The Unofficial TFC Blog | Toronto FC

Toronto FC’s first XI has underwent a major overhaul under the management of Winter and Mariner and now the team looks like it has serious depth with seven players fighting for the two starting central defensive positions and a packed midfield when all the players are healthy. [Continue Reading]

Dwayne De Rosario, the man known for walking in a very abnormal fashion after scoring goals (could find the right words to describe his “dance”), will not only go down in TFC history as one of the best players to ever don the Toronto FC jersey on his back, but also as the player with the best goal celebration (so far) in the club’s short history. Well, funny for outsiders and fans with a sense of humor – Aron Winter and MLSE executives probably didn’t laugh.

For those of you who are not sure what incident is being referred to, it happened during week 26 of the 2010-2011 MLS regular season, after scoring a brilliant goal that ended up as goal of the week:

After one-timing the ball perfectly into the top corner of the net against San Jose, De Ro ran to celebrate, stopping to make a gesture of writing a check, amidst a battle he was having with the front office to get a pay raise. [Continue Reading]

Here’s a cool look at the new Kia car with a custom Toronto FC interior:

It seems recently that a number of controversial race and sexual orientation-related issues have been happening and being reported on in the media over the past couple of months in the soccer world.

It started with John Terry allegedly making a racist remark to Anton Ferdinand, to the altercation between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra, and Roland Martin calling soccer “gay”. Recently, Ravel Morrison was charged for using a “gay slur” on Twitter.

The latest event, which happened in Major League Soccer, was newly signed Vancouver Whitecaps FC left back Lee Nguyen calling someone a “fagggg” (not sure if I included enough g’s in there) on Twitter. [Continue Reading]

With the LA situation, we are seeing an example of how mega rich owners can come into MLS and take advantage of the budgetary rules. Say, for example, New York bought a great designated player in his prime at 25 years old and then immediately sold him. They might end up breaking even, but when they make the sale, they get a nice portion of allocation money to buy down the contracts of their existing players.

If every off-season a team from MLS came in and aggressively bought and sold designated players, they would be able to increase their cap significantly by simply getting mounds of allocation money.

In other words, say New York had bought Sergio Aguero for 38 million and then, a year later, sold him on for that same amount, they would technically get 2/3 of 38 million in allocation – which basically means their cap is now buffered by an additional 25 million, which they then use to spread around on their entire roster. [Continue Reading]

Both Winter and Mariner joined The Soccer Show on the FAN 590 to discuss all things TFC as well as a slight digression to discuss the Terry and Capello drama with the FA. Here are some of the highlights from the hour long show:

On Most Important Part of a Player: The main thing when Toronto FC looks for players on the team is their personality. They want players that buy into their style and care about that as much or more than the players’ qualities and abilities

On LA’s Cap Situation: Paul says that the only way he can understand how they’ve managed to do this is if they received allocation money for loaning Donovan and Keane out to clubs in the premier league.

On the Academy: Winter expressed his happiness that they have the new facility close by to BMO Field, he says that this gives young players extra motivation to make the first team every time they leave the academy and pass by the pitch. Mariner added that newly hired director of the TFC Academy, Thomas Rongen, is “excited about the academy and has never seen such talented youth”. The club has a “few prospects” that are close to breaking into the first team. [Continue Reading]

A lot of fuss has been made about the LA Galaxy offseason, with complaints that they have favor with the league front office who are helping them circumvent the MLS salary cap with numerous gimmicks.

As we have already pointed out on this blog, it is obvious that they are not in violation of any MLS rules, the same way in any other North American league no team would be allowed to violate the salary cap laws. AEG is not the only ownership group in MLS and Don Garber serves 17 other teams (AEG also own the Houston Dynamo).

But what is slightly less obvious is that the league is not being run in a balanced manner and bends the rules for sponsorship and marketing purposes. It is not only for LA, but it is being done for the New York Red Bulls too, both teams are spending over 10 million, while the next highest spending teams (Toronto FC and Seattle) aren’t even spending 5 million. The budget gimmicks in MLS need to be removed, as they make the league look silly. What is so hard about having a hard cap and parity? [Continue Reading]

Much ado has been made in the MLS blog world about LA possibly circumventing the cap because Don Garber wants to mastermind success for the most popular club and help them succeed and advance to the FIFA Club World Cup, yet they miss the biggest problem with that conspiracy: MLS is a single-entity league. With fiery owners like Merritt Paulson of the Portland Timbers and Joe Roth for the Seattle Sounders, one can be rest assured that no cap evasion is being allowed simply because all of the owners, who act in their own best interest, are aware of everything that is going on.

It is true that some teams like TFC, Seattle, Vancouver and Portland all wouldn’t mind seeing the cap raised – but they wouldn’t sit back and let LA do it unless they themselves had a chance to break the rules in the same way.

It was all looking so bright for TFC going into the CCL quarterfinals. Omar Gonzalez was pronounced out for the tournament and David Beckham was getting a year older and not replaced by a younger star like Didier Drogba or Frank Lampard. Juninho also left to return to his native club Sao Paolo. But now not only has Juninho returned to the Galaxy, they have also added their former star front man Edson Buddle.

Last year, at the beginning of the season, a lot of the talk was that, on paper, the New York Red Bulls had the best team in Major League Soccer history. Even the guys at ExtraTime Radio on MLSsoccer.com were giving that topic serious discussion. Then the LA Galaxy had a tremendous season with Beckham back from his season long injury, and people started to realize that maybe that talk was better suited for the Los Angeles “super-club”. Things continued to get better when they signed Robbie Keane towards the end of the year in the European summer transfer window. The LA Galaxy team ended up as probably the best MLS side in history, winning both the Supporters Shield and MLS Cup. [Continue Reading]