Sniff Sniff
Arrivederci! Insigne and Bernardeschi are done in Toronto and process of rebuilding the wake of their destruction can now begin. We all anxiously await MLSE's next move, which is undoubtedly to spend eye-watering money on yet another questionable high-profile arrival from Europe.
Agents are drooling in places like London, Barcelona, and Milan.
While we wait for that eventuality, let's sum up the Italian Era in the GTA:
Lorenzo Insigne: 76 games played, 19 goals, 18 assists.
Total approximate cost: $45 million
Federico Bernardeschi: 99 games played, 26 goals, 22 assists.
Total approximate cost: $20 million
Over the course of the three years Insigne and Bernardeschi spent in Toronto, getting coaches fired, refusing to train, and smoking vapes in the locker room, TFC averaged a dismal 1.1 points per game and made zero playoff appearances.
That's what you call a poor return on investment.
But...it gets cold in Canada in the winter. Sometimes you have to burn cash to stay warm.
We could spend all day autopsying the recently deceased, or we could move on from the narrow focus on Toronto FC and look at the bigger picture.
Yeah, let's do that.
The news out of Toronto on Tuesday (broken by Tom Bogert, of course) prompted this comment by Parker Smith on Bluesky:
Insigne-Bernardeschi prime case why MLS teams should not be blindly applauded for spending tons of money on 1, 2 players. But I think most people around the league still in the habit of seeing a transfer crack the Top 10 fee & going “yes, good, this automatically moves the league & team forward!”
— Parker Smith (@dparks.world) July 1, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Parker is smart. Follow Parker.
I responded to Parker, off-the-cuff, without thinking too much about it, with this:
This is why the spending model persists. MLS loves the smell of its own farts.
— Jason Davis (@davisjason.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Sniff. Sniff.
The more I think about, and while acknowledging the indelicacy of the metaphor, the more this feels like a correct reading of Major League Soccer's intractable desire to chase big names and big headlines at the expense of overall squad quality. When we talk about why MLS failed to make a significant dent at the Club World Cup, the issue isn't a lack of top-end talent, it's that MLS keeps its clubs from maximizing the influence of the Messis and Bouangas by boxing them in on the supporting cast.
There aren't many MLS clubs willing to spend what it takes to put together a team that can play toe-to-toe with the best CONCACAF has to offer (and show well in a showcase tournament like the Club World Cup). Those that are literally can't take the $30 or $40 million in their top end budgets and apply it to their full roster because of the league's budget rules.
In the case of Toronto, who carried the league's second-highest payroll according to last week's MLSPA salary dump, Insigne and Bernardeschi combined made $21.7 million of the club's $34.1 million total salary outlay.
That's 64%! Sixty-four percent of the league's second-highest payroll going to two players! Imagine if Toronto took that $34 million and, oh, I don't know, spread it out a little more. Don't you think a team like that might be able to play better soccer than the top-heavy mess that is the current version of TFC?
It's difficult to push back against the allegation that MLS only cares about marketing and doesn't care about the quality of its product when those numbers smack you in the face. That claim is reductive and misses a lot of the good the league has done to make the soccer better over the course of the last 30 years, but when stupidly expensive players like Insigne and Bernardeschi flame out without providing even a whiff of value, it's hard to deny the truth in the criticism.
There's a very good argument that MLS wouldn't be where it is now if it had flipped the buzz/quality paradigm at any point in the past. Guys like Lothar Matthäus probably didn't do much for the league's reach in the early years, but the arrival of Beckham fundamentally changed to the course of its history. Every subsequent famous player signing has been an exercise in chasing that particular dragon.
These days, it's not just about the fancy lads from fancy places. It's also about transfer fees and what pushing the MLS record higher appears to represent. Atlanta United has single-handedly driven this phenomenon, garnering plaudits for their ambition and lifting MLS in the process, and where has that gotten them?
Atlanta dropped $22 million on Emmanuel Latte Lath and sits in 14th place in the standings. The club has issues all over the park that might be fixed if it could point some of its ambitions at getting a higher caliber of players to line up beyond their record signing.
Should MLS move on from the giving big names big paydays to come to North America? Maybe. Giving up that habit..the habit of smelling one's farts...Sorry about this metaphor...can be hard to kick. I recall years ago being told that MLS convened a round-table of bloggers (I wasn't present) in an attempt to understand how to better connect with the news cycle online. With a number of very interested soccer-passionate types in the room, an MLS representative proceeded to explain how their goal was...to make Deadspin of often as possible (obviously this was many years ago-R.I.P. Deadspin).
That seems part-and-parcel of a mindset at MLS HQ about how best to grow the league, even to this day: Funnel money to players who can make headlines both in America and around the world. Doing the lower-level work, the kind of thing that might get missed by all but the most ardent of observer, is too hard or doesn't provide enough immediate return.
Getting worldwide attention is even more important (for the moment) with MLS treating the globe as a singular television market through its deal with Apple. I don't know if we can imagine a world in which MLS shifts its spending power away from marquee names as long as signups on Season Pass are partly a function of individual player name recognition.
The lie the league tells itself is that throwing gobs of cash at just a few players represents progress.
But of course there's also this: Plenty of owners, many of whom also want to see their club make the news breaking into the sports conversation in a sports-saturated country is damn near impossible, are much more likely to spend on an aging marquee talent and the guaranteed interest he'll generate than 10 guys no one has ever heard of who could actually win trophies as a better soccer-playing unit.
In other words, it's not as simple as "spend on this, not that". We can't account for whether owners like MLSE could be convinced to drop similar millions on total salary for a more well-rounded team as they do for a couple of talented, but problematic, Italians.
For now, though, let's just hope TFC has learned a lesson.
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And I also dropped some thoughts on this topic, in a much less refined form over on the Patreon page for The Best Soccer Show. A few bucks a month gets you access to my semi-daily videos and a great community of American soccer fans in our Slack. Consider signing up.
And if you want well-rounded soccer content three-time-a-week, please check out Morning Kickaround on YouTube. We're live at 9:30 AM on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and we've got a great back catalog of videos with discussion, interviews, and more. On Wednesday we talked about the worst signings in MLS history following the news of Insigne and Bernardeschi leaving Toronto. Cheers.