Sports executives are invested in results. They’re rarely invested in teams.

Now that he’s not working there, one doubts that Brian Burke leaps from his bed in the morning to check how Anaheim did the night before.

MLSE VP Tom Anselmi’s relationship with Toronto FC is unusual.

Anselmi spends the time before most home games anxiously pacing around inside the pressbox, tugging at opposite ends of a club scarf. It’s more than supportive. It’s nakedly supporter.

These days, there must be some temptation to give that scarf a couple of turns and fasten one end to a light fixture.

Yes, he’s frustrated. Yes, he knows the side has to get better. And no, he is not yet willing to push head coach Aron Winter off a moving team bus.

“I’m not in the vote of confidence business,” Anselmi said this week. “If you give a vote of confidence, it’s perceived as a kiss of death; and if you don’t give a vote of confidence, it’s a kiss of death. So I don’t do that.”

He’s taking the Fifth on the vote of confidence. Which means he’s still confident. Got that? Me neither.

Anselmi did categorically deny that the club has explored any external options (though, of course, he has a small supply of internal ones).

The authority to fire Winter rests with him, based on his recommendation to the MLSE board. Unless Anselmi is playing Clintonian word games — and that wouldn’t be very like him — Winter is still safe.

This must be why the Dutchman remains so calm in the face of so much failure.

It’s going to be hard to continue hitting the proper metaphors — “pulling together” and “breaking through” and the like — if Toronto drops its eighth straight league game on Saturday against DC United and outcast son Dwayne De Rosario.

Anselmi is old school. He came up working class. He started out in the mining business. He’s a “handshake is your bond” sort of guy (a sentiment which has not always extended throughout the leadership of this club).

As such, he’s still convinced he did the right thing in not cracking open the future MVP’s contract for a second improvement (though the league was equally adamant that it not happen and, under the unusual arrangement of Major League Soccer payrolls, the league held De Rosario’s contract).

“Going back to that time, do we believe, along with the league, that if a player has a contract that you don’t rip it open?” Anselmi said. “Yeah, we agree with that philosophically.”

That’s the guiding principle at work here now — philosophy. Toronto FC has one, and Anselmi is determined to follow it through.

He still believes Winter maintains the respect of his charges.

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“I’m not in that room,” he said, “but what I see is a group of players still playing hard, so I don’t know why I would think any differently.”

Nonetheless, this team is beginning to have the feel of a man who refuses a blindfold in front of the firing squad. It’s brave, but it’s still going to end badly.

“There’s still, what, 80 per cent of the season remaining,” Anselmi said. That’s also true. But there’s a reason they call elections long before every single vote is counted — because what comes before tends to predict with some statistical accuracy what comes afterward. Seven losses does not suggest the beginning of a winning streak.

But at this point, Anselmi is the only person Winter needs to impress. In turn, Anselmi is still taken by Winter’s romantic vision of Elysian football fields stretching across the GTA.

“They’re trying to affect the way the game is played in North America. They have really interesting, lofty, long-term goals. The league is applauding what they’re trying to do,” Anselmi said.

This is in reference to Winter’s ambitious youth academy system and it’s presumed connection to Canada’s future international success.

Increasingly, Anselmi appears to be thinking beyond the turnstiles and toward some sort of sporting legacy. Last week, he acted as spokesperson for the Canadian pro clubs in endorsing Rob Newman as their man in the upcoming vote for president of the Canadian Soccer Association. Newman is the outsider candidate, or as much of one as can be true of anyone already on the inside of that dysfunctional collection of soccer kulaks.

If Newman wins Saturday’s vote, Anselmi becomes one of the most powerful men in the Canadian game — overseeing the country’s biggest club, and the main benefactor of its key bureaucrat.

What continues to beckon through all this is the future.

Unfortunately for all those trying to weather a too familiar storm, it’s difficult for anyone not employed by this club to see beyond Toronto FC’s turbulent present.