On Tuesday, TFC reasserted its position to its hardcore fans by reiterating that it had pushed back its deadline for renewals for season tickets. Still on the fence? TFC was giving you until Jan. 31st to re-up. GM Tim Bezbatchenko told the nearly 15,000 season ticket holders in an email on Tuesday that, “A new, winning tradition begins this season for Toronto FC.” Eye-roll territory coming from a TFC official, yes, but the timing was curious.

A day later, the move seemed almost prescient. Michael Bradley on a platter. How about those season tickets now?

MLS is not a T-shirt league. Attendance wars are won and lost over the vitality of your season ticket base, those hardcore fans willing to stick out brittle fall and early spring nights and sweltering summer days. Win those and your backbone is set. By allowing its fan base time, TFC provided a small example as to why the Tim Leiweke era is already doing big things. Dwayne De Rosario and Jermain Defoe and Gilberto are already in the wings. Now Bradley? Stop it.

Reaction was predictably mixed, but there’s little question that the needle (outside Toronto) veered in the direction of unhappy. Over anything, Wednesday’s fracas revealed a dichotomy of thought embedded within the psyche of the average American soccer fan. There exists a desire to make the league better and to make American players better, but it doesn’t seem there’s much leeway for forcing them into contact with one another. How that might happen without cracking a few eggs remains a mystery.

Say what you will about how TFC will alter Bradley the player. It’s possible Ryan Nelsen is ill equipped to handle the deluge of talent so recently heaped on his plate, and perhaps a top-heavy side fails to provide Bradley much in the way of support out of the back. Maybe the motivation wanes. Maybe he becomes a shadow of himself. I doubt all this very much, but it’s possible. It’s also possible that he loses nothing, that the intensity forged from an upbringing around his equally intense and thoughtful father has equipped him well to deal with the rigors of Toronto’s strange packaging.

That’s a matter of debate. But to me, what Bradley signifies inside this fascinating miasma of the league’s evolution versus a player’s evolution is seminal. Can you bridge the gap between making the league great and making yourself great? That seems to be the hypothesis MLS is so keen to turn into concrete fact.

There is a hollowed-out trench spanning the gap between what MLS is now and what it hopes to be years down the line. Here, where we are now, you have a moderately talented league that watches much of its best young players flee for international money and playing time. On the other side of the spectrum, it can’t seem to consistently capture players that grab headlines beyond soccer’s inner circle. On the other side of the gap, where MLS hopes to be, we have a league that attracts those same players it loses from both ends. Its best stay, some of the best come. At the very least, it’s a league that grasps its own talent and develops it with its own coaches.

You can get from one side of the trench to the other, but there will be mud. So it’s a question of whether or not you want to get dirty.

About the only real digging criticism of the move itself in this instance (and in Dempsey’s, since the two are so closely linked) I can conjure with a straight face is hardly the most popular. It isn’t about Bradley’s individual form but rather the league as a collective entity. How was the move funded? And could Bradley’s outsize yearly paycheck be put to better use by spreading the wealth to an academy system that’s headed into just its seventh year in existence? Would that not kickstart the revolution in a more substantive way? To build primarily and almost wholly from the bottom-up?

And to that I say this. You cannot fight the reality of perception with pebbles. You fight it by throwing so many big rocks into the pool that the ripples overlap until they become a continual wave. MLS isn’t trying to sway the LA Galaxy devotee gnashing his teeth at Haji Wright’s impending exodus to Europe (and you’re certainly not swaying Haji). You’re the shell of the house, the resolute timber studs forced into the foundation. You’re here. You’re in the ground. But in the meantime, drab scaffolding still rings the unfinished house, which requires more attention.

Known quantities bring more fans, more interest, more money, more young players who idolize the league’s stars (which begets more interest which begets more academy dollars), more eyes, more television dollars. That starts with many splashes. A hard road, but a road nonetheless. I know you’re sick of hearing it, but this takes years, even from here.

In this case, players like Bradley and Dempsey are honeying the pot. They’re the rocks tumbling into the pool, careening into the water with such vehemence that players and onlookers alike begin to start wondering. If the step here is hanging on to the best players in the pool, isn’t the next step using them to entice some of the rest? No one is suggesting Bradley himself triggers anything specific, but a construction process requires measured steps. This is one.

Let’s be honest. The league is in the unique position of needing to convince people it’s viable to be viable. Make developing, emergent and already-arrived stars believe they need to be here, and they’ll come. This is incredibly difficult, but it’s a worthy venture, and ultimately their peers’ actions are the best salesmen. At its base, MLS is unlike other league in the world in that sense. It has to scratch and kick its way into a comfortable existence through a bramble of flagging television ratings and low expectation caked on from its contraction days more than a decade ago. Fair or not.

Ultimately, MLS needs to work at the wick from both ends. Continue to tend the garden you’ve planted with the Development Academy, but incentivize them to stay by attracting mainline talent, which will in turn force publicity (and perhaps growing outrage) toward the enormous wage gap between the top and the bottom. And transparency. We are ever in need of financial transparency. Eventually (and when, exactly, no one can say with certainty) the two meet in the middle. The young players want to be the great players and so it goes.

Michael Bradley to TFC isn’t a disaster. It’s not a death knell to his climbing USMNT form. And it isn’t the salve to the league’s wounds. It’s an American coming back to MLS to roost. What that means, we’ll soon find out.