Toronto FC’s Failure This Season Is Not The Players Fault

Another game, another loss. This season’s shambolic performances by Toronto FC continue to add up as TFC falls farther and farther down the standings. Now second last in the entire league, TFC are a shell of what they were under Greg Vanney. This season is becoming more and more of a failure as each day passes, and TFC continues to play poorly. All of this culminating in the abysmal performance on Saturday against FC Cincinnati.

The emerging negative trends of this team have not featured any major adjustments. Every time there is a set-piece or counter-attack, every TFC fan sighs and waits for the inevitable outcome of Alex Bono or Quentin Westberg pulling the ball out of the back of their net. And it isn’t like they can do anything about it either. Westberg and Bono have been left out to dry, facing odd-man rushes or unsaveable headers.

This leads to the main point of this article. The players are not at fault, and shouldn’t feel as though they are in any way. As Chris Mavinga said in a tweet last week, they are playing away from home and far from their families. This is on top of being in the middle of a pandemic, and dealing with brand new tactics that just have not worked.

The fans realize this too, take one look on Twitter and the criticisms of TFC right now are not fully on the players. Which begs the question, why would Mavinga feel the need to put that Tweet out? Did someone say something in the locker room to make the players feel as though they were at fault? Was this Mavinga asking the fans for patience after the poor results? Both of those options are very realistic, but if option one was what happened, the person who put the hypothetical blame on the players needs to be fired immediately. I do not care who it is, they need to go because that is an unfair judgement on them, especially when you consider that all of the players have been put in a very difficult position this entire year.

Are the mistakes poor, of course, but it is not the defenders or goalkeepers fault that the midfielders are not there to help them out when being counterattacked because they’re being told to play higher up the pitch, leaving TFC exposed defensively. It is not the attackers’ fault that they are unable to score goals when Justin Morrow is playing as a winger, and there is no tactical set-up for how TFC can create opportunities.

It isn’t any of the players’ fault because they have not been put in a position to succeed. They have gotten left out to dry, and they can’t do anything about it. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that the players have had a locker room leader removed from training with them because of an incident with the manager. TFC’s players have been forced to play out of position, and have had to deal with frankly insurmountable tasks due to the tactical failures of the current system.

So the results this season aren’t fully on the players, but on management being unable to create a system that fits the players on this roster. The criticism of the fans can partially be on individual mistakes, like Westberg’s terrible giveaway or Delgado’s terrible giveaway against Cincinnati, but they can not bear the brunt of fans frustrations. The issues with this team lie deeper than just a few individual errors. There are real systemic tactical problems with the way that this team is going right now, and there’s only been one real change from TFC’s past successes, but that’s been written about ad nauseam already, so let’s not get into that.

The moral of the story? Don’t blame the players for this season’s struggles. They’ve been put between a rock and a hard place, and can’t do much about it. And, unfortunately, until there’s real systemic change, this team won’t be playing much better.