Frank Lampard is staying with Manchester City until the summer. Whatever that means for you, the decision brought an unfulfilling conclusion to a dizzying period in MLS’ new history. Come to find out, Lampard was never loaned to NYCFC at all. All of the fanfare around Lampard’s arrival, it seems, was a mite misplaced. Because he hadn’t really arrived at all. Not yet, anyway.

As not-so-subtle pretext, here’s Lampard’s actual contract designation from the jump, from Grant Wahl’s sit-down with Don Garber.

The operative term here is agreement. The City arrangement was baked into his deal from the word go, which flung open the gates for further tinkering by the English giant. What we know now is that Lampard never really signed with MLS in the fashion we’d imagined, and the league was complicit in the arrangement. But the nefarious details here ultimately rest with City, which dug a pair of upturned fingers into the league’s nostrils and dragged it to a conclusion it had little choice but to reach.

But now this, from deputy commish Mark Abbott.

Abbott on Lampard not really “signing” w/ @MLS: “It is a distinction w/o difference…he had overall agreement w/ owner, City Football Group.” — Alexi Lalas (@AlexiLalas) January 5, 2015

This is a problem.

Nobody likes to be caught in the midst of a mistake. Earlier this Christmas season, I mistakenly mixed up the bottom two levels while assembling our fake tree. The result was something resembling a pear-shaped man who’d neglected the gym for a few decades. I’d somehow managed to make the lights work, but my wife immediately called me out. My ManPride bruised, I tried, quite frivolously, to argue for a solid five minutes that it was a manufacturer’s design. And then a manufacturer’s error. Finally, my store of faux resolve expended, I was left with my own error. I fixed the tree, grumbling.

So it’s understandable that Abbott bristled at the notion that the distinction between loan and whatever it is Lampard’s Manchester City extension represents is inconsequential. Garber, too, was contrite but subtly dismissive in his chat with Wahl.

“They were faced with a difficult decision,” added Garber, who said he’s been in touch with Man City CEO Ferran Soriano several times in recent days. “I’m going to be supportive of all our ownership groups, making them aware of my point of view. But we need to work hard now to move forward and recognize that Frank will be joining this team in July along with other Designated Players, who throughout the history of the Designated Player program have almost always joined in July. If there was an error in judgment on this, it was not just announcing that he would come in July and figuring out how to manage the start of the season, no different than what happened with Robbie Keane or Thierry Henry or David Beckham.”

His “if there was an error in judgment on this” is a coy, political way to frame the argument. As if there was a question. As if we’re the off-color ones for asking the questions. Garber is nothing if not a shrewd politician, as befits the position of a man juggling what would seem to be a least one unprecedented situation per week. Previously, in the same stream of thought, Garber admitted NYCFC would have to “work hard to build back that trust” with its fans before the franchise had ever played a game. In public relations terms, that’s a nightmare’s nightmare. Rich men in a poor country lobbing bread to one another like a football over the heads of the hungry.

In this instance, NYCFC incorrectly arranged its tree, and as its benevolent keepers, MLS will gently nudge the franchise toward better aims while keeping up appearances. There was nothing malicious here, but the optics on “Frank Lampard signs with MLS” are considerably more palatable than “Frank Lampard agrees to joint custody with MLS, richer club.” NYCFC got carried away without considering eventualities (it’s hard to imagine nobody in the front office imagined what would happen if Lampard became indispensable for City with so much money riding the Lexington Avenue Express north from Manhattan into the Brox). But the latter, packaged in a way we could understand, would’ve been infinitely more digestible.

MLS and its franchises often resemble an arcane wizard (follow me, here) incanting spells it understands perfectly to confused, modern masses. Like Gandalf whispering Elvish magic to a Mets fan at a Queens deli counter. Discovery claims and drafts upon drafts and whatever else. It’s clear the league knows exactly what it’s talking about, understands precisely what it’s doing. And often, those aims are laudable and precise, in a longview kind of way. But the way in which it relates these aims can sometimes look like a dizzying series of ones and zeros. This Lampard fiasco may make complete sense to Abbott. And he may be mystified that the public just doesn’t “get it.” But if he can’t understand that he needs an Elvish-to-English translator before something like this is carved in soft stone – that is, everything is open to revision – then he’s already losing the NYCFC fans who would otherwise follow this time into the fire. And it’s to fixable static.

Static like this.

Loan Watch: Frank Lampard did not travel with the @MCFC squad to Newcastle today. — New York City FC (@NYCFC) August 17, 2014

Now that we know this deal was never a loan in the sense in which we know loans, what do we make of packaging like this? How many actually understood this wasn’t a true loan? That it was more an agreement? And why Abbott et al weren’t involved with this earlier is a massive communications breakdown.

Mark Abbott on Lampard’s reported “loan” to MC: “There wasn’t a loan and I’m not quite sure why it got characterized as a loan.” — Alexi Lalas (@AlexiLalas) January 5, 2015

If you will, flash all the way back to the first week of December, when Garber gave his State of the League address in a smart roundtable in a New York City highrise. At one point, he said this.

“Transparency is a big priority in 2015. And one of the things you will start seeing is that the concepts that we have in place that allow players to come into the league, that allow a priority order, will be shared with the public after we come up with a way to organize it in buckets so people can understand it. … You have a commitment from me that at least a heck of a lot more of it will be transparent than it is today.”

Lampard’s agreement came before this quote, so it’s fair to say he’s grandfathered into Garber’s statements here. But this is literally the exact situation to which he’s referring. The issue is that in this instance, it wasn’t about inward allocation, it was about its external doppelgänger. About what happens when a richer entity that owns its franchise pushes hard enough.

I have no doubt MLS’s intentions are pure as driven snow. Lampard in MLS? Who would argue? The problem is that Manchester City led the league into an impossibly steep rock quarry from which there was no exit. “Want Lampard?” they sneered. “This is our price.” NYCFC’s misstep wasn’t accepting the gambit. It was failing to communicate what it was all along.

Let this be a lesson to NYCFC in future endeavors. Say what you mean. The cloak of secrecy and obfuscation only leads you further away from fans you’ve already fashioned into skeptics.