Published September 18, 2026
Ten days after a stunningly terse exit from the Kansas City Current — the club he’d just led to a record-setting NWSL Shield — Vlatko Andonovski is running soccer operations at the league’s last-place team instead. Chicago Stars FC announced Thursday that Andonovski, one of the most decorated coaches in NWSL history, has joined as chief soccer officer, beating out five other clubs that reportedly pursued him for similar roles.
What Andonovski Actually Just Walked Away From
The scale of what Kansas City lost is worth spelling out plainly, because it’s what makes this hire genuinely surprising rather than a natural next step for a coach between jobs. In his second year running both the bench and sporting operations, Andonovski led the Current to the club’s first-ever NWSL Shield — becoming the fastest team in league history to clinch the title, doing it while unbeaten at home, and setting NWSL regular-season records across a striking number of categories: points (65), wins (21), home wins (11), away wins (10), clean sheets (16), consecutive shutouts (9), consecutive shutout minutes (869), and fewest goals conceded (13), among others.
That record-breaking season ended in a quarterfinal exit that clearly changed the calculus inside the building. Andonovski shifted from head coach to sporting director, Kansas City brought in Chris Armas — a hire with no prior women’s soccer coaching experience, reportedly recommended to owners Chris and Angie Long by Canada men’s national team coach Jesse Marsch — and within months, Andonovski and the club announced a mutual termination on Sept. 7. Kansas City’s own release on his departure didn’t mention the Shield win or his three seasons of success, an omission multiple Current players noted publicly at the time.
Why Chicago, of All Places
Andonovski told ESPN he spoke with six NWSL teams about similar roles before choosing the one currently sitting last in the league table, on pace to potentially set franchise records for goals allowed for a second straight season. His own explanation leaned into that difficulty rather than away from it: “I get excited with projects, and Chicago will very much be a project,” he said.
The more interesting part of the story is how deliberately Chicago positioned itself to win that competition before it even knew Andonovski would be available, as Equalizer Soccer first reported. Club president Karen Leetzow had already hired Kate Cohen as interim technical consultant and Garga Caserta as interim director of high performance — both former Kansas City staffers who’d worked directly under Andonovski — specifically because she saw them becoming available and recognized the connection. “You build all the people that the best would want to work with, and then they want to come and work with you,” Leetzow told ESPN, describing the approach as intentional rather than lucky.
What This Means for Karina Báez
This site has covered Chicago’s coaching situation twice already this season — first when Karina Báez took over as interim head coach in a club already dealing with a fifth or sixth staff change since 2025, and again when the team’s brief signs of stability were interrupted by a 6-1 loss to Denver Summit FC. Andonovski’s hire adds a new, genuinely open question to that thread: his stated responsibilities include appointing both a technical director and a head coach, which doesn’t automatically mean Báez is out, but does mean her interim tag is now sitting underneath an executive whose explicit job is to decide who leads the team long-term. Nothing in Chicago’s official announcement confirms her status one way or the other, and this piece isn’t going to guess at it.
The Bigger Picture
Hiring a coach with Andonovski’s résumé to run soccer operations rather than coach from the touchline is itself a signal about what Chicago believes it needs most: not a tactical fix for one season, but someone who’s built winning rosters and cultures from the front office down, at both FC Kansas City (back-to-back titles, 2014 and 2015) and now Kansas City Current. Whether that translates into results for a team currently near the bottom of every meaningful statistical category in the league is a multi-year question, not a September one. What’s clear right now is that Chicago won a genuinely competitive hiring process for one of the league’s most sought-after soccer minds — a real coup for a club that’s spent most of 2026 being written about for the opposite reasons.