Fire stay ahead of last offseason’s pace by signing Stanislav Ivanov

Sporting director Georg Heitz and the Fire learned something from last offseason.

Last year, Heitz wasn’t hired until Dec. 20 and then was forced to scramble to assemble a roster. This offseason, Heitz already has made his third signing, when the Fire announced Wednesday the acquisition of Stanislav Ivanov. A 21-year-old winger, Ivanov comes from Bulgarian club Levski Sofia and is signed through 2023 with a team option for 2024.

“As we continue to build a strong and competitive roster for 2021 and beyond, it was important that we added another talented, young attacking player,” Heitz said in a news release. “Stanislav is a dynamic and hardworking winger who fits our style of play extremely well. We expect him to be an integral part of the team moving forward.”

Ivanov is the fourth consecutive signing who is under 23 years old since August, when the Fire signed defender Carlos Teran. He’s also the third signing since the season ended, joining striker Chinonso Offor and defender Jhon Espinoza.

It’s not a surprise that the Fire wanted to get much of their business done early this offseason. During his postseason media availability, Heitz said acquiring players late hurt the 2020 team and that he wanted to have two or three new signings before Jan. 1.

“One thing that is important for me is this year or for the new season, we would like to have the new players, or maybe except for one, we would like to have them at the beginning of the preseason,” Heitz said in November. “This was also one of the problems that we had, and this was not [coach Raphael Wicky’s] mistake, it was more my mistake that we didn’t have all the players in January. It was nearly impossible, yes, but nevertheless it caused some problems.

“I think when you’ve seen our matches, in the second half of the season we performed better than in the first half of the season. This is because it takes some time, when you have new players especially.”

Ivanov’s arrival doesn’t mean Heitz’s work is done. Players currently on the 30-man roster could exit, and it’s always possible an opportunity for improvements arises.

But the Fire are ahead of where they were at this time last year, when they still hadn’t hired a soccer-side executive to replace Nelson Rodriguez. They’ve also stuck to a youth movement and now have 16 players who are 23 or younger.

That’s the plan regardless of whether a possible leaguewide youth fund to sign young players is implemented.

“Basically, what we’re looking for is young players, whether we have this fund, yes or no, we want to sign young players, because we want to lower the average age of this team,” Heitz said. “But young does not necessarily mean that the quality is good enough. [A team] only with young players, if they are not good, you won’t win anything. Obviously, we have several solutions for all positions that we would like to cover, but that is nothing special.”