TORONTO - Earlier this week, MLSE chief executive Tim Leiweke was reflecting on Toronto FC. To properly gauge how bad things are, he resorted to emergency room analogies.

"When someone has a major wound, like we do, what's the first thing you do? You stop the bleeding. We have to stop the bleeding first," Leiweke said.

Leiweke wasn't talking about a lost season. They're all lost.

He was speaking existentially. He sees this thing going so far sideways it may never straighten out.

"I'm worried," Leiweke said. "We have leakage."

By "leakage," Leiweke means the city's steady loss of interest. He recognizes that people don't care. In order to reinforce the boss's point, the team went out this week and reminded us why.

Were you to write the history of Toronto FC in 2013, you'd want to channel Robert Musil. This is The Team Without Qualities.

It has no star. No key moment. No identity to speak of. The current iteration of Toronto FC has no rationale. It just is. It's only consistent characteristic is an ability to confound your expectations while consistently disappointing.

Four days ago in Los Angeles, they played what might have been the worst game in franchise history, losing 1-0 to a 10-man Chivas side.

On Saturday, they dominated a much better New York Red Bulls team throughout and still staggered to a 0-0 draw. It's now been more than five hours of game time since Toronto last scored.

Impressively, two entirely different games were perfectly equal in terms of unwatchability. This isn't a soccer team any more. It's human sorbet, cleansing minds between baseball season and hockey season.

Leiweke has the right short-term answer - a shot of glamour. That glamour has yet to be purchased, and though we've been talking about this for weeks, the window is closing. All MLS transfer business must be done by Aug. 8.

In that same discussion, Leiweke went down the list of impediments - not the least of which is financial.

"We have to be smart (on who to buy)," he said. "That means there's a handful of these guys. Not even two dozen of them. I think there's 10. Or less.

"We're staying focused. We've got a couple (in our sights). We're getting one of the two, I'm pretty sure."

Off the record, Leiweke named the two. The impediments have continued to pile up since. Toronto FC has been told that the first is not for sale. The second has demanded the highest salary in the history of North American soccer.

In order to get what he wants, Leiweke will have to do a major selling job and then undertake a massive expenditure, one that is not justifiable from any tactical perspective.

A single player, no matter how good, can't make this terrible team competitive. He won't be young. If he were young and a star, he wouldn't come. So whoever 'he' is, he isn't a long-term solution.

All this theoretical new player can do right now is make things interesting.

At this point, that's more than enough.

By banging this particular drum so loudly, Leiweke has made this a lot bigger than the least important team in his portfolio.

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With full knowledge of the implications, Leiweke is making the pursuit of a soccer star an early referendum on his ability to deliver on his promises across all of his franchises.

"We need a major player, not because that's going to win us a championship. Not going to happen. We need something so that we can go back and tell the fans, 'You earned this. We did this to show you we're not taking you for granted.'

"Now I get patience and development and young kids, as do (president Kevin Payne and coach Ryan Nelsen). But if we don't do something soon to make them understand we're not taking the fans for granted, then we're in a world of hurt."

You know what that sound is? That's the sound of a truthful insight coming out of the mouth of a professional sports executive. Like the call of some rare bird, you're not likely to hear it again soon.

Over the course of the last week, Leiweke has taken a shower of abuse for visualizing success along a parade route; for knocking away the crutch of glory days, magical thinking; for hiring his hockey-playing future son-in-law to play hockey.

One senses that we carry these guys in the door on our shoulders because we know that, all the way up there, it's going to hurt a lot more when we drop them on their heads.

We complain that they're hiding from us when they won't promise to win, and we complain that they're showoffs when they do.

We mock ourselves relentlessly for the cult of '67, and then throw a hissy fit when someone decides to pack away a few of the holy relics.

Unlike this Toronto FC team, a sizable portion of the sports fans of this city have a clear identity - they're insufferable contrarians. They want what they want right up until they're given it. Then they want something else.

One does get the strong sense that none of this will surprise Leiweke.

He's run awful teams before, teams no one cares about. He knows what losing does to people.

He's always solved that problem using two tools - razzmatazz and winning.

Toronto FC is not winning anything this year. Now we wait and see if Leiweke can provide the other thing.

Because he promised.