Although the timing of his firing was very curious, Ryan Nelsen’s fate as Toronto FC coach wasn’t sealed when he publicly shot back at Tim Bezbatchenko regarding the GM’s comments about the players needing to raise their game.
It was sealed in January of 2013 when then-club president Kevin Payne plucked Nelsen from the ranks of Queens Park Rangers, where he was still patrolling the defence as an active player, and installed him as the Reds’ eighth coach in team history. This was doomed to fail right from the start.
History, of course, records Nelsen as the all-time leader in MLS wins among Toronto FC coaches. Take that statistic with a mountain—never mind a grain—of salt. His hiring was heralded by TFC as a bold move, but in fact it was a misguided showing of faith in the New Zealand international who they thought would grow into the job. It turned out to be a gross miscalculation.
Simply put, Nelsen shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.
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Toronto FC has a notorious habit of making life far more difficult than it has to be, for doing things the hard way. Nelsen’s appointment was just another in a very long list of missteps by this organization. Other managers were available. Managers with experience. Managers who coached in MLS.
Coming on the heels of a sixth straight season without a single playoff berth, TFC needed a stable hand, a coach with a track record of success, and of earning results on the field. Considering the state of the club at the time, the situation called for someone who had turned around a troubled franchise before or who, at the very least, had coaching experience.
Nelsen didn’t fit that profile. He had no coaching experience. None. At his introductory press conference, the Reds’ new manager embarrassingly admitted he’d never taken a coaching course or earned any kind of coaching license like a lot of pros do who are thinking about a managerial career once their playing days are over.
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You get what you pay for, and in Nelsen they didn’t get much in terms of results on the field, aside from a tactically naive manager who more than a year into the job was still trying to give this team a firm identity.
At the start of this summer the Reds looked a sure bet to qualify for the playoffs. But with just three wins and one clean sheet in its last 13 games, Toronto has been dragged down into a tight and heated race, and is now fighting for its playoffs life. During that same 13-game stretch, TFC conceded a whopping 26 goals and have seen their goal-difference plummet to minus-4—this from a coach who was a former Premier League defender and who was supposed to sort out the club’s longstanding defensive woes.
Bezbatchenko was spot on when he said “I know we can get more out of this group of guys.” A better, more experienced manager would have extracted more out of this group of players—much more. There’s no reason why this team, with the talent it has, should be fighting for a playoff spot at this point in the campaign.
Give Nelsen credit—the man had an extensive rolodex. It’s fair to say that Jermain Defoe, Julio Cesar and others wouldn’t have come to TFC if not for Nelsen. He was THAT connected. Building a roster was Nelsen’s greatest strength. But turning that roster into a team that could win with consistency? That proved to be a bridge too far for him.
Nelsen will tell you, as he so often did, that injuries, poor calls from the refs and plain bad luck were often at fault when things went sour on the pitch. He rarely held his hand up, and preferred to shift blame elsewhere.
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The latest instance came following Toronto’s limp performance in a 3-0 loss at home to New England on Saturday. The day before, Bezbatchenko told reporters that the players need to “take it up a notch.” The inference was clear: the players had become stagnant under Nelsen and if they didn’t do something about it and fast, you could forget about the playoffs.
Nelsen didn’t appreciate Bezbatchenko’s comments, feeling they put undue pressure on his team.
“I’ve won this league, played in it for four years, been in the Premier League for 10 years, played in a World Cup, Olympics. I’ve played in some pretty hot pressure games. One thing that I do know is this was not one of them,” Nelsen said after the New England loss.
He later added: “It affected the guys.”
My goodness, if the players have become this mentally fragile under Nelsen’s stewardship—that they can get so easily thrown off their game by the GM’s rather tame words—then God help us all, because this team has much bigger problems.
Asked about Nelsen’s claim that Bezbatchenko’s public challenge heaped added pressure on to the players’ shoulders, the club’s GM simply responded: “I think they’re excuses. We’re not in the excuse business here.”
Again, Bezbatchenko was spot on with his blunt assessment of Nelsen’s retort.
It was an excuse, and laughably flimsy one at that. But this was typical of a manager who never heard an excuse he didn’t like, and who rarely took responsibility for the team’s shortcomings on the pitch.
Rather than find solutions, Nelsen offered excuses. Ultimately, that’s why he had to go.
John Molinaro is Sportsnet’s chief soccer reporter. Follow him on Twitter.