A short video clip was running on Toronto's website in the days before the official announcement. The scene was a typical English cafe as a bald John Bull type in a white polo shirt looked up towards the television news and instinctively sprayed out a mouthful of whatever he was drinking. It never showed what he actually saw but his face was a picture of shock. Then the words flashed on the screen alongside him. "It's a bloody big deal."

Financially, yes. Jermain Defoe will be paid £90,000 a week over the four years of his contract and plainly that has been enough to make him think, a few months after turning 31, it is worthwhile joining a club whose name appears to be synonymous with failure.

An article in the Globe and Mail, by the football correspondent and author John Doyle, should tell you everything you need to know about Defoe's new employers. "There's something soul-destroying about TFC's sad, seven-year history," Doyle wrote last May. "The FC stands for 'futility club'. Coaches and executives come and go. Players come and go. But TFC stays stalled. And maybe the only way to categorise it is this way: as a new team, an expansion team about to be born, as it was when founded in May 2006, a year-zero team. It's always year zero in Toronto."

Until a year ago, Paul Mariner was coaching the team, culminating in fans protesting at matches by wearing paper bags over their heads. Mo Johnston, another name from the Panini sticker books, has had spells as manager and director of soccer, was nicknamed Trader Mo and is another one who can be ticked off when Doyle goes through the strange cast of people "who, frankly, seem to know nothing about building a soccer club". Aron Winter, the former Holland international, was the manager before Mariner and now it is the turn of Ryan Nelsen, lured away from the chaos of QPR's relegation season, as a friend of the president (who has since been removed) and with absolutely no background in coaching.

Jason de Vos, a former Canada international, has called it "without a doubt, the most bizarre coaching appointment ever made in Major League Soccer".

As for the results, well, the mayor Rob Ford is not the only person in Toronto clinging on to his job. Nelsen's team won six of their 34 games in the season that finished in October, lost 17, drew 11 and finished second from bottom of the Eastern Conference, getting nowhere near the play-offs – pretty much in line with what it has been like in every year of their existence. In 2012 it was even worse, finishing 19th out of 19 Major League Soccer (MLS) teams. The previous year they were 16th out of 18 but with the worst defence in the competition.

Nelsen tried to steady the team by bringing in a succession of players whom many people might have suspected were no longer in the sport. Robert Earnshaw, 32, was a free agent after leaving Maccabi Tel Aviv. Bobby Convey, once of Reading, followed, aged 30. Steven Caldwell, 33, came in from Birmingham City and has just been named the supporters' player of the year. "The team could be called Ryan Nelsen's retirement home for mediocrities," according to Doyle. "There is no identity to TFC, no iconic player, no team ethos to promote, no populist coach to present. There is nothing. Zilch. Zero year, every year."

Nelsen, the eighth coach to have a go at putting it right, has talked about trying to eradicate "seven years of mistakes". Doyle describes results as "disastrous".

Defoe, to put it bluntly, is joining a club where the limitations are limitless. A club with plenty of cash and a showy front but nothing behind it, like a Kinder chocolate egg with no toy inside – the equivalent in standard, you could say, of a side in the bottom six of the Championship, if you were putting it generously.

Perhaps he is excited by the possibility of being the star man and the satisfaction that might follow if he can help deliver the first sliver of success. Then again it did not really work out that way for Toronto when they made the former Germany international Torsten Frings one of their "DPs" – designated players – or the Dutchman Danny Koevermans.

No, this is about the bags of gold on offer and another reminder that money is how a lot of footballers keep the score these days – enough of it evidently that Defoe is willing, if necessary, to surrender part of his career and sacrifice going to the World Cup, given that he is effectively asking Roy Hodgson to select someone who has now broken free from top-level club football.

Hodgson will not be schlepping over to Canada to watch him at the open-air BMO Field, where the attendances fell last season to a new low of just over 18,000. He has always been an admirer of Defoe, the way he brilliantly comes to life inside the penalty area, and the speed of thought and finishing that has established him in fifth place on the all-time list of Tottenham scorers.

