Billy Haisley has fast become the internet’s Great MLS Agitator. He once tried to actively convince you to not watch MLS. An unabashed critic of the league’s steps, Haisley’s written time and time again about how the league knowingly defrauds its fans through a rules set it tilts toward a handful of Haves. Which, somehow, is unlike any other league structure in the world. We’ll get to that in a bit.

On Monday, Haisley released his Magnum Opus, his shining monument to MLS hatred. Entitled “MLS Is Putting The Fix In For Toronto FC, Right Before Our Eyes,” Haisley asserts MLS is totally rigged. Like a mayoral election in Chicago in the 30’s. Rigged.

So let’s look into the article to examine, point-by-point, just what in the hell he’s talking about. Quick note: if his grand point gives you an innate desire to reach for the tinfoil hat, he’s done his job.

Not that this is any real secret, but it deserves to be said as often as possible: MLS is rigged.

Scorching, tongue-scalding take right off the stove. This oughta be fun.

Is it possible Billy Haisley is rigged? That any decision the league makes will be met with an endless, spewing torrent of bile? And that Haisley is sitting on a spring-loaded dais with the dial turned to “Total Righteous Indignation” at every turn? It’s like the Iron Throne, but made from shredded MLS soccer balls and Iker Casillas’ disembodied head painted at its apex, wreathed by glowing light and topped by a halo. With lasers.

The league jointly owns each individual team, centrally controls all major decisions, and has a rule book as regularly erased and written over as a chalk board. With yesterday’s reported news that Juventus forward Sebastian Giovinco will sign a contract with the league to join Toronto FC, we have even further evidence of MLS’s shameless central planning.

When you think about it, what MLS is doing right now isn’t really a surprise. The league will enter the new season shorn of two of its biggest stars, Landon Donovan and Thierry Henry, and has essentially replaced them Steven Gerrard, David Villa, and (maybe?) Frank Lampard—big but not enthralling names. Besides Clint Dempsey, there isn’t really another player to point to as one the face of MLS—or at least not one who’s on a good team.

This is MLS, though, where teams are structurally hobbled in their ability to improve with the various restrictions placed on them in a salary-capped, single-entity, closed league. In this environment, a couple favors from the league office in terms of personnel can make all the difference in a team’s fate almost immediately.

Is this, like, money?

The closed system is limiting. That’s obvious. To say it’s nefariously rigged by the league is an unsubstantiated step into Area 51 levels of conspiracy. What are “a couple favors?” if not, like, you know. Money. At last glance, TFC’s brass had a lot of it, and they’re willing to sink it into limited assets. Considering the human element, Giovinco isn’t going to Colorado. Not yet, anyway. And that’s on Colorado way more than it’s on the league. Not to pick on Colorado, but from an allocation standpoint, moneyed ownership overcomes on-field incompetence every day of the week. If a middling on-field franchise like TFC doesn’t prove that fact, what else would? TFC could be any team.

This isn’t complicated. TFC’s ownership group has money and ambition. The funny thing here is there’s been an almost inverse reaction in the league between blind spending and success. LAG laces a Robbie Keane signing with Gyasi Zardes. The Sounders develop a DeAndre Yedlin with the same hand it uses to sign Clint Dempsey. If TFC has the money to sign Giovinco? Great. But to say it’s a competitive advantage? Have you ever looked at TFC’s coaching history? Its year-end standings? If MLS wanted to subversively rig the election beyond the occasional sidestep of the allocation rules, TFC would make the playoffs. The rules would bend to far deeper depths.

Thus this winter’s orchestrated campaign to have Toronto join the ranks of the L.A. Galaxy and the Seattle Sounders as a prestige team challenging for titles every year. Their recent transfer hauls—Michael Bradley, Jermain Defoe, Júlio César on loan, now Jozy Altidore and Giovinco—are actually in a line dating back to summer 2013. That was when Toronto hired as their new CEO Tim Leiweke, the former AEG CEO most known for being the guy in charge of the L.A. Galaxy when they signed Landon Donovan and David Beckham. Soon after, the league was able to finagle that shocking Michael Bradley transfer and put him in Toronto.

