Words, photography and graphics by Timothy Belin

Where Chicago soccer trails its counterparts more significantly is the professional realm.

The Windy City is widely acknowledged as a sports hub, and for good reason. Chicago is one of just four U.S. cities to have a professional team in all five major men’s leagues as well as a WNBA and NWSL outfit. Though most of the local franchises have struggled in recent years, they’ve also established themselves as core parts of Chicago culture.

The Fire and the Red Stars have yet to achieve this.

Though both are founding members of their respective leagues, neither ever truly connected with the Chicago soccer fanbase. Instead, Chicagoans have turned their attention elsewhere, notably to Mexican and European competitions.

“If Red Stars is on [TV], we'd probably pick the Premier League game,” Carman said of her and her friends’ watching habits. “It’s probably bad of us, but that's just what people go do.”

Some of the biggest reasons for this disconnect have been, according to many in Chicago's soccer community, the mismanagement of both franchises and where the teams play.

“I think you have to become part of cultures to turn them into customers,” said Andrew Swanson, co-founder and president of Edgewater Castle FC, a Chicago club soccer team. “Sometimes it feels like the city of Chicago is a little foreign to the Chicago Fire.”

Along with the lack of excitement for the professional teams, one of the biggest challenges facing Chicago youth soccer is its organization. The talent is abundant, and successful teams exist throughout the city with a wide variety of leagues for them to compete in, but with no real oversight and hierarchy, the system gets confusing.

“Soccer won't come to you, you have to go look for it,” said Eileen Magana, a rising senior at ITW David Speer Academy in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood and captain of the school’s girls soccer team. “So I think there's a lot of opportunities that a lot of people fail to reach or to meet. You really have to look to find a team or to find somewhere to play, but it's definitely there.”

The Fire Academy and Chicago FC United have youth teams competing in MLS NEXT, the nation’s highest level of youth soccer. They, and a few more Chicago clubs, also field teams in recognized national competitions such as the Girls Academy League (GA), Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) and United States Youth Soccer’s Elite 64 National League (E64).

Below that, it gets more complicated.

Multiple leagues exist throughout the Chicago landscape, with new ones cropping up every few years while others disappear. Some compete regionally in the Midwest, while others are confined to Illinois or just the Chicago area. They all promise the best competition for prospective teams and players, but how they actually compare to each other is highly unclear.

Mulvaney admitted he still has some questions and confusion about the various leagues despite 10 years leading his own organization. Hannah Berregaard, director of soccer operations for FC United, said that the constantly evolving youth soccer scene is probably holding the city back.

“Everyone's starting new leagues to try to attract teams and clubs to play into it,” Berregaard said. “There's so many clubs, and everyone's looking for that platform to play at that will give them the best competition, and sometimes I think that makes the soccer landscape kind of fragmented.”

Berregaard said this results in the top teams not necessarily competing against each other, which would ideally be the case to maximize player growth. However, she also pointed out how promising it is to have so many entities looking to get involved with the city’s soccer community.

Those differences aren’t always down to the coaches, however.

High school environments tend to include a wider talent range and must adapt to serve the largest number of players. While that can hold some top talents back, school programs remain a unique opportunity to represent one’s school and community.

And they can still be a key developmental pathway for many.

Carman, who made her school’s varsity team as a freshman, said high schools provide one thing clubs do not: the opportunity for younger talents to test themselves against an older age group.

“It kind of forces you to know how to use your small size, or figure out how to play with them,” Carman said. “So it's definitely made me a way better player, because it really does move a lot faster than just playing against girls your own age.”

Adrian Calleros, head coach for Solorio Academy High School in Gage Park, a neighborhood with an overwhelming majority of Latinx residents, said many of his players are from underprivileged backgrounds.

High school soccer is often the only viable option for their careers.

Calleros has been at the school since it opened in 2010, fielding a full team of freshmen in the soccer program’s first season. Since then, he’s turned Solorio into one of the most consistent soccer programs in the city, in 2017 becoming one of the few Chicago teams to win a state championship in the sport.

That success comes down to dedication from players and staff, with Calleros saying he runs the program the same way one might at an academy or in college.

While Calleros thinks there are some good coaches within the Chicago Public Schools system, he worries about their longevity. He’s been at Solorio for nearly 15 years, but he said few of his peers stick around that long.

“As a public school coach, we're not compensated the way the suburban schools are,” Calleros said. “So in the city, you get what you pay for, there isn't that much longevity in public school coaches. You can count them probably on one hand the amount of coaches that have been at a school for more than 10 years.”

