Domènec Torrent is a fraud.

Just four months ago, when he took over New York City Football Club midseason from Patrick Vieira, the Catalan coach was hailed as some kind of tactical savant, fresh off a decade seated at the right hand of Pep the Father Almighty and come down to MLS to save us all. He promised to preserve Vieira’s system, which after all was vaguely modeled on Manchester City’s, and to make only incremental adjustments. He promised to compete for trophies—if not this season, okay, maybe next year. He promised us the pinaple would be pretty.

The results have been anything but. Dome inherited an NYCFC side that sat a lofty third in the Eastern Conference on points per game and allowed them to slide all the way to, well, third in the Eastern Conference. Hmm okay bad example. But there has been genuine cause for alarm: Torrent’s points per game over his four months in charge have been a middling eleventh in the league, and from the start of September till last week only Orlando, Colorado, and San Jose were worse. Topping those three shouldn’t even qualify you for a participation trophy at your youth rec league’s season-ending pizza party.

Lately it’s been one big shame spiral in the Bronx. NYCFC lost at home to New England, as if Boston needed another sport to be happy about right now. They lost on the road to ten-man Minnesota (a team that is, to borrow Robert Frost’s description of Loons superfan Paul Bunyan, “a terrible possessor”). Six of NYCFC’s last ten games came against other Eastern Conference playoff teams, and until this week they’d gone winless in them. Fans were inconsolable. A #DomeOut hashtag started bubbling up on Twitter. The Extra Time Radio guys called NYCFC trash and bet a t-shirt on it. The club’s playoff hopes were widely written off.

But that, see—that was the fraudulent part.

The hideous lie that Dome has perpetrated on you, the pure-hearted men and women of the American soccer public, is to convince you that he’s made NYCFC worse. Oh sure, he’s had help from league shills pushing propaganda about how his team has “come unglued in terms of how and where they press, what they do when they win the ball back, and how to even build from the back.” They were in on the act. Dome knew you’d buy it because, come on, just look at his wins and losses. Look at the lack of goals. He must be a bad coach, right?

Dome trusted you wouldn’t notice that even as the goals dried up, underlying stats were on the upswing. Dropping much-needed points to an opponent NYCFC outpossessed by 38 percentage points and outshot 31 to 2 was the perfect way to distract you from the fact that the team had spent the last few months quietly amassing more expected goals and conceding less than over any comparable period in the club’s short history. (Hey man, it’s hard to do math when you’re sobbing into a chicken bucket.) When xG did come up, fans who’d loved the stat in the summer had lost faith in its predictive power by fall. And nobody wanted to hear that the team was passing more often, more effectively, and closer to the other team’s goal than before, while opponents were doing the opposite. If the wins weren’t there, what good were numbers? Basically the whole #DomeOut scam depended on nobody reading this nerdy website—which, you know, fair enough.