Reaching, Billy. Don’t sprain your shoulder.

Bradley coming to MLS was a potentially league-defining coup. Here was the best American player, solidly in his prime, choosing to come home rather than continuing on in a much higher profile team and league in Europe. MLS has hoped to transition from an emphasis on aging European greats into a league of worldwide—and especially American—players at the peak of their powers, and Bradley was the closest they’d ever come in realizing this.

Only thing was, Toronto weren’t very good. Ahead of last season, the team also added another pricy Designated Player in Englishman Jermain Defoe to give Bradley some help, but things never came together. They ended the season losing four of their last five games and didn’t make the playoffs.

Something had to change. The league obviously didn’t want its most prized asset mired in midtable obscurity, so it decided to beef up Toronto’s roster. The first move was bringing home Premier League laughingstock Jozy Altidore. Without the tandem having even kicked a ball to each other up in Canada, they’re already the league’s most attractive star combo. Not only are they critical pieces of the USMNT, they’re both young. Fans can dream on the idea of them improving together and dominating the league for years to come.

Waitwaitwaitwait. Let’s unpack this series of inanities here.

To look at Bradley and Defoe in a vacuum is a hilariously shortsighted marker of someone who either hate-watches very few MLS matches per year or doesn’t watch it at all. At least not enough to understand anything about TFC’s roster, history or the realities of signing a human being to a contract.

Since this is all conspiracy theory from Haisley (WE ARE ALL TINFOIL TODAY), let’s entertain. MLS signed Bradley to begin into its Grand Plan, subversively allocated him to a team that never made the playoffs in a market that had been doing so poorly that in 2012 TFC literally slashed season ticket prices back to expansion levels, realized, “OOPS, HE NEEDS TEAMMATES,” somehow used Drake as bait to sign Jemain Defoe in a premeditated and highly illegal RAPPER BOONDOGGLE (LeBron James, also), only THEN realized Jackson wasn’t going to aid them in their grand plan, and then did it all again this offseason. And, according to Haisley, all this was supposed to be clandestine.

This would be the most outstandingly elaborate fix to bring one perennially bad team up to speed in sports history. It’s also maybe the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read.

A closed system still tilts toward privilege. In the sense that every self-sustaining enterprise is fueled by revenue, MLS’ allocation system is basically built in tiers. If you’re FC Dallas or the Colorado Rapids, your ownership group needs to do two things to join the likes of Seattle and LA and RBNY and TFC at the Big Money Negotiating Table: 1) Say you’re interested, 2) Back up that interest with money. Literally. That’s it. The allocation system isn’t some massive Communist plot Don Garber and his COMMIE MINIONS ripped from the pages of a Leninist pamphlet littering the muddy banks of Volgograd.

The system as is is basically a distilled and tangible measure of money + interest locked into an internal system. Do oversights happen? Absolutely. The league has a lot of things to fix. Its system is convoluted and it does absolutely overlook smaller markets from time to time. But by and large the league rewards the Haves in the same way as does, I don’t know, every other league on the planet. There are hills worth dying on regarding MLS’s oddly placed and confusing allocation rules. The “MLS is secretly holding Illuminati meetings under the earth’s crust,” or Hill 42.Ted, is not one of them. He didn’t even mention envelopes.

There are also monetary reasons why this move makes sense right now, but naaaah.

The Altidore move by itself didn’t raise too many eyebrows. Toronto’s ownership group is willing to spend, and reportedly this transfer was one of the few where MLS apparently didn’t have to scratch out a provision or two of its recondite rules on player movement. (Altidore reportedly got to Toronto through the allocation process.) Despite being terrible practically everywhere in Europe, Jozy’s probably still a top quality MLS striker, and for all the other reasons mentioned above, it was a logical move. However, the Giovinco contract removes all doubt about what’s really going on.

There’s no word yet on the exact mechanisms MLS used to get Giovinco to Toronto, but they will probably prove as convoluted as always. MLS is in the business of getting big players to the league’s desired destinations, regardless of what the undecipherable rules are said to forbid. Nor is there an obvious exit strategy for the team’s current third Designated Player, Gilberto. The 25-year-old Brazilian came to the league ahead of last season hoping a good showing here would springboard himself to a better league, but didn’t play particularly well. Hopefully MLS finds a foreign partner to foist him off on, because some kind of “trade” with an “unrelated MLS franchise” would look pretty damn shady.

