Baseball First, What About Soldier Field?

Finally, Chicago is headed where many other cities with professional sports teams have been for months.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced she'd be allowing some fans at Major League Baseball games.

So, it can be expected the Bears will also be letting fans into Soldier Field this year. No actual announcement of that was made on Monday, however.

Although the baseball teams are allowed fans, they will receive only 20% attendance at games. That amounts to 8,000 to 9,000 fans tops, or about what some of the top minor league teams in the midwest had at games before the pandemic.

Chicago has been trailing other cities in other states when it comes to allowing fans at games. The Bears were not allowed fans all of 2020. Seventen NFL teams allowed fans at games either all or part of last season and the playoffs, with the Dallas Cowboys allowing 30% capacity, or over 31,000 fans.

The Green Bay Packers had fans at their two playoff games while the Milwaukee Brewers also announced last week they would have 25% seating capacity at American Family Field.

The mayor hasn't decided to allow the Chicago Blackhawks or Chicago Bulls to host fans at this point. The Bulls are one of only 10 NBA teams not allowed to have fans while half the NHL teams teams are allowing fans at this point.

"We are keeping close tabs on where we are with public health data regarding the Bulls and the Blackhawks and other indoor venues, more complicated for the obvious reasons," Lightfoot said. "But we are still working with them and if we believe that we can have fans in the stands at the United Center for either the Bulls or the Blackhawks before the end of the season, we'll certainly look for those opportunity to make that happen but we're not quite there yet."

Last football season the Bears were talking initially with the city about getting some fans but no plan was ever put into place for it.

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