Is Toronto FC a Real Club?

A warning to the pedant; this is about as unscientific as football analysis gets.

Let's say you start up a new MLS franchise. You stock it with the best club you can afford under the draconian salary system in place (a system I will never speak of again on this blog or elsewhere, because there is a whole secret society nerding it out on this topic right now and they don't like to be disturbed). You give them the best attacking midfield in the league and some very-decent-but-not-stellar fullbacks in an age where the importance of a good midfield and good fullbacks cannot be underestimated (see Jonathan Wilson).

Now, let's say you add a sold out twenty thousand seat stadium, and a ready-made supporters culture...any MLS' club dream, right? As Landon Donovan said when LA first came to BMO Field, no team should lose playing at home to fans like that. And, in large measure, they don't. It's the road that's the problem.

Oh, they don't always play terribly on the road necessarily. It's just they can't win. Or draw even. A punishing mid-summer North American travel tour gets blamed. The lack of away fans in MLS (although Toronto always manages to produce a few at every game) is a concern. Some point to poor finishing from an admittedly mediocre collection of strikers. The team tries everything, but the problem persists.

For three years.

So what gives? My suspicions arose right about the time someone pointed out Toronto's terrible record taking penalties. Toronto FC doesn't do penalties. One could say it's just "one of those things," like the way some breakfast places don't do poached eggs. But a penalty requires a moment of individual concentration and technical ability. It requires a player to momentarily focus on the circumstances at hand, and to make a decision about how you will take the spot kick, which direction the keeper will move, and how to disguise your intentions. It requires the sort of precision that reliance on your teammates or the baying, screaming crowd of twenty thousand fans can't produce, i.e., it doesn't go on adrenaline and fighting urge alone.

Toronto players don't have that yet.

When is the last time you saw a Toronto FC player run to the South Stand pointing to the name on the back of their shirt? You might hate the gesture, but it does indicate some measure of acknowledgment of self worth; that player might be the one training hardest on the team. The one player who seems to have self worth in spades right now is Dwayne De Rosario. The rest? Pablo Vitti? Chad Barrett? And for all their incredible talent, do Sam Cronin, Marvel Wynne? Amado Guevara even?

The pattern of road losses is so consistent now that it can't be dismissed out of hand as "one of those things." It's for that reason that I'm not convinced Toronto FC are a football club yet. There are signs it's on its way to becoming a football club, the introduction of a strong contingent of Toronto natives for example. But right now you get the sense that TFC, the club that wins games, scores cracking goals, and plays with some measure of purpose, exists for the BMO Field "home game experience" and not the other way around.

Most MLS clubs play to half empty stadiums filled with indifferent soccer moms. Some teams that don't even have that win MLS Cups. It might be annoying as hell to the Toronto or Seattle fan that the Columbus Crew are champions with their pitiful attendance records, but playing to an indifferent fan base in a quarter-full ground will do wonders in helping players learn to rely on themselves for confidence on the pitch. It forces you to turn away from the hype of home advantage and the hope, as Danny Dichio so often said, that the crowd will "suck the ball in the net."

I'm not saying Toronto should pray for the numbers to drop off at home so that they can finally focus on being a real football club. But something has to change so that Toronto FC plays both home and away as a proper club in a proper league, not at home as part of the MLSEL "soccer experience" and away as a collection of meandering individuals with no game plan.