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ensco
04-18-2010, 08:20 PM
Shit. Can’t a guy enjoy a day off? Here I am, finally about to sit down for dinner with Jay Triano to discuss my idea for his upcoming induction into the Raptors Wall of Honour (for some reason, he doesn’t seem keen on it, I can’t figure out why) and my blackberry lights up like a Times Square billboard.

TFC got clobbered again, and everyone wants to know what I’m doing about it. Peddie, the Mayor, about 7 news and TV guys. It’s Sunday goddamn night, people! It’s weird. For some reason, the Raptors and Leafs can lose, and everyone just rolls over like fat seals, except for a couple of annoying journalists. (They’re easily handled by getting someone from Teachers to occasionally slip in complaints to the offending paper’s publisher over drinks at the RCYC. Always works best right after bemoaning cuts to next years ad plan. They usually shift the offending putz onto roller derby for a few weeks after that.) But these TFC freaks are obsessed. What is wrong with them? I went and stood at the gate Thursday, and smiled like a trained monkey. More than I’ve ever done for the big teams!

Christ. I’m going to have to get our minions in the IT and marketing departments on their laptops pronto to start countering the shitstorm that must be brewing on those goddamn soccer supporters boards asap. Those boards are going to be the death of me. Can’t let this fester. Need to keep up the drumbeat that only bad supporters or morons would dare criticize the team.

Need to keep buying time. The Board is getting antsy about how much Peddie and I have paid guys not to coach or manage over the last few years. Suddenly one of the Directors wants to know the terms of Mo’s contract. Need to tap dance around this one.

Can’t let it get out that the wily Scotsman got extended because Peddie and I got sloshed at that party last summer after he sold that guy with the funny name for a few million. We couldn’t believe it. All we’ve ever done is overpay for players, and here’s a guy we can barely understand selling one for real hard cash. We’d have given Mo anything that night. (It was only later when the guys at AEG explained that this sale was 100% done by the league, the we started to wonder what we'd been sold by this crazed bugger.)

I should have cut Mo when he brought that absolute nutter Carver in. I let that whole episode slide because Mo saved us a few bucks at the end, but I should have dealt with him then. Now he’s practically barking, talking to no one, emerging from his office only after long conferences with the security guys about making sure there are no “Fire Mo” signs at the games.

Gonna have to tie the can to Mo without getting the Board upset about the cost. But how? Who here knows anything about soccer? This new guy Mo brought in, the dead ringer for Michael Corleone, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

I am screwed.

:hump:

Stryker
04-18-2010, 08:25 PM
Gonna have to tie the can to Mo without getting the Board upset about the cost. But how? Who here knows anything about soccer? This new guy Mo brought in, the dead ringer for Michael Corleone, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

I am screwed.

:hump:
This. The only reason Mo still has a job.

DOMIN8R
04-18-2010, 08:26 PM
Fantastic. Keep it up, Euge.

Shakes McQueen
04-18-2010, 08:27 PM
This. The only reason Mo still has a job.

MLSE have an illustrious history of paying GM's and coaches to sit at home. My guess is Mo makes less than all of them.

- Scott

Whoop
04-18-2010, 08:29 PM
That's gold Jerry, gold!

http://anandvrao.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/bania2.jpg

LMAO....

Beach_Red
04-18-2010, 08:30 PM
ps. thought this was going to be the easiest of our teams to deal with - we sub-contracted it out to those agents, the league handles all the contracts, handed us our local hero from Houton, sold that guy with the funny name, all we have to do is sit back and rake in the profits. And that Scottish guy takes all the blame, everyone laughed at the press confrence when I said he was the one squirming.

Oh yeah, right, this is gonna work out fine for me, what was I thinking?

Parkdale
04-18-2010, 09:20 PM
you had to pick on RCYC didn't you? ;)

Cashcleaner
04-19-2010, 07:01 AM
ps. thought this was going to be the easiest of our teams to deal with - we sub-contracted it out to those agents, the league handles all the contracts, handed us our local hero from Houston, sold that guy with the funny name, all we have to do is sit back and rake in the profits. And that Scottish guy takes all the blame, everyone laughed at the press confrence when I said he was the one squirming.

Oh yeah, right, this is gonna work out fine for me, what was I thinking?

THIS!

Time and time again I keep getting the impression that MLSE was investing in a sports side-project when it came to Toronto FC. Even four years into the swing of things I don't believe the club is getting a fraction of the attention I think it deserves from it's owners. I think they had figured they'd slapped together a team, have a stadium bought for them, and just let things carry on while they rake in the cash. Only now it seems are they starting to fully realize that the fans of the club are far more committed than they could ever imagine. And that doesn't just mean we'll sit back and enjoy ourselves regardless of the level of play we're watching, but will rather demand the very best from our players, staff, and management.

Poor MLSE. They thought this was gonna be some get-rich-quick scheme devoid of any real hassles.

ecospice
04-19-2010, 07:37 AM
But some thoughts came to me overnight on how to fix the problem:

-raise the price of beer



What the hell?!?!?! DO NOT joke about raising the price of beer.

Terrace Greg
04-19-2010, 07:39 AM
THAT......was quality! I luaghed my ass off, then shed a tear because it was probabaly fairly close to the mark, more or less.

You have a Hunter S. Thompson-esque style of Gonzo style writing to you and I like it! Very entertaining. Will you also please write what Mo's journal version was like las t night? You know, the one he wrote while in his office, in between pounding scotch and blow wondering how he got the good fortune of finding a job in an organization where there is no accountability so he can pretty much fall ass backwards into job security? Good thing he's not in the private sector....there they expect "results" (insert sarcasm). lol

Good work!

menefreghista
04-19-2010, 08:39 AM
What the hell?!?!?! DO NOT joke about raising the price of beer.

They raise the price every year, including this one.

I'm not sure about the other sizes, but he large draft of Carlsberg has gone up $0.25 each season.


Oh yeah, right, this is gonna work out fine for me, what was I thinking?

Ya, is there any job in the world that's safer than MLSE executive? I will be shocked the day guys like Anselmi or Peddie finally fall on their swords.

Mo Johnston should have been fired after the 2008 Nutrilite debacle. We have been prolonging the misery ever since.

As for the incestuous way the organization is run, I'm scared to think about the future for this club.

Whoop
04-19-2010, 09:45 AM
THIS!

Time and time again I keep getting the impression that MLSE was investing in a sports side-project when it came to Toronto FC. Even four years into the swing of things I don't believe the club is getting a fraction of the attention I think it deserves from it's owners. I think they had figured they'd slapped together a team, have a stadium bought for them, and just let things carry on while they rake in the cash. Only now it seems are they starting to fully realize that the fans of the club are far more committed than they could ever imagine. And that doesn't just mean we'll sit back and enjoy ourselves regardless of the level of play we're watching, but will rather demand the very best from our players, staff, and management.

Poor MLSE. They thought this was gonna be some get-rich-quick scheme devoid of any real hassles.

You weren't the only one who has had that impression. LOL

Beach_Red
04-19-2010, 09:58 AM
As for the incestuous way the organization is run, I'm scared to think about the future for this club.


The future of the club is clear - the same future as their other teams; bumbling losers.

Maybe loveable losers. If we can keep a sense of humour and have some fun with it, it'll be okay. Lots of teams in the world are loveable losers and their fans embrace it.

Hey, it builds character ;).

ensco
04-19-2010, 10:20 PM
I am ready to kill someone.

I had today booked off to work on two things: first, the hokey marketing schemes for the Raptors and Leafs next year need to be developed (maybe something like "Character. Commitment. Cellar Bound."....neat thing is, we could use it for both teams, save on the printing costs) and second, the carpet scheme for the common areas in the new condos at the ACC. I'm thinking retro, maybe shag, get a "Leafs 70s night thing" going, we could licence the carpet if I get this right....

oh yeah where was I?

Of course I got nothing done. Screw me, we can't go 12 hours without another soccer eruption. Ali Gerba decided today that he had to unburden himself to the media. I had to spend my day with everyone at the Globe and the Star convincing them that this isn't worthy of a story. The thing I do not need is for Directors to start figuring out just how many guys we are paying not to work for us. If it's not in the print edition Globe or the Star, it didn't happen.

Why don't we have the usual nondisclosure agreement with this guy? How can we be paying this guy not to play and have this happen? As usual lately, I can't get a hold of Mo. Whatever Mo's doing with that blackberry of his, it's got nothing to do with getting players for this team anymore.

Tomorrow I need to sit down with Coach Corleone. He doesn't seem to care about any of this, but I can't have this anymore. People are going to start to think I can't run a soccer team.

Only problem is, Tanenbaum and I are spending the day looking at the plans for the restaurant in the mall annex they're doing at ACC. So I don't really know when I'm going to find the time to see the coach....

Whoop
04-19-2010, 10:22 PM
This thread is becoming legendary. LOL

Suds
04-19-2010, 10:32 PM
I'm just happy Tom take the time to post his musings here. :rolleyes:

Bombonera
04-20-2010, 01:28 PM
I think Tom should start drinking heavily...

fetajr
04-20-2010, 02:28 PM
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Content/Image/03-28-2008/Tom-Anselmi.jpg

MFG1
04-20-2010, 05:27 PM
THIS!

Time and time again I keep getting the impression that MLSE was investing in a sports side-project when it came to Toronto FC. Even four years into the swing of things I don't believe the club is getting a fraction of the attention I think it deserves from it's owners. I think they had figured they'd slapped together a team, have a stadium bought for them, and just let things carry on while they rake in the cash. Only now it seems are they starting to fully realize that the fans of the club are far more committed than they could ever imagine. And that doesn't just mean we'll sit back and enjoy ourselves regardless of the level of play we're watching, but will rather demand the very best from our players, staff, and management.

Poor MLSE. They thought this was gonna be some get-rich-quick scheme devoid of any real hassles.

QFT!

Whoop
04-20-2010, 09:51 PM
Love the Feschuk column today in the Star.

http://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/nba/raptors/bryancolangelo/article/797760--feschuk-colangelo-selling-raptors-fans-a-bill-of-goods



On Monday Colangelo called Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the pension-fund-owned controller of the local NHL, NBA and fifth-division pro soccer franchises, and this is an actual quotation, “one of the best organizations in all of sports.”

He went on: “I’m talking about hockey, basketball, soccer, real estate. Everything. Television. It is a company that will do everything in its power to answer the fans’ concerns, and that’s what we’re doing.”

To paraphrase Allen Iverson: You’re talkin’ ’bout real estate? How relieving to know that the local sporting monopolists are condo-selling geniuses. And how fitting. Some sporting GMs are described as visionary architects, and maybe Colangelo will become one someday. But on Monday, in a wide-ranging post-mortem on his team’s second straight losing season, Colangelo sounded less like a savvy builder of great rosters than a desperate seller of swampland. Four seasons into his sub-.500 tenure, it’s getting harder and harder to buy a word he says.




“The plan is to win basketball games at whatever cost,” Colangelo said at one point.

I am not making this up.

“At whatever cost,” are the words he used.

That, folks, isn’t a sales pitch: It’s just a lie. The defending NBA champion L.A. Lakers are spending some $25 million (all figures U.S.) more than the Raptors on salaries this season — you can argue their plan is to win basketball games at whatever cost.

Heck, the Cleveland Cavaliers are outspending the Raptors by millions upon millions in their quest to keep LeBron James in town, this while Colangelo and MLSE are only now talking about possibly spending to keep Bosh. This week brought news that the Cavs have been losing many millions in the process. And yes, you should always distrust claims of losses with a lockout looming. But you can’t deny that Cleveland’s majority owner, Dan Gilbert, believes victory can’t be achieved on a balance sheet. And you just can’t say the same thing about Toronto’s owner.

Toronto’s profiteers are paying Colangelo some $4 million a year to dance around the obviousness of this uneven playing field; to toss a mismatched mix into a locker room every October, to up-sell their merits to the ticket-buying public, and to appear positively shocked when the new guys don’t play well together. We all understand this.

