Many of his peers would find such an ordeal agonizing. And Schweinsteiger — one of the most decorated players of his generation, a winner of the World Cup and the Champions League, a serial Bundesliga champion — would be forgiven for seeing it as an unwarranted indignity, for allowing bitterness to fester and resentment to set in.

Yet even now that it is over, Schweinsteiger betrays not a hint of that. It is not just that he issues the usual platitudes about wanting to “look forward, not back,” focusing on the Fire rather than the ashes of his time at United — it is that his trials have not diminished his determination, but redoubled it.

“I’m not really a negative thinker,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “It was a character test, that’s all.”

He does not say it — he does not need to — but it is clear it is a test he feels he has passed.

When it was announced this month that Schweinsteiger had signed a one-year deal worth a reported $4.5 million to join the Fire, it was greeted by some as an unwelcome echo of the days when M.L.S. was treated as a sinecure for those fading stars no longer able to shine in Europe.

That is not how Schweinsteiger sees it. Nelson Rodriguez, the Fire’s general manager, had highlighted the benefits signing a player of Schweinsteiger’s caliber might bring off the field — “Bastian comes with an entirely different standard of excellence, and this is a call to our team that we need to meet that expectation,” Rodriguez said — but Schweinsteiger does not view that as his primary responsibility.