This is a concerning trend to many within the city’s boundaries, as the best coaches tend to go where the money is, and the best players want to follow the best coaches.

This results in a vastly unequal playing field between CPS teams and their suburban counterparts.

Harkness said that his program, taking advantage of Lane Tech’s selective enrollment policy and strong financing from its booster club, is one of only a handful of schools that are competitive when leaving the city’s confines.

His assertion is backed up by state results, where Chicago has underperformed suburban high schools for decades. Since the 1972-73 season, when the Illinois High School Association’s online records begin for boys soccer, Chicago teams have won just six out of a possible 92 state titles, with three additional teams finishing runners-up in that time period.

The numbers are even starker on the girls’ side.

In the 36 years covered by IHSA’s online records, dating back to the 1987-88 season and accounting for 73 state championships, only one Chicago girls soccer team has ever won the ultimate prize. The Latin School of Chicago in the Gold Coast neighborhood holds that honor, winning the 1A title in 2006. It also finished second in 2015, one of just two instances of Chicago schools claiming silver in girls soccer.

Carman, who plays high school soccer at Lane Tech, said she noticed this mismatch. She knows many players who moved to the suburbs for better soccer opportunities and believes clubs there are subsequently also of a better level, leading many Chicagoans to commute out to them.

“The suburb teams are better, that's just how it is,” Carman said. “They have more access, there's more space, that's a big thing. We have like a couple of fields and most of them are high school fields that we can't use all the time. The suburban teams have huge complexes, more coaches. More people go out there because they want to take soccer more seriously.”

Carman is right to point to space as a major imbalance. While Chicago teams have limited fields, most suburban clubs have significantly more access to them.

Campton United Soccer Club, in St. Charles, have five full-sized pitches at the city’s East Side Sports Complex, in addition to an indoor facility. FC Lake County, in Grayslake, go even further with four separate game day fields, three training grounds and nine indoor locations all listed on their website.

Even the Fire Academy are a suburban program, with practices held at the Bridgeview stadium. FC United are the same, with headquarters in Glenview and pitches spread out across Winnetka, Northbrook and Wilmette, including two indoor facilities.

These clubs are not exceptions, but rather the norm for many of the bigger suburban teams.

As a result, when Carman’s Northwind team lost half its players to graduation, forcing her to leave after a decade at the club, she chose a suburban team, FC United, as her next destination.

But not everyone has that option.

For many in Chicago, this suburban dominance only widens the sport’s financial divide. Those with the means to relocate or commute can take advantage of these opportunities, while those without are left behind.

Collaboration between the city’s various stakeholders is what many believe needs to be the next step in developing Chicago's soccer potential.

Fire Youth SC’s Blakely said he has a good relationship with Chicago Public Schools, having previously worked there, and as such tries to form meaningful connections between his club and the local coaches and teams.

Because players cannot train or compete for other teams while playing their high school season, clubs rely on those schools to maintain a player’s developmental trajectory. Providing coaches with whatever resources and guidance they can to achieve that is therefore a no brainer for the Fire Youth organization.

“We engage with high school coaches to help them develop, to help them learn, to improve them, to give them exposure to some of our methodology, to some of our methods, to some of our facilities,” Blakely said. “We're really trying to build up that reputation and that collaboration between our two organizations. That's really important for us.”

At Chicago City SC, Mulvaney also stressed the importance of collaboration.

He said the club developed a charity arm, the Chicago Soccer Foundation, to facilitate communication between clubs, notably through coaching symposiums.

“We want to be open,” he said. “We want people to come in and learn from us, but we also want to learn from them.”

Mulvaney added that, ultimately, the collaboration needs to lead to opportunities for the best players to all play and compete against each other on a more regular basis.

Like many in Chicago, he has no doubt about the talent being present. The issue is how far spread out it is.

Multiple members of the Chicago soccer community praised the local level and competitiveness, and firmly believe that Chicago has some of the best soccer talents in the nation. But the fragmented state of the youth setup dilutes that talent across its multitude of leagues and teams, lessening the experience for all.

Mulvaney, who hails from Ireland, thinks that if Chicago’s best players all joined the same team, they could compete with some of the best academies not just in the nation, but in Europe as well.

“We should never have to leave Chicago to play in tournaments, because the talent pool is immense,” Mulvaney said. “There's this unfortunate reputation that you have to leave and go to all these pristine tournaments in Las Vegas and Florida, and this and that. But no, you don't. I'd love it if we could kind of nearly put a bubble around Chicago and say, look, we have all the talent here.”