Ieven if you’ve never seen Xherdan Shaqiri play a full match, chances are you’ve seen one of his highlights. There’s no shortage of them. That breakout goal and controversial celebration against Serbia at the 2018 World Cup. Those help in the Liverpool-Barcelona comeback. That ridiculous bike kick against Poland at Euro 2016. One of his goals came from a free kick for Stoke.
This week, that career reached its nadir: a disappointing two-and-a-half seasons in Major League Soccer ended via mutual contract termination. The 32-year-old was heralded as a potential franchise-changing signing for a desperate Chicago Fire team in 2022, but leaves the U.S. after rarely looking above average in MLS. Often, he was significantly below that. Given the money involved, there’s a compelling argument 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 partly because of those injuries, his most consistent role at club level was as a sub off the bench, meaning he wasn’t typically the focal point of a team’s attack, as you might expect for the Fire. Shaqiri’s key role for Switzerland meant he would miss more 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 in the early 2010s, and he spent big money on a reunion with his compatriot. The Fire reportedly paid Lyon $7.5 million for Shaqiri (a club record at the time) and signed him to a contract pays just over $8.1 million a year in guaranteed compensation, according to figures released by the MLS Players’ Association. It was the richest deal in MLS history to that point.
In total, that’s a $30 million outlay from Chicago for Shaqiri’s tenure – or around $1 million per goal contribution (though the total could be less depending on the terms of the contract termination). Shaqiri has scored 16 goals and 13 assists in 75 appearances in all competitions for Chicago, half of them from the penalty spot.
The yield is so meager that MLS’s own highlights compilation of Shaqiri’s “best goals” simply shows all seven non-penalty goals he ever scored in the competition.
“Xherdan definitely has one quality: he is a winner,” Heitz said in Shaqiri’s introductory press conference. “We all know he is technically very talented, but it is also about 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 European experience and titles to his name. That a broader winning mentality never emerged, however, is another factor that paints Chicago’s front office worse than Shaqiri, who is capable of miracles but 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 scored just two game-winning or game-tying goals in MLS – a total that would have been doubled if Shaqiri hadn’t scored two 89th-minute game-winning or game-tying goals that were neutralized in stoppage time thanks to the Fire’s defensive breakdowns.
“I want, and I think the whole club wants, that people [to start] “I look more at football, but you have to be successful,” Shaqiri told The Chicago Sun-Times shortly after his arrival, addressing expectations that he would help the Fire not just on the field but off it as well.
The Fire saw a significant increase in average attendance in Shaqiri’s first year, from 10,000 to just under 16,000 per game, but that could easily have been due to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions that limited the capacity of Soldier Field for much of 2021. The numbers haven’t improved much since then. The Fire finished 23rd out of 29 teams in average attendance last season, despite playing in one of MLS’s largest stadiums and the third-largest city in the United States.
Shaqiri ends his MLS career in ignominious company, alongside the likes of Lothar Matthaus, Rafa Marquez, Denilson, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard – household names who arrived in MLS with a hefty price tag but for one reason or another failed to live up to expectations. None of those players, however, came close to matching the total investment in Shaqiri, and none had as little success on and off the field.
Shaqiri’s next move still has a good chance of being successful, as long as the team that picks him up has realistic expectations. For the Fire, a high-dollar player leaves with the feeling that he was the wrong man for a big job. With Heitz on his way out, the goal of a new general manager will be to ensure the mistake isn’t repeated.