And we understand, too, that Colangelo is angling for a contract extension. So certainly that explains his elegant sips of the corporate Kool-Aid. Still, credibility’s a precious thing, and Colangelo lost some Monday.

Ah, MLSE... what a wonderful thing.

ensco
04-20-2010, 09:58 PM
^There's something about the tone in that story....Someone else pointed out to me this morning that Feschuk may well be a regular reader of these boards.

ensco
04-22-2010, 06:14 PM
A bunch of us are getting together at Lobby tonight to watch the Spurs-Mavericks game. I wonder if Hedo will be there. Go Spurs!

Actually we don't really love the Spurs, it's more that we hate Mark Cuban. How did we not give that guy the Balsillie neck message when he applied to buy the Mavericks? Cuban actually said this the other day: "Some owners can't stand the pain of losing. Others can't stand the pain of losing money."

Gonna be a tough weekend. All kinds of bad optics out there. Phoenix may beat Detroit, they finished fourth overall and spent $15 million less on payroll than the Leafs did. Even worse, the MLS version of Cuban, Drew Carey, has his team in town, and Carey makes us look bad. Real bad.

Things just getting uglier in TFC land. Mo had the bad judgment to come out from his bunker and patronize the fans by telling them that the problem was with them. The guy is all balls and no judgment. I think his reason for speaking was really to send a message to Peddie and me: "Maybe Gansler quit, maybe Carver quit, but I'll never quit. You'll have to carry me out feet first." Great.

Looking forward to that drink or two tonight.

Beach_Red
04-22-2010, 07:25 PM
Well, I'm looking forward to hearing how Anselmi feels about Joey Saputo joining the league. He may be an owner who can't stand the pain of losing. Especially to you know who...

ensco
04-23-2010, 05:33 PM
Had a long chat with Tim Leiweke from AEG today. Leiweke gave me a long speech about how the only way they turned the Kings around, after years of failing, was by picking high in the draft for three or four years running. Thanks a lot Timmy.

Leiweke says he thinks Seattle are a great team. He and Anschutz are trying to figure out how to work the league rules so that Drew Carey et al can't keep building a dynasty out there. They'll probably want us to support some weird rule that nobody understands but is designed to wipe the smile off Carey's face. The Galaxy will be the dominant team on the west coast, or there will be no league, as far as Anschutz is concerned.

We might lose Sunday. Maybe badly. Plus it's going to rain, and there's a chance that the grass field gets torn up - it only went in a couple of weeks ago. Everyone tells me "it'll be fine", which I've learned around here translates as "duck the fireball".

So I decided to start going on the offensive on the TFC front because things may be Coyote-ugly by Monday. I've muzzled Mo. I gave an interview today where I repeated exactly what I said last fall, we need to make the playoffs blah blah blah, but added "I read the message boards".

Maybe that'll calm the savages down a bit. Gave em the old Bill Clinton "I'm one of you, I feel your pain" spiel. Gave the rest of the guys around here a laugh - I have an art collection, and I don't feel pain, I give pain.

I just need time before I can move on Mo. I'll do it when I've got the Board primed, and not a minute before. 5 games into the season is too early. Plus I've got to get to know Corleone better - I'll probably have to give him the keys, and something tells me he's nobody's interim baby.

ensco
04-26-2010, 07:57 AM
It was a nice weekend. Shame about the weather. I decided not to drive down to the wine tasting Sunday in Niagara, since the forecast wasn’t good. Just puttered around the house Sunday. Very relaxing.

Was expecting to deal with more TFC problems today, but, blissfully, it’s Peddie who gets the hand grenade today, after that ugly weekend story about the MLSE charity stuff.

I will be able to spend the day reviewing an issue with the tile supplier for the new atrium, and also need to thumb through a briefing binder on possible “sign and trade” options for Bosh. Colangelo and I are meeting on this tomorrow. Just pages and pages on the most complex cap stuff you’ve ever seen. What Colangelo hasn’t put together yet, is the “media” campaign. Here Bryan, let me help you: Bosh is too soft, chokes in big games, wears down as the season goes on, not worth max money, hey, we're better off without him! Colangelo is too nice a guy. Burke understands this stuff better. We’ll need a multi-prong strategy, with our friendliest reporters, on this.

Just watched the TFC game highlights (somebody's got to explain the offside rule, where is the blueline in that sport?). The most important thing is that the grass held up pretty well. We’ll have to wait until after the Montreal game before we know for sure. I was ready to go full Freddy Krueger on somebody today, if we had had a problem there, but it looks like maybe, just maybe, we’re OK.

I have an email here telling me Mo was down in the room after the game, pumping his fist, and red in the face like he did it all himself. But one thing I’ve learned is that few teams rarely really overcome a bad start, and the way to play it is to assume that a bad start doesn’t actually reverse itself. The win takes a little bit of the pressure off us, for maybe a couple of weeks. We had our lowest gate ever on Sunday, and the trend in attendance (or more specifically, actual fannies in the seats) is the one thing I’m actually monitoring closely. Thank god we don’t report those numbers, with TFC joining the slump, they’re now terrible for all three of our teams. People that buy seats and don’t come are telling you that your product stinks, and they won’t buy next year.

I’ve got one thing I’ve got to deal with right away. Mo left me a message on my cell last night, he wants to see me to talk “strategy” about the two games we’re playing on short rest this week. Which means, based on past experience, that he wants to “tell” me which game matters more to us. Which, since I told him his butt is on the line if we don't make the playoffs, is the league game, for Mo.

I know I told everyone that it’s all about the MLS playoffs this year, but being me, I get to say one thing, but mean something else. You know what I actually care more than anything else? Revenues, baby, revenues! (I miss the Swirsk. He was always good for a laugh.)

Which means I care more about the CCL than league games. The reward for CCL victory is better, perhaps far better, than that for making the MLS playoffs. You get one extra gate guaranteed for either, but you are capped at two home games max in the MLS playoffs, while you can get quite a few more games if you ever get deep into CCL, plus you could maybe drive some decent TV ratings against good Mexican teams in later CCL rounds.

So I’ll dance a bit with Mo today, but what this really is, for me, this is Coach Corleone’s chance to show that he can do business with me. He and I will have a private chat tomorrow. These will be my instructions: no matter what Mo says, or what he would do otherwise, Corleone must play to win against Montreal, and let the chips fall where they may in Salt Lake.

The Mavs look like they’re going right out. The Bulls will get only two gates after all (I was a bit worried there for a second, a Bulls run would make us look bad). The Canucks got through, which puts off the “what’s wrong with Canadian teams, especially the Leafs” stories for at least a couple of weeks. Feeling great!

Now where are those tile samples....

Oldtimer
04-26-2010, 08:07 AM
Just watched the TFC game highlights (somebody's got to explain the offside rule, where is the blueline in that sport?).

:lol: :lol:

Beach_Red
04-26-2010, 08:26 AM
I was hoping Tom would have read the Paul James article about how Vancouver has a bigger/better front office:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/toronto-fc-falling-behind-vancouver-whitecaps/article1545656/

Another area where Tom can pat himself on the back for saving the company some big bucks. Maybe he'll get a bonus.

Oh well, maybe the guy who brings the tile samples will mention it when he tries to sell Tom even more expensive tiles.

greatwhitenorf
04-26-2010, 11:19 AM
Actuality update: Anselmi spotted putting his body on the line walking through the beer garden area under the new stand in the north end, early in the game on Sunday. Just to prove to fans the shaky, rattly aluminum stands really are safe.

Looked nervous, moved quickly, avoided prolonged eye contact in case anyone recognized him and collared him for a griping session. But no bodyguards or visible side arms with him.

What courage.

ensco
04-26-2010, 11:01 PM
“Barkeep. Just another wee dram of whisky. “

Down she goes.

I have to think. Think, dammit man. There has to be a way out.

How much is Kristian Jack paying these guys to talk? They must be getting real money, in return for throwing their careers away. It can’t just be a mad desire to hurt me….can it?

Why didn’t I go down on the field when we moved Carver out? That was the plan. But I thought I could control the room from afar, without putting my neck on the line as coach. I left a cliquey team in the hands of a raw rookie coach. How could I not see how that would end?

Shite.

Why wouldn’t that goddamn fool Cummins play Dichio? Why was Cummins so in love with Barrett? That was when the trouble really started. Everyone in the room was grumbling about that. I couldn’t be the first manager in world history to bag two coaches in the same season. Jimmy couldn’t control the room, he were too close to me. So I brought Nicky in, to give the lads some direction. Made it clear to Cummins that Nicky goes in, and stays in.

Ooooh that is fine stuff. Down she goes.

Players started going to Anselmi: “Garcia is reporting back to Mo” “Garcia starts, but he’s our worst player”. Cummins was so stupid, he couldn’t see that it wasn’t a Canada vs US rift, it was an “Everyone hates Garcia. Maybe Barrett too” rift. And eff me if Garcia didn’t proceed to personally lose 5 games in a row for us.

Nicky, my son, ya failed me.

I could give a shit about Gerba talking. But Cummins, that’s different, that’s personal. Plus he’s too close to Carver. I can’t have that. The suits upstairs will try to stop me from suing both their asses, but they’ll have to fire me to stop me. I’ve seen worse, and come out on top. Cummins (and Carver, if he squawks tomorrow) have peed on the wrong rug.

(Sees man staring at him.) “Who are you looking at eh? Would you like me to put this bar stool leg through your eye? Bugger off. “

You people. I got you DeRo. I got you grass. You wanted de Guzman, I gave you de Guzman. You are all effing ingrates. You can all rot in hell.

Anselmi said some foolish things today, he must be nervous. He’s in the shit with me. They’d have to go rid of us both. The suits upstairs can’t even spell soccer ball, they’ll never do it. I just need to weather the storm. But first I have to deal with those two effing pommy ponces, who think they can run me down and get away with it.

Lucky Strike
04-27-2010, 08:18 AM
These are great, they're like "Schumi's Sekret Tagebuch".

ensco
04-28-2010, 09:38 AM
I should be able to get to that Bosh file today, finally. TFC is worth maybe 10% of the Leafs or Raptors, but seems to have 200% of the problems they do. Had to push Colangelo off after all hell broke loose Monday. Bosh situation has changed anyway. Miami went out like kittens, and Wade won’t stay unless the Heat do something big. Colangelo knows that Riley doesn’t think LeBron and Wade can play together (Bryan is solid on this kind of gossip, too bad his talent evaluation isn’t anywhere near so good). So that means Riley needs Bosh, the only decent post player available, to keep Wade, and Miami can offer max money. So we need to rework the Miami sign-and-trade scenarios…

The good news is, I know shit about soccer, but I do know something about pushing people’s buttons. This Carver thing was a real problem. Nobody cares what Cummins thinks, but “Bobby Robson’s protégé” (whoever the hell Bobby Robson was) apparently has the ability the get headlines here and in England, or so Mark Abbott in the league office says anyway, and that got everyone concerned. Because we don’t know exactly what Carver would actually say about Mo, but we do know exactly what he would say about MLS, which is that MLS is the biggest joke anyone has ever seen. (Somehow Carver just wasn’t able to flow with it when we had to sign that guy who looked like Bob Marley out of a beer league to be a starter.)

First I had to horse-collar Mo: his threat to sue Cummins turned out to be useful, but Mo was ready to re-enact the battle scenes from Braveheart on Cummins’ lawn, which would be unhelpful. Then we had to get to Carver. That nutter could say anything in front of a live microphone. Abbott in the league office swung into action: he let Carver’s agent know what the implications of him going on the air unscripted would be, and told the guy that he, Abbott, and the agent together would agree on and then provide Carver with a transcript, that Carver could read over the phone to the stenographer of Abbott’s choice. (All of which calmed Mo down, a bit. But he’ll never forget. I like that about Mo.)

And faster than you can say Robert’s Your Father’s Brother, that’s how it went down.

Part of me thinks Carver did this just to let Mo and I know that he could hurt us. A flash of steel, same as with that Dobson interview we had to pull down. But who knows what is in that guy’s head, really? Bringing him in is still the reason why Mo will ultimately have to go.

