picked a coach, placed him in an administrative seat, and handed him the job of building a system from scratch. The best-case outcome is that Andonovski becomes an architect — the man who once took Kansas City Current from mid-table to the top, but this time at organisational level rather than team level.

The worst case is also fairly clear: a club touching bottom hands power to a group of people who were already tied to each other at another club. In football, abusing trust is also a dirty tactic — not because it is ethically wrong, but because it removes the ability to detect errors early. When every voice in the room comes from the same training ground, hard questions tend to be spoken most quietly, and sometimes not at all.

There is one more point I watch closely. This club has exactly one named cornerstone: Mallory Swanson. If next season's entire attacking plan revolves around her, Chicago will create a single point of dependency. Football history is full of such teams: they win while the star is fit, and collapse when the star is injured. In a closed league with no relegation, the price of collapse is the indifference of the crowd — something far harder to recover than points.

It is also worth noting the romantic story the media likes to build around rebuilds. It is attractive because it suggests fairness: the poor club can still beat the rich one. But it hides an operational reality — the gap in facilities, in spending power inside the salary cap, and in commercial pull, which decide who gets picked. 127 dissenting voices, one truth: the pitch always answers for itself.

What to track

Andonovski has set his own benchmark: "Next year, we're gonna do whatever it takes to be in the playoffs." That is an easy statement to make and a hard one to deliver, given a starting point of last place with 17 points from 24 matches. But that very statement is the most useful thing in the current situation: it turns a vague process into a measurable milestone.

So what are the internal signals to track?

First, the head coach's chair. Whoever sits there will shape the playing style, the pressing organisation and how Swanson is used. If a coach with existing ties to Andonovski is chosen, the bedding-in period will be shorter, but the risk of insularity is higher.

Second, the technical director appointment. If Chicago picks a data-driven executive, that signals the club wants to change how decisions are made, not just who sits in the chair. If that post stays vacant too long, power concentrates in one person and the model loses its most important control layer.

Third, transfer activity. Two starting-calibre arrivals would show the promise to "bring in some good players" has a real basis. One signing says nothing; two in the right positions is a signal.

Those three signals, plus Swanson's fitness and contract status, will decide whether Andonovski's project in Chicago is a genuine rebuild or just another staffing change in a cycle the club has already been through twice this year.

I return to the Kazan story I have told before. Kazan taught that football wins on emotion before it wins on shape. The man who wept in Kazan did not see defeat, only a revived belief. In Chicago right now there are no tears, no revived belief, only a contract and a promise. And when a last-place club hands the keys to a man who has just failed on the biggest stage in women's football, the real question is not whether Andonovski is good. The real question is: if the decision-maker is also the chosen one, who will be the first to say he was wrong?