Toronto FC will receive the best news of its blighted nine-year history on Wednesday. It gets worse from here.
Sebastian Giovinco will be named Major League Soccer's MVP in the late-morning – a first for the club. Beyond the headline, the Italian's award is an inside-out indictment of the franchise he represents. After just one season in MLS, he is already the second-leading scorer in Toronto's history. One of the guys in the top 10 is a goal post.
Giovinco's excellence reminds us of the team's greatest tradition – that it has none. It's the bus station of professional sports – very few people hang around for long, and you wouldn't want to be the sort who does.
Giovinco should have changed that perception.
You could mount a plausible argument that he is not just the best player in MLS, but its best player yet. By choosing North America (and the money), he reworked the league's talent-acquisition template.
He's an eye-catching star just entering his prime, and a name brand. He's impish and charismatic. He seems happy here. Or happy enough.
Here was Toronto FC's golden bullet into the local marketplace. It hasn't just missed the target. Nobody heard the shot.
Aside from the masochists who show up at BMO Field and a TV audience that occasionally flirts with the margin of error for zero, no one cares. If they did, they'd watch.
Five years ago, this might've been a biggish deal. A lot of people wanted to like this club back then. They just needed a reason. The team couldn't find one.
It wasn't just that they lost. It was how they lost. Every setback was self-inflicted. Every decision was wrong. Every message was warped. Every decent player fled. The ones who wouldn't were driven away. Once anybody left, they got better elsewhere.
Jermain Defoe was their last chance. At the time, the English star was hyping his Great Canadian Adventure (soon to go the way of the Franklin Expedition); this was still a team people talked about.
Nobody talks about them any more. They made a decent run this year. They clinched their first-ever playoff spot an hour or so after Jose Bautista's bat flip. In the second half of that game, Giovinco scored the best goal in team history. For all the buzz it created, they might as well have done it the same day JFK was assassinated. They were annihilated in the postseason. Crickets. Nobody even bothered ripping them. That's when you know it's gotten desperate.
A season that should have been a turning point was instead dumped in an unmarked grave. A few hard-cases attended the funeral. They still got charged $10 for beers at the reception afterward.
It's a general rule that a sports club attracts interest proportional to its performance. Toronto FC has become the exception to it. When they were terrible, people followed along in a sad, forlorn way. Watching the worst team in all of North American sport was a sweet sort of pain. It seemed noble.
Now that they're good – kind of – you've begun to realize that, without the angst, this club has no discernible identity. Even a player as electric as Giovinco couldn't improve that perception. If he can't, who can?
There won't be any more bold, expensive ideas from management. Once Tim Leiweke decided he no longer wanted to be president of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the merciful thing to do would've been to take Toronto FC down to the lake and drown it.
Leiweke wasn't just that team's biggest booster. He was its life-support system. By concocting a grand idea about a quickie turnaround in a city starved for any sort of winner, he convinced ownership to inject more money into the club than it could ever hope to recoup.
It started with selling Defoe as the face of a franchise he would play for less than two-dozen times. When that move imploded, Leiweke couldn't properly appreciate that this was the last straw for a lot of people. He hadn't been here for all the disasters that preceded it. The fringe fan – the one the club needed to get through to – turned away forever as Defoe skulked out of town. Having no other choice, Leiweke plowed forward.
He didn't believe in the team, per se. Leiweke believed evangelically in soccer, and that it would soon be the second-biggest sport in the country. There's no one left at MLSE who thinks that. That makes the slow dismantling of the most expensive roster in Major League Soccer history inevitable.
There is no orderly way to manage that, or any chance of convincing the fans who remain that it's the prudent thing to do. They'll see it for what it is – a new era of competitive cheapness, where Toronto FC is designed to pull in a single buck more than it shells out.
Whether they win or not will be beside the point. Because when did it ever change anything?
Toronto FC is in the midst of proving something you'd begun to think was no longer possible in the current market – that incompetence and terrible luck can combine to destroy a sports franchise. Perhaps not on a spreadsheet. TV content that must be viewed live – even stuff working at an infomercial level of interest – is potentially too valuable to ever let die.
But it can functionally wither. A sports team that is not watched and obsessed over by a critical mass of people is an unwatered tree – it may still be standing, but it's dead inside.
Maybe Toronto FC can turn it around. Maybe Giovinco's emergence isn't an end, but the (curiously slow) beginning to something. Maybe a substantial breakthrough can still happen in a local landscape now crowded by winning baseball, competent basketball and a suddenly hopeful brand of hockey.
Maybe that's all possible. But I wouldn't bet that way.