Huge Montreal game tonight. That last game was memorable, wave after wave coming at them like that. The stuff memories are made of.

But I think the Caps have just too much for them to handle.

ensco
05-03-2010, 08:50 PM
We are just being buffeted in stormy seas around here. It would actually suck, if it wasn’t for the fact that I make such an ungodly amount of money.

First, LeBron James told the media last week that he was glad Toronto didn’t make it into the playoffs, because he's glad his Cleveland Cavaliers faced the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs — because unlike the Raptors, the Bulls actually wanted to be there. That seriously stung.

Then last weekend, all three local papers finally began turning their guns on Brian Burke. I'm amazed it took this long - if the Leafs were TFC, everyone would have been all over Burke months ago. The proximate cause was the fact that Mike Cammaleri has scored 8 goals in the playoffs so far, and he is a local boy who told everyone he wanted to play here and, guess what, plays an awful lot like Phil Kessel. We could have had Cammaleri for the same money as Kessel, and kept the high draft picks.

Then Corleone decided to stick it in my eye. I told him last week that the priority of the two games was the Montreal game. So, having won the Montreal game, what does he do? He puts a lineup out on the field against Salt Lake that wouldn't beat a high school team. Just to let me know who is boss.

I have another call with Mark Abbott in the MLS league office tomorrow. Abbott and Garber are getting worried about us. The Gerba/Cummins/Carver circus made us look ridiculous, and we are just a terrible team. We may be in the top 3 in home attendance, but we are also right up there with Chivas as the absolute worst draw in MLS. I need to explain this to Larry Tanenbaum, who is always preening about our home attendance, again. Given the way the single entity works, road attendance is also pretty important to overall financial performance. Stunts like the one Corleone pulled don’t help.

Soon Bosh will leave, and the NHL draft will be upon us. In that draft, the Bruins, our divisional rival, who look like they are making a deep run with a young stud goalie that we gave them for less than nothing, will select a star with our high pick. People are getting seriously agitated around here.

If TFC doesn’t find a way to stay out of the news, Mo will have to go soon. The dogs must be fed.

THA BUTCHA
05-03-2010, 09:23 PM
gold my friend...

gold..

have you ever thought about a blog?

DOMIN8R
05-04-2010, 04:42 AM
Very entertaining. I like the way you weave all the MLSE team sub plot threads together into one comedic blog tapestry.

Oldtimer
05-04-2010, 05:42 AM
Keep 'em coming. It's very well written.

fetajr
05-04-2010, 10:04 AM
well done.. you have me hating MLSE now more than ever...and i didn't think that was possible.

ensco
05-06-2010, 11:20 AM
We have done a great job of executing the plan here. But the problem is that the plan has always been about stadium development and cost containment, rather than market development. So most of our teams lose money. Which means, despite everything we intended, it’s going to be a league of “haves” and “have nots”. Which means the owners are now at war with each other. Which means we have all the problems the single entity was supposed to avoid.

Our owners are split into four groups. We’ve got billionaires who see this as a plaything (Paul Allen), billionaires who see this as a small part of a broader set of sports and entertainment industry speculations (Anschutz and Kroenke), some real estate guys (Wolff) , and then a bunch of more miserly guys who see this as some sort of way of preserving capital (The Hunts and Kraft). Then there’s MLSE, the chameleons, who on any given day will profess their uncompromising commitment to the view of that owner which they’re on the phone with. That usually lasts 15 minutes until the next phone call with the next owner.

Our owners really can’t agree on anything except this: everyone cares a lot more about maximizing non-MLS and ancillary income in their shiny new stadiums, than they care about the league product or league attendance, because for non-league events, they get to keep it all. Everyone pursuing their own self-interest in this way, makes it a near certainty that the group screws itself as a whole.

The evidence of this is everywhere. Every team is madly scheduling friendlies that are certain to result in important players missing league games. Dallas moved a league game in 2008 for a rock concert, TFC did the same for a 2009 friendly. TFC plays their best XI in their domestic Cup game and plays the reserves in a league game 3 nights later. NE will not move out of their abysmal suburban NFL stadium into any of the 3 perfect, cozy soccer stadiums at universities in Boston proper. I could go on.

The quality of play in MLS is slowly improving, but isn’t good enough, and we can’t sell enough tickets to invest in a better product. The biggest thing we have to face up to is the fact that NCAA soccer is just not producing enough “good enough” players, that have a little flair, in the numbers we need. The cost of acquiring players that could change things vastly exceeds our revenue potential right now. The J League gets all the half-decent Brazilians because they can pay multiples of what we pay. We’ve tried to deal with this by building relationships with agencies like FWS, but frankly it’s not doing much for us. Realistically, FWS gets more out of us (guaranteed placement in MLS of some pretty marginal talent, access to our better domestic players who have some value in Europe) than we get from them (the odd player than can actually move the needle here). This is why we had to bring in the “three DP” rule, even though passing that was a brawl that exposed the huge factions that exist in our ownership.

Gotta go. Need to start keeping a closer eye on TFC. That episode with the ex-coaches last week was unbelievable. Then Mr Popularity, Preki, decided to “rest” his best players last weekend by sitting them for the first half. Funny that – back in the day, playing 45 minutes and then getting subbed off was called “resting”, but sitting the first 45 and then coming in was called “benching”.

That whole TFC situation needs watching, it may blow soon.

Hitcho
05-06-2010, 11:37 AM
THIS!

Time and time again I keep getting the impression that MLSE was investing in a sports side-project when it came to Toronto FC. Even four years into the swing of things I don't believe the club is getting a fraction of the attention I think it deserves from it's owners. I think they had figured they'd slapped together a team, have a stadium bought for them, and just let things carry on while they rake in the cash. Only now it seems are they starting to fully realize that the fans of the club are far more committed than they could ever imagine. And that doesn't just mean we'll sit back and enjoy ourselves regardless of the level of play we're watching, but will rather demand the very best from our players, staff, and management.

Poor MLSE. They thought this was gonna be some get-rich-quick scheme devoid of any real hassles.

But that's the thing, it's exactly that. Do we seriously think we;re a thorn in the side of MLSE and that they really care or worry about what we think? The bottom line is that 95% + of the SG's won't give up their season tickets in protest. We'll keep buying the tickets, keep going to games, keep supporting the team. Which means the atmosphere will still be there, and all the soccer moms and family groups will still come to games too, and scalpers wills till be able to sell tickets on.

So what kind of "hassle" do we actually represent to MLSE? We piss and moan and do nothing, and there's nothing we can do. Christ it took a few decades before Leaf attendance started to drop and only then did they start to think about things, and they make a LOT more money from the Leafs than they do from TFC.

The fact that we're so committed is actually a weak point - it means we won't walk away and take our wallets with us. And that makes us powerless.

menefreghista
05-06-2010, 11:43 AM
So what kind of "hassle" do we actually represent to MLSE? We piss and moan and do nothing, and there's nothing we can do. Christ it took a few decades before Leaf attendance started to drop and only then did they start to think about things, and they make a LOT more money from the Leafs than they do from TFC.

I was actually wondering how many people consider themselves active and passionate members of RPB, U-Sector or NEE? 300-500 at most? We are a drop in the bucket amongst the overall TFC fan base and game-day attendance.

Sure, we are bringing most of the atmosphere on game day, but we are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Hitcho
05-06-2010, 11:48 AM
I was actually wondering how many people consider themselves active and passionate members of RPB, U-Sector or NEE? 300-500 at most? We are a drop in the bucket amongst the overall TFC fan base and game-day attendance.

Sure, we are bringing most of the atmosphere on game day, but we are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Even if you accept that 500 is a big enough number to make a difference though, what could we really do? MLSE will take some steps to appease every now and again if we make a big enough stink, but it's still not akin to being a genuine problem for them.

Even if we all dropped our season tickets, the scalpers would buy them up, or parents looking for cheaper tickets to take the kids along and keep costs down, and MLSE wouldn't be hit that hard, at least not in the short term.

So I think Cash actually hit on a very good point - this is a hassle free walk in the park for them.

Anyway, thread hijack over, sorry ensco. Carry on with the diary entries! :D

Beach_Red
05-06-2010, 11:51 AM
The biggest thing we have to face up to is the fact that NCAA soccer is just not producing enough “good enough” players, that have a little flair, in the numbers we need... We’ve tried to deal with this by building relationships with agencies like FWS, but frankly it’s not doing much for us. Realistically, FWS gets more out of us (guaranteed placement in MLS of some pretty marginal talent, access to our better domestic players who have some value in Europe) than we get from them (the odd player than can actually move the needle here).


Another excellent entry. That flair is key. It really seems like soccer is a suburban middle-class sport in the US and produces some effecient players - it's like basketball when it was regional midwestern sport. Soccer could use a Bird-Magic rivalry.

And don't forget FWS also organize those friendlies that get league games moved around.

menefreghista
05-06-2010, 12:10 PM
Even if you accept that 500 is a big enough number to make a difference though, what could we really do? MLSE will take some steps to appease every now and again if we make a big enough stink, but it's still not akin to being a genuine problem for them.

Even if we all dropped our season tickets, the scalpers would buy them up, or parents looking for cheaper tickets to take the kids along and keep costs down, and MLSE wouldn't be hit that hard, at least not in the short term.

So I think Cash actually hit on a very good point - this is a hassle free walk in the park for them.

Anyway, thread hijack over, sorry ensco. Carry on with the diary entries! :D

I agree with you. I think we as fans have very little power.

I also think 500 may be pushing it. It may possibly be as low as 200 who would be willing to really pressure the club.

ensco
05-07-2010, 12:11 PM
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

When we first started thinking about Canada, we went to Toronto despite the fact that Montreal had a successful operation up and running. We did it because we weren’t really sure about how deep young Mr Saputo’s pockets (or those of his father) were, Toronto is the bigger market, and MLSE by contrast seemed to be the epitome of a deep-pocketed, successful sports management outfit. We got the market right, but were bamboozled by the MLSE suits. They are the worst managers of sports teams in North America, by a country mile. I think they’ve had one team in the playoffs in 5 years. In 3 sports! The odds against that kind of ineptitude are astounding. It has taught us a lesson. If Joey’s money is green, he’s welcome!

It’s funny how the timing worked, because we are growing Canada significantly at the very moment that TFC are backsliding badly. This is making me very uncomfortable. MLSE do not understand the product at all. TFC cannot attract, evaluate or keep talent. They spend foolishly on talent, but are incredible cheapskates on the management/scouting side. The turnover in players and coaches on that team has been ridiculous. Attendance is declining.

They’ve screwed it up in spite of the fact that we’ve really gotten involved to make them successful. We practically made Houston give them DeRo. I spent weeks trying to stop them from signing De Guzman – that guy hasn’t, and won’t ever, sell a single ticket to any game in this league. We gave TFC extra slots to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t get enough quality Canadians, so what happens? They build a team out of internationals that miss half their league games, and keep signing marginal older veteran Canadians, while the best young Canadians wind up in Houston, RSL and DC. I had to step in to prevent a second ex-manager of theirs from public disparaging MLS and thereby damaging our player recruitment efforts in England and Europe.

The most frustrating part is, MLSE seem to change their mind on what they’re trying to do with TFC every 15 minutes. Are they in the free spending group? Or the capital preservation group? Their fans have no idea, and neither do I. The only thing I do know is that they’re not doing the one thing they talked about endlessly at the beginning, and that’s building around young Canadians.

I’ll always have a soft spot for TFC, because they’re the ones who really enabled us to crank up the expansion fee gravy train, and helped create a new buzz around the league. But our biggest problem is that we can’t sell tickets in our mature markets, and there’s not much we can do for those teams/owners. If TFC slides into that group, so be it.

MLSE are in for a rude shock when Vancouver arrives next year, because I’m not going to keep wasting time trying to help someone that can’t be helped. I think Vancouver for sure, and maybe Montreal also, will actually pursue that “young Canadians” strategy, and based on the level of soccer professionalism we see from their groups so far, we’re going to help them do it.

ensco
05-11-2010, 07:57 PM
Guess who emerged from his cave last week? The Ped-meister! He surfaced in a Globe story about the fact that, gee, Colangelo may have have really, seriously, screwed the pooch here. Peddie had a clever “we may not be good, but we’re slow” comment for the stenographer. He admitted he’s thinking about replacing Bryan, then also admitted he had no idea who else could do the job.

