TORONTO – Toronto FC is at war.
Or, to be precise, it is gearing up for a war.
Not content with having one historic season under its belt – a 2017 campaign that included winning MLS Cup, the Canadian Championship and the Supporters’ Shield, and setting the record for most points in a single regular season – TFC wants more. Much more, in fact.
That, in part, is why TFC, with the financial backing of MLSE, is stockpiling talent at an impressive rate, adding to what is already the best, deepest and most expensive roster in Major League Soccer. Thanks to an influx of new Targeted Allocation Money, Toronto and the rest of the teams in the league are now involved in a nuclear arms race of sorts, a race the Reds are determined to win. Not even off-season departures have managed to slow down general manager Tim Bezbatchenko.
Gone are Raheem Edwards, Steven Beitashour and Benoit Cheyrou, replaced with Liam Fraser, Gregory van der Wiel and Auro. While the 20-year-old Fraser is a long-term prospect, van der Wiel (who started for the Netherlands in the 2010 FIFA World Cup final) and Auro (a former Brazilian under-20 international) appear to be significant upgrades on Edwards and Beitashour who can immediately contribute.
This wasn’t just a matter of filing roster holes. The signing of international players the calibre of van der Wiel and Auro represented something more significant than that. It was a statement of intent to the rest of the league, that the MLS Cup title won’t easily be wrestled from Toronto’s firm grip.
It was also a matter of TFC taking another step towards achieving its ultimate goal: domination of MLS.
Between 2009 and 2014, the LA Galaxy – with Robbie Keane, Landon Donovan and David Beckham leading the way – went to four MLS Cups (winning three) and won a pair of Supporters’ Shield trophies. They were the one team that everybody hated, the undisputed kingpins of MLS, resented for their success. That’s what TFC wants to be, only, the Galaxy’s five-year spell on top isn’t good enough for the Reds.
“I point to the Galaxy … [and how they] hit four MLS Cups. They won [two] Supporters’ Shields. How do we become that type of franchise? We’ve now gone to two MLS Cups in a row. I think we’ve established ourselves as one of the pre-eminent teams in the league right now. But now how do you do it for half a decade? Nobody’s ever done it for a decade,” TFC club president Bill Manning said last week.
“Those are the kinds of things we look and aspire to, and I do believe when it’s all said and done, when we make our next couple of signings, I think we’ll have a better team this year going into the first game [of the regular season] than we had a year ago.”
One of those future signings will be Ager Aketxe. A 24-year-old Spanish playmaker who came up through the ranks of the well-respected youth system at Athletic Bilbao, Aketxe is in Toronto at the moment, and he is expected to undergo a medical examination and complete the paperwork that will allow him to join the Reds on a free transfer from Bilbao.
The signing of Aketxe speaks to the pure ambition of Toronto FC. Aketxe not only helps strengthen an already strong TFC side in the short term, but also in the long-term. Victor Vazquez is in the second year of a three-year contract, and if doesn’t he renew and heads back to Spain to finish his career, as he has previously hinted, then the Reds appear to already have found a replacement in Aketxe.
First it was van der Wiel. Then it was Auro. Next, it’ll be Aketxe. After that, who knows? But it’s becoming increasingly clear that with each signing, TFC is putting a little bit more distance between itself and the chasing pack.
Recently, Manning passed along a startling stat to his players. Since the second leg of the Canadian Championship final on June 26, 2016, TFC have played 69 games in all competitions. They’ve won 38 of those contests, with only 11 losses.
Manning warns that MLS “is not a league that you can take your foot off the gas.” To that end, he and Bezbatchenko are putting together a roster that it feels can sustain this incredible run that the team has been on for the past two seasons.
“How can we continue to play at that level, at that pace? You need challenges. You need teams within the league [raising] the bar, like Atlanta [United] and LAFC are doing. We’re seeing that that saying, ‘We can’t take a rest.’ We have to continue to [strengthen],” Manning said.
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