It would look shady for a team, which needs to clear up a DP spot, to trade a player on a DP contract? Alright.

What is clear is why this is happening. Toronto FC were bought by big-money owners who wanted to make a splash. The league wanted to help them achieve this goal and create another prestige franchise, so they’ve tried to facilitate the process. With the Bradley transfer, MLS realized it had a vested interest in not letting a potential superstar waste away on a bad team. Thus, just a year after Bradley’s acquisition, the league has granted his team two of the shiniest new toys anywhere in the league.

Here, finally, we come to the heaving, corrupted, unsubstantiated core of Haisley’s argument. He acknowledges that TFC’s ownership group (MLSE) “wanted to make a splash” with their raft of resources. Who could argue? Once paired up with a wheeling-and-dealing GM like Tim Bezbatchenko and a money-running president like Leiweke, none of this should’ve come as an urgent shock. Between Bez, Leiweke and MLSE’s endless kitty of resources, it’d have been more a shock had TFC not reached for the top of the shelf.

But to stretch that into some shaded corner where MLS had this vague goal to hew a “prestige franchise” out of the Canadian rock via Whatever Means Necessary? Where does that come from if not a place of vague and general distaste that hits at a general distaste for the league, regardless of its non-pro/rel mechanisms? It’s a fantastical conspiracy theory no even-keeled, discerning adult could find on the most detailed American soccer road map.

TFC has money and a newly installed, fast-moving front office willing to use the league’s confusing and convoluted allocation rules to its benefit. How the conversation moves beyond that to the land of Narnia, I have no idea.

Again, this is no shock. What is a bit of a surprise, though, is the fact that such a naked plan to fix things in Toronto’s favor has been met with such indifference. How can fans of other teams believe their destiny is in their own hands in a league where those in power pick favorites and where the direction of ringers to certain cities isn’t even a bug, but a feature?

Naked plan! Naked! Haisley sees a man in three layers of goose down and tells him to cover up because conspiracy.

This is a good example of why the kind of convoluted conspiracies that fascinate a certain type of paranoiac are often unnecessary. An institution doesn’t have to conduct its nefarious business behind closed doors to escape the attention of even those who have an interested in finding malfeasance. You can get away with pretty much anything just by pretending there’s nothing wrong with you doing it.

Here’s my question: is Billy Haisley rigged by The Brain to see birds and assume war planes? Or to see big money signings and to assume malfeasance? Because while the league has hardly built up the transparency of goodwill to earn the benefit of the doubt on all things, it’s certainly done enough to warrant a deeper train of thought than, “Bradley good, Bradley need teammates, MLS cheat for Bradley.”

Imagine the Columbus Crew signing Giovinco to a $7 million per year contract, and the league passing it off as Columbus’ simple ambition. That’s malfeasance. That’s rigging the game. That’s lying. What MLS is doing is allowing its big clubs to operate like big clubs in a system that can approximate world leagues without emulating them. It isn’t hard to be TFC in MLS. It just takes money, an ownership structure willing to spend it and a front office able to connect with big players enough to reel them in. Not that that’s particularly easy either, but ambition is a universal language. It isn’t hard to spot.

Remember, we’re talking about human beings in this equation, not names etched in digital ink. If TFC wants to throw Monopoly money at Giovinco, who’s struggled to find consistent minutes with Juve, that to me indicates the exact opposite of a conspiracy. From Giovinco’s perspective, it’s common sense. Club with enterprising front office offers silly money? Please and thank you. The discussion is around whether TFC is foolish for lobbing bags of cash at a player who may or may not perform up to insane expectation. And whether this has tilted the market value for future DPs into dangerous levels of overpayment. It is not whether the league has a secret ponzi scheme running behind closed doors to benefit certain teams and destroy others.

The former is a soccer discussion. The latter are the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. Choose your message carefully.