“I look around and think, geez, who else would I want?”, Peddie said in the story. I dunno Richard, maybe somebody whose team doesn’t play soft down the stretch every year for four straight years? Sometimes I feel sorry for myself, but I’m glad that mess isn’t my problem.

We signed our deal on the TFC friendly yesterday. Soccer is strange. In what other sport do you have to play games where the owners pay appearance fees to teams nobody has heard of? As far as I’m concerned, why not just play some kids from Erin Mills in a scrimmage or something?

Anyway, there is a team named Bolton that plays somewhere in England that apparently we can pretend to our fans is a real interesting team worth watching. Paul B tells me it may even be the truth. (I’m worried about Paul. He says all kinds of strange things, like “I really think the Ivory Coast is interesting this year” and spends all day being a twit, or some such, on his cellphone.)

Another huge Montreal game tomorrow night. Montreal don’t have much talent but they have some grit. With all that has happened in the last two weeks, they will be really pumped up for the game. It’s the dawn of a great new rivalry.

Hard to bet against Crosby, though.

Auzzy
05-11-2010, 09:21 PM
Gold!

ensco
05-17-2010, 09:28 PM
Been keeping an eye on that story about the new stadium for the Pan Am games and the Tigercats in Hamilton. The audacity of those guys, asking for all that public money! Harrumph! (Quietly gumming up the works there any we can. We’d be glad to host those Pan Am soccer games in Toronto. Any decent basketball, hockey or soccer venue within 100 miles of downtown Toronto has to be opposed on principle. Same goes for anything that is good for the CFL, as it’s only a matter of time before they take another run at going into BMO.)

We’re all in a better mood now that the Celtics won game one yesterday. We were all sick to our stomachs when we suddenly realized that Vince Carter might be on his way to an NBA title this year. Things looking better now.

The NBA draft lottery is tomorrow night. We have a 2% chance of moving into the top 3 picks. All MLSE teams have the same game plan: spend enough in payroll so that you give your marketing department something to talk about in the pre-season, but miss the playoffs by this much, thereby ensuring both that MLSE get no playoff gates and the team never improves its competitive position by picking high in the draft. Of course Burke went off script by spending right to the cap, missing the playoffs, and trading the pick, which turned out to be ridiculously valuable this year, for once. It would have cost Burke his job, if we hadn’t just given him a $20 million contract.

Speaking of Saint Brian, he cracks me up. He spent all year in the halls at 40 Bay belittling Gainey for loading up on smurfs. Now he’s been retailing a story to the local stenographers that the Habs run is somehow proof that “it could have been us….if only we’d won some of those 22 one goal games we lost”. Burke is just gearing up, he will be in “full truculence mode” by the time the NHL draft rolls around. He knows that the best defense of the Kessel trade disaster will be a schoolyard punch in the nose to anyone that dares mention it. We can all learn a lot from the guy.

The atmosphere of daily crisis at TFC has abated, for the moment, as, contrary to what I was expecting, we've played better. Interesting thing going on with Corleone. Even though he's winning, he won’t talk to me, won’t talk to Mo, can barely stand the press, practically calls them idiots in the post-game scrums.

I guess when you grew up in Belgrade, professional sports in North America doesn't seem that...tough.

Corleone is the surliest SOB I’ve ever been around. You can’t do business with him. We can never give him a long term deal, but maybe he can get us some results. God knows I’m sick of the “nice guy” coaches, we’ve had a ton of them, from Lenny Wilkins to Paul Maurice to even Mo himself.

Mo is on me again about the second DP thing. Looks like an all out DP arms race may happen in the league in July, with at least 3 of 4 big name euro players coming over. I think I’ll chum him along a bit, but really, there’s no way I’m going to do it. If I did do it and TFC miss the playoffs, maybe the Board will fire me. If I don’t do it and TFC miss the playoffs, I’ll probably fire Mo. I like option two better.

Oldtimer
05-18-2010, 07:24 AM
If I did do it and TFC miss the playoffs, maybe the Board will fire me. If I don’t do it and TFC miss the playoffs, I’ll probably fire Mo. I like option two better.

:lol: :lol:

Bombonera
05-18-2010, 07:31 PM
Tom:

You have too much time on your hands, and have been watching way too much TV.

I suggest have another drink, and greenlight the DP. If all else fails, perhaps you can become an "expert" contributor to the post.

ensco
05-25-2010, 10:33 AM
The US Supreme Court ruled that the NFL don’t have any special antitrust immunity yesterday. This is terrible. It weakens our position that no existing NHL team can move into the GTA without our permission. Thank god that ruling didn’t come down when ownership of the Coyotes was still in the hands of the Arizona courts, or Balsillie might have won the day. But it’s coming. Somebody is going to move a weak NHL team from the US into our backyard, and I’m not sure we can stop that. Not that anyone here will ever admit it.

This issue may also be weirdly relevant to TFC someday, because of the way the PanAm soccer stadium thing keeps mutating. Now the talk is that the government will build a stadium in Oakville that both the Argos and Ticats may both move into. Have to think this one through. It’s not bad for us to have somewhere else to go from a negotiating point of view with the City, so that’s good, but Garber is always going on about “the majesty of derbies”, and what if one of the weak MLS teams suddenly decides to come into that nice new stadium? That’s bad. Need to huddle more with the lobbyists on this.

All quiet on the TFC front. One of the guys sent me a link of Dero, on one of the Argentina goals yesterday, getting undressed faster than a two dollar hooker in a back alley. Corleone and Mo will enjoy that. Corleone especially. He loves taking everybody down a peg, and it ought to take him about two minutes to laconically point out to Dero that “ehhhhh, you know, Dwayne, I scored the winning goal in a Gold Cup game against Brazil a few years back, you know, ehhhh, those South American guys, they aren’t so hard to play against, you know?”.

Great game coming Saturday night. Momentum is a huge thing in sports. Both teams have it. It’ll probably end in a tie.

I like the Hawks to win it in OT though.

ensco
05-31-2010, 09:22 PM
After ducking me for weeks, Michael Corleone finally agreed to have dinner with me (I know his name, but I can’t help it, the name he uses sounds like a shampoo to me, he’ll just always be Corleone to me. I think he understands.) Amazing what a win streak does for your willingness to sit with the bosses. Just got back. Holy Shit! Gotta write all this down while it’s still fresh in my mind.

We broke the ice by talking about Hedo, who unburdened himself to some Turkish stenographers last week. In no particular order, Hedo declared that he had been misused by the Raps coaches, personally hung out to dry by Colangelo, and demanded a release or trade. Corleone told me he would tell a guy like that to go home, stop paying him, make him sue you, and only then start negotiations. I told him, Michael, tell me something I don’t know, I saw what you did to Gerba already! So he did. While we demolished a couple of nice Super Tuscans, Corleone explained his philosophy of life to me. It goes something like this:

Contrary to what we suits learn at these Executive MBA boondoggles, never let anyone, ever, know where they stand. Keep them guessing. Keep them afraid. Otherwise they get complacent. “Tell me Tom, ehh, who makes better cars? Americans or Koreans? Tell me Tom, who is actually afraid of losing their job, you know? The guy in Detroit who’ll, you know, just go hunting and collect welfare, or, ehh, the Korean guy whose wife will slice his balls off if he gets laid off? Give me the Hyundai every time!”

As a corollary, you don’t need the best people. You can hire anyone, as long as you scare the shit out of them. “Tom, when I tell the reporters that hard work beats talent, ehhh, this is what I mean, you know? They all think, one bad pass, and he’ll kill me. This is how you get results, Tom”

Corleone breaks every management rule in the book. He is inconsistent and unpredictable on purpose. “One day, Tom, you tell a guy in practice he’s looking good lately. The very next day, you tell him he’s crap. Now Tom, you watch, that same guy, you know, watch how hard he works, trying to impress me.” Of course, that crazy idiot takes it even further. “Tom, I cut guys for no reason. Or sometimes, I almost cut them, you know, let them think they’ve survived, then when they’re relaxed, ehh, then I call them in and cut them.”

As Corleone was washing down the linguini with the last of the wine, he said to me, “Tom, it makes them crazy. But crazy people are more productive, you know. Ask any psychiatrist, he’ll tell you.” When I raised me eyes to this, he said, “All you guys, you think you should be nice, treat people with respect. Who tells you this? A bunch of professors, you know. Never anybody who has seen war, or built a company with his bare hands, or somebody who has led men.”

Even though I know he’ll eventually turn on me, you can’t help but be impressed. Corleone will have all of us, me, Mo, the lot, on a platter, or will die in the attempt.

Bombonera
05-31-2010, 10:04 PM
wow..The better TFC gets, the more thoughtful I am finding Anselmi to be.
I am growing very, very concerned for my own sanity...
Funny, no mention of the profit found in a potential Frei trade...

Oldtimer
06-01-2010, 07:17 AM
I'm still wondering what fake Anselmi is thinking of Mo these days... he's been quiet in that area.

Beach_Red
06-01-2010, 07:24 AM
"Corleone will have all of us, me, Mo, the lot, on a platter, or will die in the attempt."

It seems like fake Anselmi now thinks of Mo as more a part of MLSE than of TFC. Anelmi needs someone to talk to about soccer before board meetings and it doesn't sound like Preki has the time or the patience.

los sonadores
06-02-2010, 01:57 PM
ensco, it took me a while to get around to it, but i joined this board to congratulate you on this thread. great work.

of course if anselmi could write as well as fake anselmi, or had ever displayed this degree of intelligence, the thread might not have been needed in the first place. but hey, what a consolation it is.

ensco
06-06-2010, 04:03 PM
Enjoyed taking in the game yesterday afternoon. Nothing quite like the sunshine, a cold beer, the lake breeze, the general good vibrations that you feel in the stands when your team has been playing well. I don’t love it though, when those games end at 6pm like that, as it interfered with our plan to go to the theatre.

Still, it was a nice walk off win in the 14th inning.

Sat in the owners box, it was the first time I’d ever met the new Rogers honcho, Ted Rogers’ son. Even better, it was the first time I've met his wife. Holy smokes! Those TFC message boards that love posting the Sunshine Girls, if they ever got a look at her…

Been thinking about Corleone’s management 101 speech the other night. He’s right about how a bunch of lunatic professors run the world, it’s true that the MLSE Board loves these university studies. Someone circulated this the other day.: http://blogs.forbes.com/sportsmoney/2010/05/the-worst-managed-pro-sports-franchises-of-the-last-5-years/

Imagine if the dimwit who put this together had included not only player expense and team performance but also revenue base, as he should have. We would have finished dead last in the NHL and probably been a factor to finish in the bottom 3 in the NBA. If these coffee-house types ever got this analysis right, and managed to reflect our futility in MLS as well, it would give Peddie and I real problems with the Board.

As it is, the Peddler may be in real trouble given the Raptors mess, and what I’m hearing about how the Leafs renewals are going, isn’t good either. To deflect the anger about the Kessel trade, he’s been going on about how Burke “stole” Dion Phaneuf, but nobody’s buying what he’s selling. Ian White had better stats in fewer minutes than Phaneuf did, and a whole group here thinks we’ve tied our can to the biggest locker room cancer in sports.

All this turmoil elsewhere in the empire, and TFC’s recent success, have been a godsend for me. It allows me to lay the groundwork, over the summer months, for taking Mo out at yearend, if I want or need to. Not that I don’t like Mo – I do, and I respect him. But Mo may have become unnecessary to the soccer operation. Corleone won’t let him near the team, vetoes every player move Mo wants to make and dictates all moves that we do make. Consequently, Mo spends his days huddling with Brennan about…what? Best I can tell, developing plans for “MLS Cup Weekend” and the like. I can’t let my man-crush on Corleone get to me, but really, these days I forget that Mo is even in the building.

ensco
06-15-2010, 06:16 PM
Back when we hosted the MLS All Star Game in 2008, we organized an after-party. It was the usual, we charged $150 a head, just to soak the suckers for some extra cash. Delivered a few of the players. I was there. DeRo held court. First time I saw his local posse. They could fill the Ricoh.

