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Jeremy Loome ,

January 28, 2014 Email

Jeremy Loome



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Toronto FC works as a business because it takes soccer culture seriously. If MLSE threatens that model by adding football lines to TFC’s pitch, it will kill that business as surely as leaving Paul Mariner in charge. For years, fan culture was all TFC took seriously. You could get a chip butty and a pint in the crowd – a nod to British roots of many fans -- but you couldn’t watch a competitive team on the field. The team, and its business model, is built on fan culture. As much as Seattle Sounders fans love to crow to other fans in MLS about their fan dominance, that team and its fan model would not exist had its owners not seen traditional football culture – supporters songs, TIFOs, and sellouts in the stands – take off in Toronto seven years ago. So MLS owes Toronto’s fan base a lot. Yes, they were doing it in D.C. first and the Barra Brava are a great supporters group. But until U-Sector and the Red Patch Boys turned BMO into a walking product placement for how fun it can be to go to a soccer match, MLS’ reputation as entertainment was not great. It’s obvious Tim Leiweke is the first showman/club president to get that and to also have enough work ethic and preparation to pull off his promises. That’s why the club just invested about $100 million in salary and transfers on three elite players. Leiweke could see the obvious: without a decent product on the pitch, eventually even diehard fans start to drift away. And an MLS team with 12,000 fans and no fan culture might as well pack it in right now. If he can see that, here’s hoping he has the foresight right now, while it’s still possible, to explain to his board at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment that there is no single bigger turnoff for hardcore fans than to see gridiron lines on a field. It signifies disrespect for the game. The mistake they may make is looking at Seattle, seeing that fans there put up with it and still set records for attendance. But Toronto is not Seattle. It is a larger metropolitan area with the most diverse multicultural spread in North America, sophisticated football fans who have allegiances to European clubs and cultural background that they consider sacrosanct. That’s why they started leaving BMO when they’d decided the product would never catch up with the glitz. The product isn’t enough on its own any more than the glitz was; football lines on BMO’s surface will signal to the hardcore fanbase that the club does not take respect them. Without that hardcore base, the atmosphere will disappear, and it doesn’t matter how good the club is, because the casuals will leave if they don’t see going to BMO as “an event.” In Seattle, they had football and baseball to pick from. In Toronto, it’s hockey, basketball, soccer and Canadian football, plus amateur hockey, junior hockey and Pro Lacrosse. In Seattle, polls show most Sounder fans do NOT follow NFL football and other sports. They were looking for a something different to which they could devote their social allegiance. However in Toronto, soccer fans are multi-generational and many of those under 50 do follow other sports; they have other places to which they will happily give their attention and their ticket dollars. Anything that suggests to the hardcore fan, the flag-waving club fanatic, that MLSE is taking soccer less seriously than it is taken at European clubs will probably kill the franchise. In fact, it’s a truism of soccer in Canada in general: the only time it has worked as been at the “major league” level. Franchise after franchise that tried to do it “on the cheap” or without respecting the needs of its fan base has folded. Unless F.C. Edmonton, as an example, can eventually get a small stadium built or convert Clark Park into a larger soccer facility, it will also die. In fact, it probably will die anyway, because at the Div. 2 level the soccer simply isn’t good enough for most Canadian fans. They’ve got a thousand other pro games they can watch from overseas that are simply far more entertaining. A stadium and the right atmosphere might be enough to make them a weekly event, but it’s doubtful. Soccer in Canada has to be the total package to work: the right infrastructure, the right fan accommodation and promotion, and the right product on the field. Grid iron lines will kill that at BMO, and eventually kill the team as surely as if Leiweke and Tim Bezbatchenko had never been hired. That’s the message Leiweke needs – gently or otherwise – to convey to his board. Veteran print journalist Jeremy Loome is the co-publisher of Gigcity.ca and author of the “Quinn” mysteries under the penname LH Thomson.