Even if you had never watched Xherdan Shaqiri play a full match, it’s likely you have seen one of his highlights. There is no shortage of them. That breakaway goal and controversial celebration against Serbia in the 2018 World Cup. That assist in the Liverpool-Barcelona comeback. That ridiculous bicycle kick against Poland at Euro 2016. Any of his pinpoint free-kick goals for Stoke.
This week, that career reached its low point – a disappointing two and a half seasons in Major League Soccer ended via mutual contract termination. Heralded as a potential franchise-altering acquisition for a desperate Chicago Fire team in 2022, the 32-year-old leaves the US having rarely looked above average in MLS. Often, he was significantly below that level. Given the money involved in his acquisition, there’s a compelling case to be made for Shaqiri as the league’s worst-value signing of all time.
As exciting as Shaqiri can be, there were plenty of reasons for caution. He had missed at least 10 games due to injury in five of the previous six seasons before joining Chicago. At least in part because of those injuries, his most consistent role at club level involved coming off the bench, meaning he was not usually the focal point of a team’s attack, as he would be expected to be for the Fire. Shaqiri’s important role for Switzerland meant he’d miss further games in MLS, which often plays through Fifa’s international windows.
If the Fire front office saw those red flags, they ignored them. Then-sporting director Georg Heitz, who also stepped down this week, was at FC Basel during Shaqiri’s breakthrough at the turn of the 2010s, and he spent big for a reunion with his countryman. The Fire paid a reported $7.5m to Lyon for Shaqiri (then a club record), and handed him a contract paying just over $8.1m a year in guaranteed compensation, according to figures released by the MLS Players’ Association. It was the richest deal in MLS history up to that point.
In total, that’s a $30m outlay from Chicago for Shaqiri’s tenure – or around $1m per goal contribution (though the total could be less depending on the terms of the contract termination). Shaqiri scored 16 goals and 13 assists in 75 appearances across all competitions for Chicago, with half of those goals coming from the penalty spot.
The output is barren enough that MLS’s own highlight compilation of Shaqiri’s “best goals” simply shows all seven non-penalties he ever scored in the league.
“Xherdan definitely has one quality: he’s a winner,” Heitz said in Shaqiri’s introductory press conference. “We all know that he’s technically very gifted, but it’s really about also leading this team together with other experienced players so that we feel more comfortable in the games this season.”
Shaqiri certainly arrived with plenty of experience in Europe and titles to his name. However, that a broader winning spirit never materialized is another factor that reflects more poorly on Chicago’s front office than Shaqiri, who is capable of miracles but is not a miracle worker. Chicago never qualified for the playoffs and lost 45% of the games they played over the course of Shaqiri’s tenure. He only scored two winning or equalizing goals in MLS – a total that would be doubled were it not for the two separate occasions where Shaqiri had 89th-minute winners or equalizers nullified in stoppage time thanks to the Fire’s defensive breakdowns.
“I want, and I think the whole club wants, the people [to start] watching soccer more, but you need to be successful,” Shaqiri told The Chicago Sun-Times just after his arrival, addressing the expectation that he not only help the Fire on the field, but off of it, too.
The Fire did experience a fairly large bump in average attendance in Shaqiri’s first year, from 10,000 to just under 16,000 a game, but that could just as easily have been due to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions that depressed Soldier Field’s capacity for much of 2021. The numbers have not improved much since. The Fire finished 23rd of 29 teams in average attendance last season, despite playing in one of MLS’s largest venues and in the United States’ third-largest city.
Shaqiri ends his MLS career in some ignominious company, alongside the likes of Lothar Matthaus, Rafa Marquez, Denilson, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard – well-known names who came to MLS with heavy price tags but who, for one reason or another, failed to deliver on expectations. None of those players, though, came close to the overall investment in Shaqiri, and none experienced so little success on and off the field.
Shaqiri’s next move still has a good chance of being successful, so long as the team that picks him up has realistic expectations. For the Fire, a high-priced player departs with the sense that he was the wrong man for a big job. With Heitz on the way out, a new general manager’s goal will be to ensure the mistake isn’t repeated.