Anyway, so we brought in some of the local hotties just to give the thing a little boost. And guess what happens? One of the girls becomes the West Ham goalie’s steady flame. She moves to England to live with him. He gets called up to the English national team. She breaks up with him right before the biggest game of his career, against the “Current and Former MLS Allstars”, otherwise known as the US National Team. The poor distraught guy goes on to commit the biggest goalkeeping blunder in World Cup history, thereby giving a huge boost to….us!

It’s fantastic. There’d been a general feeling in the MLS league office that MLSE/TFC haven’t done anything for the league. Until now, that is. Now Mark Abbott can’t stop sending joke emails about how beautiful Canadian women are. Little extra step in everybody’s stride here the last couple of days.

Been spending my time selling condos, and poking my head out of the Leafs bunker. We had a couple of nice events at the ACC yesterday and today. But I feel sorry for Phaneuf. Burke is feeding him to the lions. He isn’t that guy, he hasn’t been a captain ever, at any level. They’re going to kill him.

But I love Burkie because he understands the suits. He wanted to deflect attention from the Kessel trade fiasco, I have a bonus clause related to merchandise sales, and faster than you can say “Leaf fans are pathetic, epic suckers”, we named a captain and moved a lot of jerseys for $129. Who buys these things, anyway?

Saint Brian the Pugnacious is now furiously working the phones to TSN and Sportsnet, so that there’s no confusion. Here’s the deal: anyone who doesn’t keep their voice down about the Kessel trade during the upcoming draft hoopla, the menu for next year have a substitution: no scoop for you, here’s a knuckle sandwich instead. Same rules apply for any honest assessment of the investment of $44 million in Komisarek, Beauchemin and Grabovski.

Speaking of feeding someone to the lions, right on cue, Corleone has done it to Sam Cronin. He cut the deal walking off the field in San Jose in late May, guys tell me that he just handed Cronin’s contract to the San Jose trainer. That way he didn’t need to talk to Mo about it. Well, the league came back and said, you can’t do it that way, so now there’s a bag of balls coming back this way. I think Corleone just wanted everyone’s attention while they were off for the World Cup break.

Mo loved Sam. Seems like a long time ago that Mo was going on about how he would be worth $5 million, just like Edu. I miss those days. Mo was more fun than Corleone.

H Bomb
06-15-2010, 06:28 PM
So its MLSE's fault England tied the USA. I knew it. You Bastards!!!!!!!!!!

ensco
07-01-2010, 10:57 PM
TFC bumping along tying games. Fine by me. The offices have been deserted for weeks as everyone from Mo on down is “scouting” the World Cup games. Scouting the girls at the Brazen Head, is more like it. Mo lost a bet with the Pedmeister when Buddle got into game action for the USA – Mo had sworn he would never see the field, but Peddie had better information (he talks to Tim Leiweke). Mo can never move on – he is still trying to prove how smart he was in dumping Buddle in favour of the great….Collin Samuel.

Both Mo and Corleone have been sending me stories about all the dissension in the various World Cup locker rooms, as if to say, “See? It happens everywhere….players these days”. Yeah right. Not every team on earth has every single ex employee running to the papers to complain. Cronin waited exactly one day to tell the San Jose paper how he didn’t he care if he was traded for a bag of balls, he was just glad to be out of Toronto. Both Mo and Corleone are psychopaths. Locker room cauldron still bubbling along there, who knows when it boils over next?

It’s a fantastic stroke of luck that I haven’t had to deal with that mess yet. Two months ago, that would have made me look bad. Now my game plan is set. Keep expectations tamped down – no second DP. If TFC tanks in the second half, Mo goes. If it’s bad enough, Corleone too. At all costs, stay out of the spotlight, let the conflagration across the hallway take center stage.

The Board is focused on the ongoing disasters that are the Leafs and Raptors. That’s Peddie’s main turf, and he owns the hirings of both Cufflinks Colangelo and Saint Bryan. Right now, all three are getting North Korean torpedo-sized holes blown in their already-sinking–ship reputations .

The Bosh thing is killing us. Cufflinks and Peddie and the Board months ago, calm down, we’ll be able to dump some salary and/or get a name player back as part of a sign-and-trade for Bosh. But if Bosh does go to Miami or Chicago, as we all believe is going to be the case, there’s very little we can do. Cufflinks looks like he miscalculated - Bosh values picking his team more than making max money. On July 8, Cufflinks will in all likelihood be standing on a street corner holding Herman. With the Pedmeister standing right there, shoulder to shoulder.

As for the Leafs, it’s even worse: Burke is screwing the pooch, in plain sight of all.

We asked Saint Brian to do something to help us move luxury boxes, and show the suits at CBC and TSN that we care about their ad sales problems with our pathetic product. We had about $10 million in cap room and we’re thinking, do something like signing Kovalchuk or trading for Lecavalier. So what does Burke do? He spends the majority of the cap room on….. drumroll please….depth guys that only hardcore fantasy wonks have heard of. Thanks Brian. That’s really helpful.

Burke cannot manage the cap. He spent $44 million on Komisarek, Beauchemin and Grabovski last year, and they’re all busts. Now he brings in Colby Armstrong for $9 million over 3 years, Colby’s got an edge but he’s at best a third liner on a decent team. And the Versteeg trade… holy shit, what is going on? If the Leafs top 6 forwards are Bozak, Kadri, Kessel, Grabovski, Versteeg and maybe Kulemin, they’ll make the Habs forwards look like giants.

Does Burke even understand how the system works? The Versteeg trade is the Kessel mistake all over again. Sure these guys are younger, but so what, in the age of free agency at 25. Burke is giving up real assets via trade to bring in guys that he should be acquiring via the free agency route. Floaters who score 20 -25 goals are a dime a dozen in the free agency market – Tanguay, Whitney, Jokinen are examples this year. Aside from the Phaneuf deal, and even that one I didn’t love personally, everything Burke is doing is making people gasp around here. Burke won’t be able to pull this shit for much longer – people in this building actually understand hockey.

Things are going to get very interesting, maybe soon, around here. I will use the summer months to sip cocktails with key Directors, who knows, they may have to make a battlefield promote one of these days….

Carts
07-01-2010, 11:13 PM
Fail...

AL-MO
07-02-2010, 05:29 PM
Fail...


????

DOMIN8R
07-03-2010, 07:55 AM
Still a fan. Keep'em coming, Ensco.

ensco
08-30-2010, 07:12 AM
Well, Mo came to talk to me last night. It’s over.

Cost cutting by the league means that there’s no more access to the owners party the night before the MLS Cup for anybody but Peddie or Tanenbaum. The fact that it’s here in Toronto just makes it harder to take. The broads and booze flow at that thing as if Caligula were still emperor. Mo’s fit to kill someone over this.

Mo and Corleone have left me with a bigger problem with that stupid game. Why oh why didn’t we let NY take it? The plan was to force the seasons ticket holders to buy those tickets (at an outrageous price of course) as part of a playoff and next-year-renewal package. If TFC are out of the playoff chase, how the hell do we do that? Those guys owe me for that, it’s coming out of their bonuses (or severance).

By the looks of things, that MLS Cup party’s pretty much the only fun anyone in these parts will have over the next few months. Burke signs 4th line journeyman after 4th line journeyman. Cufflinks not only fails to land a single meaningful asset for Bosh, he spends the summer public dangling (and of course alienating) one of his last remaining assets, Jose Calderon, to the point where he actually has to fly to Madrid to beg the guy to actually try when he shows up for training camp this year.

Through it all, Peddie is hiding under a rock somewhere, trying to pretend that the massive dropoff in next year's TV ad revenue rates, and luxury box renewals, for both the Leafs and Raptors, has nothing to do with him.

But for me, slowly but surely, this has become the Year of Tom. When TSN walked away from the Raptors, who negotiated the new deal with Rogers? Who decided to put the wood to BMO to renew the TFC jersey deal a year before the original deal expired, at a huge uptick to the $2.7 mil per year that BMO were originally paying, right in the middle of the World Cup, and at the very moment when Canadian bank stocks hit their all time high? Who opened this summer the single best condo project the city has ever seen, 100% sold out? Who is increasingly the public face of MLSE to every outlet in town?

Tom “CEO-in-Waiting” Anselmi, that’s who.

Aside from the MLS Cup ticket headache, the TFC chips have fallen almost perfectly for me. Back in April when it was a complete circus and you had multiple former players and coaches running to the press to bitch, I was really concerned that the Board might see me as part of the problem. But the team quieted down and stayed competitive and out of the headlines, for just long enough so that now, I’ve got a winning hand either way. If these guys somehow get into the playoffs, great. If they go down the tubes, I’ll be the one guy in this town who actually takes decisive action, I’ll just vaporize Mo and Corleone, and move on. (Not sure what I’ll do if they get through Concacaf, I’ll have to think about that, ie ask Tim Leiweke what he would do).

Both Mo and Corleone know they’re in trouble. The finger pointing over the Spaniard who looks like a homeless guy has been intense, each is blaming the other because we’re paying him (a guy who can’t get a job in Europe as a ballboy) $1 million for 15 games, and Homeless Guy’s done almost nothing so far (except help us beat a Mexican team named after a health insurance scheme or something). Corleone’s been especially amusing lately – I was ribbing him because I saw a picture of him in a goofy Kiwanis club jacket thing that he wore when they inducted him into something or other recently. Corleone in a tie is not himself. Anyway, he couldn’t wait to segue into telling me how impressed he’d been with Omar Gonzalez in his USA debut against Brazil (which was the same night), “you know, Tom, it’s such a shame because we could have had him instead of that Cronin”.

Oh yeah. One last thing. Forgot to mention another highlight of the summer. Hosted the Canucks President in Muskoka, and we commiserated about how deep we all dredge in the schmaltz cesspool, in order to pander to the segment that love that goop. I told them about what we’d done with Brennan and Dichio, and before you know it, the Canucks announce the inauguration of their “Ring of Honor” with their own epic expansion hero, the great Orland Kurtenbach, being the first one in. Laughed so hard when I read that I had coffee running out of my nose for 15 minutes. P.T. Barnum was right.

Cristiano14
08-30-2010, 08:32 PM
HAHAHAHA these are amazing
please keep them coming

ensco
09-14-2010, 07:17 PM
It had been a good couple of weeks. I dealt with some important matters. Like choosing the finishes in the lobby of the condos. Like this.
http://mapleleafs.nhl.com/club/news.htm?id=536854.

So it’s no wonder I wasn’t ready to deal with the TFC conflagration that blew up again in the last week. It started when Corleone sent Daso to Vancouver for a holiday (I swear to God, I hadn’t heard of anyone doing this since Stalin sent Politburo members to “take the cure” on the Black Sea in the 1950s, before having them executed). The rest played out like a 1970s Leaf line brawl: Mo wanted to fire Corleone, Corleone wanted me to fire Mo, the players wouldn’t play for anybody, and loonies on those damn message boards were ready to go up in bell towers with rifles.

So I asked my self two questions:

1 – what would Tim Leiweke do? (I asked him, he told me to fire everybody and put in as GM anybody, a pet parakeet or something if I had to, it doesn’t matter, it’s a placeholder)

2 – what would Harold Ballard do? (He would have the guy that Corleone sent out to pasture return with a bag over his head at the press conference)

Peddie nixed the bag, but other than that, that’s what I did and how I did it. It's fun to roll with "that feeling in your gut"

But really, that “feeling in my gut” that I talked about to the stenographers today, that’s the feeling you get when millions of dollars are walking out the door, because we’ve got a looming MLS Cup/season ticket renewal disaster on our hands. I hope this somehow gets better soon. Even I know that this was a terrible day for everyone involved in TFC.

It’ll be nice when I can get back to the condos in a couple of days.