Yet who can blame the England manager for sounding unenthusiastic now the player's priorities have become so blurred? "We will have to see what the competition for places is and what other possibilities I have," Hodgson said when the proposed transfer was mentioned before Christmas. "It won't be quite as simple as saying: 'While you are in America you have got no chance.' But on the other hand I am not prepared to go down the other route and say: 'If you go and play your football in America you are still guaranteed a place on the plane.'"

Hodgson had previously recommended that, if Frank Lampard were leaving Chelsea, as had looked likely last season, and had ambitions to figure in the World Cup, it would not be a good idea for him to choose Los Angeles Galaxy as a resting stop. Those comments attracted enough publicity at the time for Defoe to understand very well the risks, in a sporting sense, about dropping down to this level.

The MLS, as Sir Alex Ferguson notes in his latest autobiography, is too athletic to be derided as a Mickey Mouse league. Yet he still points out there were absolutely no football reasons for David Beckham making the move and that he suspects his old player probably regrets taking himself away from high-end football. As for Toronto – or "Ambitious Toronto", as the English press appear to have renamed them – they may have some money swilling around but their story is so undistinguished to this point it brings to mind an old quote from Rodney Marsh about the West Bromwich Albion side relegated in 2003. "They've made some new signings but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig."

Defoe was apparently persuaded that Canada was the best place for him, rather than another club in England or trying to win over a new manager at Spurs, when he took a telephone call from Drake, the rapper and Toronto fan.

The striker follows a path once trodden by Danny Dichio, Carl Robinson, Rohan Ricketts, Richard Eckersley and Ronnie O'Brien, once on the books of Juventus (zero appearances) and briefly one of the most famous Irish people in the world because of a students' campaign to vote him in as Time magazine's Person of the Century.

The money is sensational but it would have to be because this is the moment, unfortunately, when we should probably stop taking Defoe's career seriously.

David Moyes must ignore the ex-factor

The funny thing is that Sir Alex Ferguson, at one point last summer, had confided he was extremely aware his presence in the stands might increase the pressure on David Moyes. Ferguson, at a meeting of Manchester United's supporters' club secretaries, acknowledged it might be a difficult balancing act, bearing in mind his new position as a director, and said he would have to consider how it might impinge on his successor.

Evidently he has concluded there is not a great deal he can do if the television cameras decide to zoom in whenever United are doing badly and, in the case of their defeat at Sunderland, capture him shaking his head and wearing the expression of someone who has just missed the last bus home. It was always going to be slightly awkward for Moyes, like going on a date while the other person's ex tags along, but I would also wager it is a long way down the list of things the manager would like to change.

He would never admit it, but Moyes is probably entitled to think Ferguson's treatment of Wayne Rooney, going against everything he has ever preached to publicise a private conversation and announce the striker had asked for a transfer, was a classic piece of selfishness that badly undermined the club throughout his first months in the job.

The timing of Ferguson's autobiography, with all its strategic point-scoring, is another demonstration of his less appealing side and, yes, it is probably true Moyes would not have looked quite so inadequate if the retired manager were not so visible.

It would be a much greater problem, however, if Ferguson had been turning up unannounced at the training ground or if the players were going straight to him, rather than Moyes, something that happened regularly to Wilf McGuinness and Frank O'Farrell when Sir Matt Busby stopped managing the team without being able to cut himself free.

So far, there has been no evidence of that, and it seems to be more of an issue for the media than the relevant people at Old Trafford.

If nothing else, Moyes really should be focused on the players around him rather than the guy 20 yards or so over his left shoulder.

Fanning the flames of moneyball

Last week, I asked whether the Football Association might try to do more to take care of its own competition. The answer promptly came in the form of the television schedules for the FA Cup's fourth-round ties and the news that Liverpool's supporters will potentially be asked to trek down to Bournemouth for a 12.45pm kick-off. Arsenal's tie against Coventry City has been switched for BT's coverage to a Friday night, in a move the Sky Blue Trust has aptly described as "money first, money second, money third and, oh yeah, there's the supporters". It has been that way too long and, sadly, nothing changes.