Tom Anselmi wants to get a few things off his chest.

First of all, the chief operating officer of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment is “pissed off” about the poor performance of Toronto FC this season, which will see the team miss the playoffs for the fourth straight year. He also admits the club “screwed up royally” with its season-ticket renewals.

And he vows to “get this fixed real quick” by re-jigging season ticket packages and hiring the right general manager to improve on-field results.

“We don’t feel good about the fact that we are where we are because the objective this year was the playoffs and we missed it,” Anselmi said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s bothering me.

“I feel a personal obligation to our fans to deliver and so far we haven’t.”

TFC, which has been a box-office sensation since it joined Major League Soccer as an expansion team in 2007, was officially eliminated from the playoff race last Saturday just prior to a 3-0 loss to Chivas USA.

With two games to go, the Reds (8-13-7) sit in 11th place among 16 teams.

In a wide-ranging conversation just three days before the deadline for 2011 season-ticket renewals, Anselmi made a plea for fans to “hang in there.”

Scarf-waving supporters, angry with the lack of improvement on the field and dramatic increases of over 30 per cent in cost and four more games in their season-ticket packages for next season, have been voicing their displeasure with chants and protests during home games.

TFC is to announce Wednesday that Anselmi is going to hold a series of town-hall meetings with supporter groups. The club is also removing a pair of CONCACAF Champions League matches from obligatory purchase in season tickets, a move that will cut the total cost of the 2011 package, he said.

“We screwed up and we’re going to apologize,” Anselmi said of the move.

“Our job is real simple now,” he said. “It’s to deliver them a product they can be proud of, give them something to cheer about.

“We’re going to turn it around.”

Diehard TFC supporters, who made TFC the model for MLS expansion by packing the stadium for every game, are excused for believing they’ve seen this movie before. The last time, was about 50 weeks ago, not long after the Reds got thumped 5-0 by the then-last place New York Red Bulls in the season’s final game to come up one point short in their post-season bid.

The hiring of Preki Radosavljevic, who replaced interim head coach Chris Cummins, was trumpeted by general manager Mo Johnston and Anselmi as a key piece of the puzzle to getting TFC its first playoff appearance.

Instead, both Preki and Johnston, former teammates, have been fired and the search is on for a new general manager, who may also herald big changes.

While Anselmi was reluctant to spend much time reviewing 2010 publicly, he did say the “disconnected situation” between the two men meant the plan for 2010 to make “a couple of tweaks that would put us over the finish line” and into the playoffs was abandoned for wholesale roster moves.

“The bottom line is you make a plan but then you ignore it and rip the guts of the team apart and change 15 people, all bets are off,” Anselmi said of the massive player overhaul undertaken by Preki and Johnston.

“At Maple Leaf Sports, we’ve been accused at length about suits like me interfering with the team. (This is) proof positive, we don’t interfere.

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“We had a general manager and a head coach who played together on both sides of the ocean, won a championship together. You would have thought that they were on the same page. We stayed out of their hair and let them do what they did and maybe that wasn’t the right thing.”

Anselmi insisted that he and other MLSE executives aren’t looking to run the day-to-day operations of the team. But rather than a “one-man band” as under Johnston, he said the new GM will have soccer people around him in the front office, including interim GM Earl Cochrane and Jim Brennan, who earlier this season retired to move to the front office as Johnston’s assistant.

“We think we’ve let them down,” Anselmi said of TFC fans. “We’re sorry.”