Beach_Red
09-14-2010, 07:35 PM
Mo is on me again about the second DP thing. Looks like an all out DP arms race may happen in the league in July, with at least 3 of 4 big name euro players coming over. I think I’ll chum him along a bit, but really, there’s no way I’m going to do it. If I did do it and TFC miss the playoffs, maybe the Board will fire me. If I don’t do it and TFC miss the playoffs, I’ll probably fire Mo. I like option two better.




I just want to say... wow. The only thing you missed was the "half" DP of Mista, but who could have seen that coming?

Well done.

ensco
09-14-2010, 07:49 PM
I just want to say... wow. The only thing you missed was the "half" DP of Mista, but who could have seen that coming?

Well done.

Very kind. Thank you.

Oldtimer
09-14-2010, 08:25 PM
I was happy to see that you posted an update. A perfect end to a perfect day.

greatwhitenorf
09-15-2010, 09:56 PM
Here's a link to a scene where Dwayne De Rosario demands accountability from our boy Tom. Dwayne's pet name for Tom is Nick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKX32WqDNDU

ensco
09-16-2010, 11:01 AM
September 15, 2010





MLSE Board of Directors Meeting



The meeting of the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. Board of Directors was held at 40 Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario on September 15, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EST. Larry Tanenbaum, Board Chair, presided and called the meeting to order.

The following members were present, representing a quorum:
Larry Tanenbaum – Kilmer Sports (non-executive chairman of the board)
Richard Peddie – President and CEO
Robert Bertram – Senior Advisor, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Glen Silvestri – Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Ashvin Malkani – Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (observer only)
Robert MacLellan – TD Capital
Dale Lastman – Goodmans LLP

Action Items

A.1 Review and Approval of Agenda
The draft Agenda was approved as submitted.

A.2 Review and Approval of the Minutes
On a motion duly made, the Board approved the draft Minutes of the May 11, 2010 Board Meeting.

A.3 Management Update

Management provided an update on season ticket sales and luxury box rentals for the upcoming Leafs and Raptors seasons, which are expected to decline significantly again. The CEO cited the economy, sunspots, bad luck, and the generally improved quality of movies released this year, and some fun new restaurants, as reasons for the decline.

A General Board discussion followed. Several directors would like access to boxes that might otherwise be sitting empty this year.

The CEO then provided a summary of the efforts of the Corporation with respect to its interactions with the public sector over the preceding 12 months. These included (but are not limited to):

- lobbying efforts to preserve the deduction for unlimited corporate entertaining deductions (there are MPs in all parties who would like to cap this deduction, which would have enormous negative consequences for the Corporation)
- a summary of expenditures to improve public sports facilities in the City of Toronto. This expenditure, totally approximately $1 million/year, which compares favourably with the tens of millions MLSE didn’t have to spend as a result of government involvement in building BMO Field
- lobbying efforts to prevent the expenditure of federal or provincial funds in the building of a new CFL stadium for the Tiger Cats in either Oakville or Oshawa
- A discussion of the new Team Up Foundation activities, which are complimentary to all of the above goals, and have the additional benefit of reducing MLSE corporate overhead
- A public relations campaign designed to encourage the public perception of MLSE’s munificence in building and rebuilding public parks

Finally a detailed occupancy forecast for Maple Leaf Square was submitted.

There were no questions asked that related to the on-field activities of any MLSE teams, as nothing has occurred that requires discussion recently, it being the offseason for both the basketball and hockey teams.

The Board accepted the reports.
.
The following resolution was approved:

Be it resolved that while it says on our website that “winning is everything in sports and it is what we believe in”, it’s no big deal if every last one of our teams finishes last, so long as we get access to insider parties and owners box seats.


A.4 Director Only Discussion

There was considerable discussion of the performance of the CEO. The Board remains impressed by the combined abilities of the CEO and Chairman with respect to managing relationships in the public sector which critically underpin the business model. Given that principal responsibility for the major assets of the corporation now contractually reside with the Presidents of the Leafs and Raptors, respectively, it was decided that there was no basis on which to take a decision with respect to the CEO’s performance in these areas, now or ever.

The COO has performed well in his role as principal developer of the Maple Leaf Square project. It was suggested that the COO continue to get exposure to the sports management business, in which he has no background, by continuing his education and development via continued involvement in non-material assets such as the soccer team, and perhaps by getting further involved in the Leafs and Raptors over time.

A.5 Termination of Meeting

There being no further business, the Board approved adjournment of the meeting.

Oldtimer
09-16-2010, 11:24 AM
The COO has performed well in his role as principal developer of the Maple Leaf Square project. It was suggested that the COO continue to get exposure to the sports management business, in which he has no background, by continuing his education and development via continued involvement in non-material assets such as the soccer team, and perhaps by getting furthered involved in the Leafs and Raptors over time.

ah hahaha

Truer words have not been written.

spark
09-16-2010, 12:09 PM
I can't believe someone actually posted 'fail' in this thread.

This shit's gold. Can't wait to see Tom's diary when he starts interviewing GM candidates and coaches!

gtaguy
09-16-2010, 05:28 PM
gold ensco pure gold.. keep them coming..

ensco
09-21-2010, 09:41 AM
The Teachers and TD have to live with Larry, but they have always loved the Pedster.

Back when they first got involved with Stavro in the early 90s, the business was just the Leafs and an ancient arena (that was and is essentially worthless, because you could never develop the site given the heritage designation). Today, MLSE is a multi-sport, multi-facility powerhouse enterprise that is probably worth 4 or 5 times what it was worth back then. So the Board members have always treated Richard like he walks on water. (The fact that an orangutan could have put the same amount of money into media stocks back then and achieved a higher return seems not to have crossed anyone’s mind, seeing as doing so would call into question the existence of the guys at Teachers and TD who back this investment.)

But Richard ‘s balloon is losing air. It’s obvious. He’s getting killed in the papers. You can’t preside over an empire like this and have this kind of a record of failure not matter. Here’s the record of how many home playoff gates the other North American basketball and hockey conglomerates have had since 2004:

· Kroenke’s Nuggets and Avs have had 32 combined.
· Cablevision’s Rangers and Knicks have had 11 (it’s all Rangers, the Knicks have zero, thank god for them, without them we’d have unquestionably the worst team in both basketball and hockey)
· Comcast’s Flyers and 76ers have had 31
· The Atlanta Spirit group, the one that has been constantly in the courts brawling, it owns the Thrashers and Hawks and they have played 17
· Average is 23 home playoff gates

The Leafs and Raptors (and TFC for that matter) combined have played 5 home playoff games in 6 years. Two Raptors first round exits. That’s it. It’s pathetic. The LA Clippers alone have played six, for Christ’s sake.

We used to make about $3 million a playoff game (half in tickets etc, half in TV). So those 18 games we didn’t play because we weren’t even average cost us $50+ million. Plus we pointlessly spent right to the cap every year for both teams – that cost an extra $5 million per team per year easy.

So one could argue that MLSE would have made $100 million more over the last six years, just by being mediocre. Someone is going to have to pay one of these days. It's in the air. Change is coming.

That’s why I’m making my move. It starts now with the TFC pricing. Time to roll the bones. Everyone told me not to jam the MLS Cup game in there, but I need that MLS Cup game sold out. All the Directors will be there. I have to have that.

When the Board thinks of Tom Anselmi, I want them to think, there’s an aggressive guy who doesn’t leave anything on the table. In contrast to the current CEO.

The Globe jumped ugly with me this morning about TFC prices but the stenographers who wrote the piece didn’t really understand how we do what we do. Nobody cares what prices are somewhere else, or what the product on the field costs. It’s what the market will bear that matters, period. We don’t have a cratered financial sector like they do in the US or UK, and if you’re a corporate buyer that’s finding the Leafs or Raptors expensive (who doesn’t?), you can trade down to TFC.

It’s a measured gamble. We’re not really sure what the renewal rate or the true depth in the waiting list is, but if we get it wrong and need to, we’ll come back and fix it in the winter, either with the hoopla that I will engineer around the new GM/coach signing, or by signing a DP, or even by dropping prices a bit,.

Bombonera
09-21-2010, 08:15 PM
I say every single ticket holder should boycott the MLS CUP. THat means we don't go, and we don't sell the tickets (Even if there is someone stupid enough (unless you are in a box...) to buy it).

Bocotting the MLS cup would be epic. Think about it...

How would you like that Anselmi?

jloome
09-21-2010, 09:02 PM
The Teachers and TD have to live with Larry, but they have always loved the Pedster.

Back when they first got involved with Stavro in the early 90s, the business was just the Leafs and an ancient arena (that was and is essentially worthless, because you could never develop the site given the heritage designation). Today, MLSE is a multi-sport, multi-facility powerhouse enterprise that is probably worth 4 or 5 times what it was worth back then. So the Board members have always treated Richard like he walks on water. (The fact that an orangutan could have put the same amount of money into media stocks back then and achieved a higher return seems not to have crossed anyone’s mind, seeing as doing so would call into question the existence of the guys at Teachers and TD who back this investment.)

But Richard ‘s balloon is losing air. It’s obvious. He’s getting killed in the papers. You can’t preside over an empire like this and have this kind of a record of failure not matter. Here’s the record of how many home playoff gates the other North American basketball and hockey conglomerates have had since 2004:

· Kroenke’s Nuggets and Avs have had 32 combined.
· Cablevision’s Rangers and Knicks have had 11 (it’s all Rangers, the Knicks have zero, thank god for them, without them we’d have unquestionably the worst team in both basketball and hockey)
· Comcast’s Flyers and 76ers have had 31
· The Atlanta Spirit group, the one that has been constantly in the courts brawling, it owns the Thrashers and Hawks and they have played 17
· Average is 23 home playoff gates

The Leafs and Raptors (and TFC for that matter) combined have played 5 home playoff games in 6 years. Two Raptors first round exits. That’s it. It’s pathetic. The LA Clippers alone have played six, for Christ’s sake.

We used to make about $3 million a playoff game (half in tickets etc, half in TV). So those 18 games we didn’t play because we weren’t even average cost us $50+ million. Plus we pointlessly spent right to the cap every year for both teams – that cost an extra $5 million per team per year easy.

So one could argue that MLSE would have made $100 million more over the last six years, just by being mediocre. Someone is going to have to pay one of these days. It's in the air. Change is coming.

That’s why I’m making my move. It starts now with the TFC pricing. Time to roll the bones. Everyone told me not to jam the MLS Cup game in there, but I need that MLS Cup game sold out. All the Directors will be there. I have to have that.

When the Board thinks of Tom Anselmi, I want them to think, there’s an aggressive guy who doesn’t leave anything on the table. In contrast to the current CEO.

The Globe jumped ugly with me this morning about TFC prices but the stenographers who wrote the piece didn’t really understand how we do what we do. Nobody cares what prices are somewhere else, or what the product on the field costs. It’s what the market will bear that matters, period. We don’t have a cratered financial sector like they do in the US or UK, and if you’re a corporate buyer that’s finding the Leafs or Raptors expensive (who doesn’t?), you can trade down to TFC.

It’s a measured gamble. We’re not really sure what the renewal rate or the true depth in the waiting list is, but if we get it wrong and need to, we’ll come back and fix it in the winter, either with the hoopla that I will engineer around the new GM/coach signing, or by signing a DP, or even by dropping prices a bit,.

Good Lord, Eugene, this is so bloodlessly true I`m not even sure if it`s funny. Actually, no, it`s funny. In a sick way.

Seriously, dude.

Southsider
09-21-2010, 09:18 PM
This is still one of the greatest threads on the site. But now there is competition on twitter from @tomanselmi, anybody else know about who's doing that one?

maximo_rpd
09-23-2010, 09:43 PM
:poke:

Please ensco - shine the light into that dark and empty head and tell us how he came to the conclusion that the best way forward was to shit on all of the Season ticket holders? I am dying to know what happened - did he mix up which team fans he meant to screw with? ( Raptors fans deserve to be worked over, but the supporters of the boys...???) Did he misplace his medication? Is he secretly hiding the fact he has been diagnosed with dementia? Is he being blackmailed by Columbus management because of those tape recording of those "meetings" he held with young "interns" at the Columbus Motel 6?

