Beer and Soccer

Chicago, IL – With less than two months to go until the Fire kick off their 2011 MLS campaign, the Fire’s front office has expanded its search to the internet in order to replenish its badly depleted roster. 

Fire honcho Frank Klopas launched an exhaustive scouting search of Chicagoland parks (from “Highland to Tinley”) this off season, but after several months he had nothing to show for it except frost bite and syringes of dubious origin.  Despite this failure, Klopas was undeterred.  After hearing about the “Internet” from a neighborhood child, Klopas decided to take advantage of 50 free hours of “Internet” time that he says he “won” in a “mail order sweepstakes” from America Online.  After several hours of attempting to load the software, Klopas was on his way to complete his reconstruction deconstruction of this once championship-caliber team. 

“Last year we really tried to give Andrew’s money away to every reclamation project we could find: Nery, Collins, you name it.  Now that I’ve exhausted every player and coaching recruiting resource I’ve got, I’m turning to the only other connection I have - my internet connection.” 

After lovingly describing the features of his 28.8k modem (“do you see all those lights?”), Klopas went on to explain his approach to Monster.com.  ”The loss of our jersey sponsor and our DPs cancel each other out, so that’s good, but the lower attendance over my tenure has really strained our hiring practices,” Klopas explained, ”clearly we can’t field the type of $100,000+ players that theladders.com caters to.  But that still leaves Monster.com, which has a much fiercer sounding name, anyways. ”   Thus far, the posting on Monster.com has yielded well over 1,000 hits for the Forward position, however, after realizing the compensation structure surrounding and learning that Carlos de los Cobos would still be managing, all applicants have since dropped out. 

Undeterred, Klopas pledged to forge on, “Results and attendance are only part of the story.  This front office has a vision and will use the Google tirelessly until we find out what that is.”

[This piece was contributed by author Mark.  For more by Mark, check out his blog at http://ussoccersnob.blogspot.com/ (ed: this is the correct link, an incorrect version had previously been posted. sorry)]