What do football legends Danny Blanchflower, Sir Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Hill, and Eusebio all have in common? They all played at one time for a professional club in Toronto. The fact that these and many more skilled pros came to the Big Smoke to play for crowds in the mere thousands back in the 60s and 70s is difficult to believe if one takes seriously Jim Brennan's defense of Mo Johnston's slow player acquisition, that getting players to play here is 'hard' and we should be patient.
Times have certainly changed in professional football, especially with the Bosman ruling in Europe which opened the door to outrageously inflated transfer fees for talented players in their prime. Yet Toronto's pro soccer pioneers knew the importance in acquiring foreign stars to complement our domestic professional leagues, luring them with the prospect of a new and grateful fan base and a comfortable home, if not bags and bags of Canadian cash.
Danny Dichio's success in Toronto after his humiliating fall out of favour at Preston North End should be a model of how to court impact players overseas, where bad press can mean the end of a career often well short of a player's footballing potential. After all, Sir Stanley played for Toronto City at the age of 46, and a year later won English Footballer of the Year for helping Stoke win the Second Division. Even with the quickened pace of the Premier League, those in the English press sounding the death knell on Beckham's career might want to crack a history book now and again.
So should Trader Mo. Youth development is important, and John Carver has the right idea in regard to his long term plans for a football academy in the heart of Canada's largest city. But for the club to build a trust among its hard-core supporters, Toronto FC needs to be more adventurous with its allocation money. Foreign players have always been a huge draw in Toronto, well before curiosity-seekers went in the tens of thousands to watch Pele play for the New York Cosmos in the late 70s. Tours of foreign clubs in Canada beginning in the 1950s, especially from England and Scotland, would often travel through Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver, stopping perhaps once on the way back in the Big Apple before returning home. Toronto's papers had full-page spreads of the English and Italian league results dating back to the 1920s and continuing well into the 80s with the decline of English club football. Varsity stadium would sell out to crowds cheering clubs like Juventus, Dinamo Zagreb, Benfica and Rangers play against whichever hapless local side was on display.
The bottom line is Canadians take the game seriously at the highest level. Most are saavy enough to know our chances as a Canadian club in the MLS in a highly competitive transfer market, and therefore most know there at least one or two marquee names that could stand to be added to the side. Unfortunately, the MLSE do not in any way resemble those adventurous weirdos in the great Canadian landscape of yore who were willing to put dollars and reputations on the line to bring the best the soccer world had to offer to a city that didn't ever seem to appreciate it. We are now, and now's the time to act.
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