Please fill us in with the next installment please - we will never figure out this ticket renewal fuck-up without some accurate insight from you!!

:poke:

Chevy
09-23-2010, 10:39 PM
"The Leafs and Raptors (and TFC for that matter) combined have played 5 home playoff games in 6 years. Two Raptors first round exits. That’s it. It’s pathetic. The LA Clippers alone have played six, for Christ’s sake."

Wow.

ensco
09-29-2010, 07:54 AM
I know why Mo always talked like he was in a foxhole or something. Now that he's gone and I'm on the front lines, every day around here does seem like the opening 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Dero had a handshake deal to renegotiate with Mo, so once we tossed Mo, he decided to take his case to the world. It's a shame, I would have enjoyed discussing with Corleone what to do with Dwayne! Oh well. I decided to punt - I'm guessing any new GM will demand the power to deal with Dero (and JDG) any way he sees fit, so I can let someone else be the bad guy in due course.

The TFC renewals are not going well. Can't tell yet how serious it is, but I'm working hard on Plan B, which is to start leaking stories to stenographers about some big name players and managers we're looking at. Those should be ready to go soon.

Meantime, we're riding it out. Paul had to go and say he was the "voice of the supporters" to the "committee" the determined the price increase. News flash: I'm the committee. Felt bad for Paul, he is the voice of the supporters, but who cares? TFC is the gnat on the butt of the MLSE elephant, and we need to push this thing if it's ever going to be meaningful to the shareholders. That means higher prices, expanding the stadium, and everything that goes with that. For 20 years people have been telling us we can't push the market any further, and for 20 years we've proven them wrong.

People are strange. Massive, inappropriate, unfair personal attacks directed at myself and/or Paul B popping up all over the internet. Yeah, that's really going to make us more likely to care about the diehards. Hey morons: if we were to magically disappear (don't hold your breath waiting for it!), the board would just bring in new faces just like ours. It's a screwed up world with screwed up priorities, the problem is way bigger than MLSE, and all you diehards out there, you're part of the problem too. Mo catered to those boards, look where it got us.

Some day sports will go back to being a hobby, but until then, kids, the grownups are in charge.

Jarrek
09-29-2010, 11:32 PM
Humorous Read ...

jloome
09-30-2010, 12:15 AM
I know why Mo always talked like he was in a foxhole or something. Now that he's gone and I'm on the front lines, every day around here does seem like the opening 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Dero had a handshake deal to renegotiate with Mo, so once we tossed Mo, he decided to take his case to the world. It's a shame, I would have enjoyed discussing with Corleone what to do with Dwayne! Oh well. I decided to punt - I'm guessing any new GM will demand the power to deal with Dero (and JDG) any way he sees fit, so I can let someone else be the bad guy in due course.

The TFC renewals are not going well. Can't tell yet how serious it is, but I'm working hard on Plan B, which is to start leaking stories to stenographers about some big name players and managers we're looking at. Those should be ready to go soon.

Meantime, we're riding it out. Paul had to go and say he was the "voice of the supporters" to the "committee" the determined the price increase. News flash: I'm the committee. Felt bad for Paul, he is the voice of the supporters, but who cares? TFC is the gnat on the butt of the MLSE elephant, and we need to push this thing if it's ever going to be meaningful to the shareholders. That means higher prices, expanding the stadium, and everything that goes with that. For 20 years people have been telling us we can't push the market any further, and for 20 years we've proven them wrong.

People are strange. Massive, inappropriate, unfair personal attacks directed at myself and/or Paul B popping up all over the internet. Yeah, that's really going to make us more likely to care about the diehards. Hey morons: if we were to magically disappear (don't hold your breath waiting for it!), the board would just bring in new faces just like ours. It's a screwed up world with screwed up priorities, the problem is way bigger than MLSE, and all you diehards out there, you're part of the problem too. Mo catered to those boards, look where it got us.

Some day sports will go back to being a hobby, but until then, kids, the grownups are in charge.

Anyone else ever want to buy one of those unmanned , deserted atolls in the Pacific, the ones charitably described as "still home to a considerable body of unexploded Second World War surplus munitions"?

If I could get good satellite and potable water there, I swear.....

Oldtimer
09-30-2010, 08:22 AM
Well done, yet again!

ensco
10-02-2010, 11:38 AM
The Globe decided to do a big 3 part feature on MLSE as part of their relaunch. Too bad they didn’t think about hiring some real journalists while they were at it. The first two parts are out. Hilarious stuff.

The best was this chart.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/mlse-valuation/article1738301/?from=1736787

This was an absolutely classic Pedmeister operation, complete with “Estimate provided by Richard Peddie” of $1.7 billion or so current value.

The stenographers at the Globe were so lazy they couldn’t even be bothered to look up the terms of the most recent sale transaction as reported in their own newspaper last year. Tanenbaum bought 7.7% for $90 million, which implied a value of $1.15 billion.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/streetwise/drama-seeps-out-of-mlse-ownership/article972166/

Let me help the Globe along on this one. There are arguments why it could be a bit higher or lower today, but let’s assume that $1.15 billion, the last transaction price, is still accurate. When Peddie came into MLSE in February 1998 as part of the Raptors/ACC transaction, the value of MLSE was around $600 million - $175 million for the Leafs; $400 million for the Raptors and Air Canada Centre; and $25 million for additional luxury boxes at the ACC.

So the return under the reign of King Richard is about 1.9x over 12 years, which is only impressive if you don’t understand the investment business. This works out to be about 5.5% a year. About what you earned by owning Canadian government bonds over the same period.

If Teachers had never met Richard Peddie and just bought shares in media companies, they’d have been far ahead. Just as an example, if they’d bought Rogers stock on the day the Raptors/ACC sale closed, they’d have made a 25% a year return over the same period, or 13x their money. If they’d bought Shaw, they’d have made 11% a year, or 3.5x.

I always wonder: why do the sheeple over at Teachers, or least the board the oversees the actions of the investment professionals there, keep putting up with this?

They have to know better. Don’t they?

Torontotonto
10-02-2010, 07:30 PM
That Globe article's a joke, you gotta be kidding me (passion), has anyone else been watching all the championship's MLSE has brought to TO ?

"Mr. Tanenbaum is the prototypical pro sports owner, in the game for passion, not profit. He now holds 20.5 per cent of the company, and is MLSE's chairman."


If's thats the case, I wish he would buy out TFC from MLSE outright. I'm sure he could afford it.

ensco
10-13-2010, 06:30 AM
An interesting email arrived on the weekend. An intermediary who knows both Real Tom and I (not very well in the latter case) contacted me to say that “Real Tom just discovered the Fake Tom Diary, thinks it’s hilarious, and wants to meet me.” Would I be willing to meet Real Tom?

I impulsively said yes. It sounded like a laugh, and maybe, if I'm honest, it appealed to my vanity. He thinks I’m hilarious! I could see it, Fake Tom and Real Tom sharing a few laughs under the warm glow of the neon at Lord Stanley’s Pub, having enjoyed an evening in the owner’s box at the ACC….

Before the plan was set (ie before I had gone through with revealing who I am to Real Tom), I asked a couple of the wisest owls in these parts what they thought of the idea of meeting Real Tom. The first said, without even thinking, don’t do it. The second thought about it for a while, hemmed and hawed, and said, don’t do it. What’s the upside? I knew in my heart they had a point. Beyond that, once Real Tom knows who I actually am, it might actually influence how he perceives what I wrote. Some of which wasn’t very nice.

Dear reader, none of it mattered. It’s a drug, access to the powerful, and I took it. After all, there are probably 100 guys trying to be GM of the team trying to talk to Real Tom, who am I to decline? So I emailed him, and within a couple of hours I was on the phone with him.

Do you know what? He mopped the floor with me. It was a short chat, that’s it, no boozy evening out, nothing of the sort other than the usual “we should get a beer someday” proferred as he was signing off. He said a couple of times that I was “a great writer and funny as heck”, for which I thank him, but he also was a pains to point out that “I can’t say I love everything you are writing” and object to certain premises in the diary. It’s not my purpose to share whatever meager confidences I may have been given, but I will point out a couple of things that bothered him the most. He wants to win, it’s not just about making money, for him, and he is most definitely not involved in the condominium projects.

Did I really press him on any topic? No. Did I go after him for saying to the papers yesterday:“We had a general manager and a head coach who played together on both sides of the ocean, won a championship together. You would have thought that they were on the same page. We stayed out of their hair and let them do what they did and maybe that wasn’t the right thing.” How I wish I had said: Cmon Real Tom – did you let a lame duck GM make that hire 100% on his own? Or was the Preki hire really driven by you? I mean, you can’t have it both ways. (Actually I hadn’t read that quote when I talked to him, so it couldn't have come up, but you get my drift.)

I let him off easy, just like the “stenographers” do.

In return for these nuggets, Real Tom now knows who I am and where I live. The protagonist vanquished the antagonist.

So, dear readers, in conclusion, I have new respect for the wretched journalist scribes whose lives I have been ridiculing. I also respect Real Tom for reaching out to me, even if it wasn’t on terms I loved, and paying me a high compliment, which is that he noticed me.

Finally, the real lesson learned – listen to your friends. Seriously. They’re almost always right.

Shakes McQueen
10-13-2010, 06:37 AM
Aww, I thought you really got to hang out with Anselmi, and that he really did find this thread, before it became obvious that you were just making it up towards the end, haha.

Thanks for jerking me around!

- Scott

Oldtimer
10-13-2010, 07:31 AM
Keep up the work,ensco, and don't let him off the hook.

I'm looking for your latest on the season ticket debacle.

spark
10-13-2010, 08:28 AM
Yeah and I want to know how exactly they hire a GM around here!

DOMIN8R
10-13-2010, 01:56 PM
Wow. Full disclosure.

Lesson learned. Let's keep our online identities hidden.

I hope that this doesn't mean that you are going to take it easy on Tommy ole boy. Now that you have a little more insight your next fake Tom Anslemi post should be should ring more true. N'est-ce pas?

ensco
10-15-2010, 02:01 PM
You all hated me. Like I am some kind of evil goblin or the like.

Aye I’m nobody’s pal. I played rough with the players. I was a cheapskate for the bosses, it’s up to the bosses to decide if they want to be toss a few more of their coins around. Of course these bosses never stepped up.

Some of the players are still crying. Hurling stones at me because I didn’t pay for coaching lessons. Christ what a bunch of numpties. I’ll remember. I didn’t win, so I had to go, but I’ll be back somewhere– getting canned by MLSE is an endorsement of your character.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few other scores to settle. The bosses actually said: “Preki broke up a team that was close to getting there, and Mo let him do it”. You can bet I’ll have something to say about that. I’m the one who thought we were close, but I got ripped when I said so. The bosses didn’t back me up and forced Preki down my throat. I warned them about him, but it didn’t matter. They gave him the keys, let him bring in his guys. Everybody loved it. For a few weeks anyway.

Then this stuff they’re doing with the fans: “we’re sorry, but not really”…“we’re hiring consultants to advise us on the consultants”…there is a god, because they're letting people see what life is like behind closed doors.

So what d’ya think now? Now that you all get to see for yourselves. What I protected you from. Every day.

Roogsy
10-15-2010, 04:38 PM
An interesting email arrived on the weekend. An intermediary who knows both Real Tom and I (not very well in the latter case) contacted me to say that “Real Tom just discovered the Fake Tom Diary, thinks it’s hilarious, and wants to meet me.” Would I be willing to meet Real Tom?

I impulsively said yes. It sounded like a laugh, and maybe, if I'm honest, it appealed to my vanity. He thinks I’m hilarious! I could see it, Fake Tom and Real Tom sharing a few laughs under the warm glow of the neon at Lord Stanley’s Pub, having enjoyed an evening in the owner’s box at the ACC….

Before the plan was set (ie before I had gone through with revealing who I am to Real Tom), I asked a couple of the wisest owls in these parts what they thought of the idea of meeting Real Tom. The first said, without even thinking, don’t do it. The second thought about it for a while, hemmed and hawed, and said, don’t do it. What’s the upside? I knew in my heart they had a point. Beyond that, once Real Tom knows who I actually am, it might actually influence how he perceives what I wrote. Some of which wasn’t very nice.

