Sunday, January 5, 2025

Getting Reacquainted with Toronto FC, the Once-Lucky Wastrels of MLS

Just reeks of the vibe, right? Especially then?
Thumbnail History

With Toronto FC, we arrive at the first expansion team to join Major League Soccer with the Designated Player Rule in full, if budding effect – i.e., the league allowed just one per team. Toronto wouldn’t sign their first DP until 2009 and, bluntly, it took them another five seasons to get it right. As follows (in the short-term), their inaugural season roster has strong Expansion Draft vibes, plus some half-desperate swings at star players – e.g., Danny Dichio, Carl Robinson, and…I don’t know, Adam Braz? Marco Reda? Their first forays in the DP market fell (very) flat – e.g., Julian de Guzman (hard, "eh"), plus a list of one-to-two season signings that impresses in all the wrong ways – but splashing cash paved their way to Toronto’s fleeting glory seasons. All the seasons prior to that point? Trash, sometimes absolute trash (e.g., Wooden Spoon’s in 2007 and 2012): they didn’t make the playoffs in any form until 2015. When the success did come, it’s hard to say where it started – e.g., was it signing Michael Bradley (2014), Sebastian Giovinco (2015) and Jozy Altidore (2015), or did that team need Greg Vanney (who looks better after 2024) to pull them together? – but I do know that those moves built Tim Bezbatchenko’s reputation into something that still sells today (not unreasonably). As the timeline below* indicates, the investment didn’t pay off immediately, but Toronto rose meteorically once they took off. In a better universe, Toronto would have won their first MLS Cup in 2016 against the Seattle Sounders (Stefan Frei had a goddamn day in that one), but they made up for it with a clean sheet/clean win over the same team in MLS Cup 2017. This brings up one key difference between the 2016 and 2017 rosters – specifically, the arrival of the Spanish midfielder Victor Vazquez. Unlike the rest of the big names, he wasn’t a DP; Vazquez was just a smart signing that gave Toronto the fourth dimension a good team needs to become great. Blessed with one of the great, single-season teams in MLS history, and a legit talent in Giovinco, Toronto made the U.S. top flight’s third close run at winning CONCACAF Champions’ League in 2018 and, to their credit, they came as close as any of them. The overall focus(/obsession) over DPs aside, the thing that stands out most about that 2017 roster is the large number of role-playing ploggers that populate it – e.g., Eriq Zavaleta, Mark Delgado, even Jonathan Osorio and the now-forgotten Armando Cooper. For a time, one could hold up Toronto FC as proof of concept for the DP Rule, i.e., the idea that three great players in the right positions can win a title. That wasn’t their last hurrah – they fought Seattle (such a fucking thing for those several seasons) in MLS Cup 2019 with another DP, Alejandro Pozeulo, leading the way – but the manner of that loss already hinted at a waning force. The trophy case in Canada’s largest city has collected dust since and that brings up something else about Toronto – i.e., the gambler’s ambition that defines the team that remains Canada’s best in the MLS era. I haven’t seen players get blessed as the Second Coming (of what, though?) the way Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi did when they signed for Toronto in 2022. Both players wouldn’t arrive until the middle of the season, but the mere thought that they'd finish the season with Toronto kept the team alive for a lot of pundits against the evidence of very bad results. Toronto finished 13th in the Eastern Conference that season, 27th overall. When the Wooden Spoon slapped them the following season (2023), I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the gods punishing hubris.

Total Joy Points: 5 (which is both low and surprisingly high)

* How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2017
MLS Cup: 2017
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2016, 2019
Wooden Spoon: 2007, 2012, 2023
CCL Runner-Up: 2018
CCL Semifinals: 2012
CCL Quarterfinals: 2021

The filthiest tokens, disgusting pennies.
Long-Term Tendencies

Their best MLS seasons aside – and, even here, that means just 2016 and 2017 – Toronto has been a pretty fucking terrible team. They have been poor-to-shit defensively in eleven of their 18 seasons in MLS and, if my imperfect notes can be trusted, the worst of them have come over the past three. The opposite side of the same soiled token tells the same tale: Toronto has scored above the league average in a mere five of those same 18 seasons. Again, this is a team that had four great seasons. Sadly, it has been fucking desolation all both sides of those gilded seasons.

How 2024 Measured Up
Toronto at least flattered to deceive in 2024, and maybe that felt like progress? The way the defense started – it allowed just one goal over the first five games – raised hopes that they’d solved one of biggest problems from the prior two (or three) seasons, i.e., a bleeding defense. That specific strength unraveled over the season in the form of eleven games where they allowed three goals or more; not surprisingly, they lost them all. After scoring a (fucking) abysmal 26 goals over the 2023 season (Bob Bradley’s last season in charge was…something) – which I thought surely would have made the all-time suck list but for the 2020 Pandemic Season - Toronto’s attack improved, but nowhere near enough to rescue that drowning defense. Most notably, Insigne and Bernardeschi pitched in numbers one expects from guys struggling to get a little GAM (or TAM; don’t know the difference, honestly) to keep them and theirs whole. The rest of the roster barely produced (shout-out to leading scorer Prince Owusu) and, while they looked…fine nearly every time I watched them (about 6-7 times, I think), I can’t say I ever saw them do much in any performance and I basically wrote them off after the stretch from early May to early July when they went 1-9-2 over twelve games.

Questions for Their 2025 Season
The extent to which this team is just plain broken, for starters. Toronto hasn’t made a big signing as of yet – they pulled Thiago Andrade of NYCFC’s reject pile (he never did much for them, fwiw), and that’s the extent of it at time of posting – which could make getting rid of Owusu the biggest move of their offseason so far. After that, I don’t know how many positives one can squeeze out of a roster that has, let’s face it, failed utterly for three straight seasons. Throw in the fact that the Toronto Brain Trust’s latest Plan A – aka, John Herdman, aka, former Canadian National Team Coach – tendered his resignation at the end of the failed 2024 campaign and it gets damned hard to see the gravitational force that Toronto FC will need to have any hope of sling-shotting the franchise in a winning direction. I have be believe changes are coming, but they, 1) don’t appear imminent and 2) feel like at least a season away.

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