Dear reader, none of it mattered. It’s a drug, access to the powerful, and I took it. After all, there are probably 100 guys trying to be GM of the team trying to talk to Real Tom, who am I to decline? So I emailed him, and within a couple of hours I was on the phone with him.

Do you know what? He mopped the floor with me. It was a short chat, that’s it, no boozy evening out, nothing of the sort other than the usual “we should get a beer someday” proferred as he was signing off. He said a couple of times that I was “a great writer and funny as heck”, for which I thank him, but he also was a pains to point out that “I can’t say I love everything you are writing” and object to certain premises in the diary. It’s not my purpose to share whatever meager confidences I may have been given, but I will point out a couple of things that bothered him the most. He wants to win, it’s not just about making money, for him, and he is most definitely not involved in the condominium projects.

Did I really press him on any topic? No. Did I go after him for saying to the papers yesterday:“We had a general manager and a head coach who played together on both sides of the ocean, won a championship together. You would have thought that they were on the same page. We stayed out of their hair and let them do what they did and maybe that wasn’t the right thing.” How I wish I had said: Cmon Real Tom – did you let a lame duck GM make that hire 100% on his own? Or was the Preki hire really driven by you? I mean, you can’t have it both ways. (Actually I hadn’t read that quote when I talked to him, so it couldn't have come up, but you get my drift.)

I let him off easy, just like the “stenographers” do.

In return for these nuggets, Real Tom now knows who I am and where I live. The protagonist vanquished the antagonist.

So, dear readers, in conclusion, I have new respect for the wretched journalist scribes whose lives I have been ridiculing. I also respect Real Tom for reaching out to me, even if it wasn’t on terms I loved, and paying me a high compliment, which is that he noticed me.

Finally, the real lesson learned – listen to your friends. Seriously. They’re almost always right.


I've never laughed harder... :smilielol5:

jloome
10-15-2010, 08:24 PM
An interesting email arrived on the weekend. An intermediary who knows both Real Tom and I (not very well in the latter case) contacted me to say that “Real Tom just discovered the Fake Tom Diary, thinks it’s hilarious, and wants to meet me.” Would I be willing to meet Real Tom?

I impulsively said yes. It sounded like a laugh, and maybe, if I'm honest, it appealed to my vanity. He thinks I’m hilarious! I could see it, Fake Tom and Real Tom sharing a few laughs under the warm glow of the neon at Lord Stanley’s Pub, having enjoyed an evening in the owner’s box at the ACC….

Before the plan was set (ie before I had gone through with revealing who I am to Real Tom), I asked a couple of the wisest owls in these parts what they thought of the idea of meeting Real Tom. The first said, without even thinking, don’t do it. The second thought about it for a while, hemmed and hawed, and said, don’t do it. What’s the upside? I knew in my heart they had a point. Beyond that, once Real Tom knows who I actually am, it might actually influence how he perceives what I wrote. Some of which wasn’t very nice.

Dear reader, none of it mattered. It’s a drug, access to the powerful, and I took it. After all, there are probably 100 guys trying to be GM of the team trying to talk to Real Tom, who am I to decline? So I emailed him, and within a couple of hours I was on the phone with him.

Do you know what? He mopped the floor with me. It was a short chat, that’s it, no boozy evening out, nothing of the sort other than the usual “we should get a beer someday” proferred as he was signing off. He said a couple of times that I was “a great writer and funny as heck”, for which I thank him, but he also was a pains to point out that “I can’t say I love everything you are writing” and object to certain premises in the diary. It’s not my purpose to share whatever meager confidences I may have been given, but I will point out a couple of things that bothered him the most. He wants to win, it’s not just about making money, for him, and he is most definitely not involved in the condominium projects.

Did I really press him on any topic? No. Did I go after him for saying to the papers yesterday:“We had a general manager and a head coach who played together on both sides of the ocean, won a championship together. You would have thought that they were on the same page. We stayed out of their hair and let them do what they did and maybe that wasn’t the right thing.” How I wish I had said: Cmon Real Tom – did you let a lame duck GM make that hire 100% on his own? Or was the Preki hire really driven by you? I mean, you can’t have it both ways. (Actually I hadn’t read that quote when I talked to him, so it couldn't have come up, but you get my drift.)

I let him off easy, just like the “stenographers” do.

In return for these nuggets, Real Tom now knows who I am and where I live. The protagonist vanquished the antagonist.

So, dear readers, in conclusion, I have new respect for the wretched journalist scribes whose lives I have been ridiculing. I also respect Real Tom for reaching out to me, even if it wasn’t on terms I loved, and paying me a high compliment, which is that he noticed me.

Finally, the real lesson learned – listen to your friends. Seriously. They’re almost always right.


Heheh, wimp.

And I see you're doing Mo now. Better not be because of the Anselmi call.

DichioTFC
10-16-2010, 07:18 AM
An interesting email arrived on the weekend. An intermediary who knows both Real Tom and I (not very well in the latter case) contacted me to say that “Real Tom just discovered the Fake Tom Diary, thinks it’s hilarious, and wants to meet me.” Would I be willing to meet Real Tom?

I impulsively said yes. It sounded like a laugh, and maybe, if I'm honest, it appealed to my vanity. He thinks I’m hilarious! I could see it, Fake Tom and Real Tom sharing a few laughs under the warm glow of the neon at Lord Stanley’s Pub, having enjoyed an evening in the owner’s box at the ACC….

Before the plan was set (ie before I had gone through with revealing who I am to Real Tom), I asked a couple of the wisest owls in these parts what they thought of the idea of meeting Real Tom. The first said, without even thinking, don’t do it. The second thought about it for a while, hemmed and hawed, and said, don’t do it. What’s the upside? I knew in my heart they had a point. Beyond that, once Real Tom knows who I actually am, it might actually influence how he perceives what I wrote. Some of which wasn’t very nice.

Dear reader, none of it mattered. It’s a drug, access to the powerful, and I took it. After all, there are probably 100 guys trying to be GM of the team trying to talk to Real Tom, who am I to decline? So I emailed him, and within a couple of hours I was on the phone with him.

Do you know what? He mopped the floor with me. It was a short chat, that’s it, no boozy evening out, nothing of the sort other than the usual “we should get a beer someday” proferred as he was signing off. He said a couple of times that I was “a great writer and funny as heck”, for which I thank him, but he also was a pains to point out that “I can’t say I love everything you are writing” and object to certain premises in the diary. It’s not my purpose to share whatever meager confidences I may have been given, but I will point out a couple of things that bothered him the most. He wants to win, it’s not just about making money, for him, and he is most definitely not involved in the condominium projects.

Did I really press him on any topic? No. Did I go after him for saying to the papers yesterday:“We had a general manager and a head coach who played together on both sides of the ocean, won a championship together. You would have thought that they were on the same page. We stayed out of their hair and let them do what they did and maybe that wasn’t the right thing.” How I wish I had said: Cmon Real Tom – did you let a lame duck GM make that hire 100% on his own? Or was the Preki hire really driven by you? I mean, you can’t have it both ways. (Actually I hadn’t read that quote when I talked to him, so it couldn't have come up, but you get my drift.)

I let him off easy, just like the “stenographers” do.

In return for these nuggets, Real Tom now knows who I am and where I live. The protagonist vanquished the antagonist.

So, dear readers, in conclusion, I have new respect for the wretched journalist scribes whose lives I have been ridiculing. I also respect Real Tom for reaching out to me, even if it wasn’t on terms I loved, and paying me a high compliment, which is that he noticed me.

Finally, the real lesson learned – listen to your friends. Seriously. They’re almost always right.

You should've downplayed his concerns like he's doing to ours at the Town Halls. Definitely an Anselmi thing to do.

Btw, your fake diary is an art, just like comic satirists in newspapers and the Pookie shorts. The people that are in the public eye are subject to be satirized. If Anselmi "cant say" that he loves everything being written about him, thats his problem.

IMO, keep it going. But harder. It's fucking Tom Anselmi, not the CIA. Who cares if he knows where you live and who you are? Who cares if he doesn't like certain things that are written about him. You are helping create interest in the product that we're consuming, which pays his bills. Who cares if you guys didn't have your candlelight dinner at Real Sports beside the fake MLS Cup?

I'd love to read Anselmi wrote in his diary during the TFC game today. Just a nugget of my own
:D

ensco
10-16-2010, 08:11 AM
Circumstances have forced me to go out and mingle with the great unwashed. I tell them I really want to win, it makes them feel better, and that part’s easy, because I do.

But the part where I parrot, like some sort of prize captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp, how soccer is “different”, how these supporters are “authentic” and were “learning” more about them, blah blah blah, is a lot harder. I can’t really pull it off, but that’s besides the point. No real points for sincerity in this life.

I wonder if these stupid soccer supporters groups have ever heard of the Gallery Gods in the old Boston Garden? Or the Blue Seaters at the old MSG? Or the Bleacher Creatures at old Yankee Stadium?

They were big groups of working class hardcores in the cheapest seats and they were around for decades. I think they lasted 70 years for the Bruins. Their basic mission was to yell their lungs out, give out “Man of the Year” awards, and, probably most importantly, make fun of and generally harass the suits. They even did the odd song (the “Potvin Sucks” thing at Ranger games was a Blue Seat special). So, other than the fact that they did bumper stickers and didn’t have scarves…..sound familiar?

Those groups were all famous. They were tough too, those groups were filled with badasses from Long Island or Southie. These Toronto supporters are the Ladies Auxiliary by comparison.

The Gallery Gods and Blue Seats had their place. And when the time came, they were all euthanized. It’s a snap of the fingers. You raise ticket prices and/or remodel/rebuild the arenas, and they can’t afford to come. Everyone moans and bitches (it was bad in New York, they put boxes in where the Blue Seats were in the late eighties, the tabloids caterwauled about it for months).

Because the truth is, we don’t like those groups. Sure, some of those people are decent enough, but there’s always a few people who will use the mob to cause security problems at games, and other people, who are sitting in better seats, see that and don’t come back.

This city has thousands of docile Leaf, Raptor and TFC fans, who come and go, but mostly, they’ll pay what we tell them to pay. So I’ll pay some lip service to these "supporters" who think they're so special, but if they take a hike, cry me a river. I've got infinite demand for the cheap seats anyway, it's the more expensive seats that are giving me a headache anyway.

Things are a lot better in the halls around here. Leafs are 4-0 for the first time since the Paleozoic era. Raptors won a preseason game by 50. Directors can enjoy going out in public again. Allows me to run the TFC renewal process in relative obscurity. But the flip side of that is, it shores up Peddie’s position.

The ticket thing is a sideshow. The real issue for everybody is the GM search, because someone on the Board might conclude that the Anselmi/Johnston management team looked a lot like the Peddie/Babcock or Peddie/JFJ management teams.

They might step in and bring in a Burke or Colangelo style Soccer President. There wouldn’t be room for both Peddie and I in the management structure.

If that happened, one of us would have to go.

That, sports fans, for those of you keeping score at home, is the actual stakes in the actual game being played.

ensco
10-17-2010, 03:15 PM
I’ve got a possible New York and Los Angeles match for the MLS Cup coming together, and damned entertaining teams in Salt Lake, Seattle and Dallas that would give us a great game if they happen to make it. Our product has really improved this year. We have a whole group of terrific new DPs and overseas interest in a whole bunch of younger players that could produce serious revenue. The Vancouver and Portland expansion teams are both coming together nicely. It’s sunny and 70 degrees today as I write this.

So what the hell is this? Given all that, how can the Times today have a massive half-page feature on….. TFC, MLSE and the unhappy fans in Toronto?

This story could be attacked. The writer claims that TFC prices are higher than Manchester United’s, and that TFC ticket prices are rising 34%. Neither of these things are true. But why am I the person who has to take this on? The TFC/MLSE management group are apparently too busy pretending to be sorry about having such a bad team, and generally engaging in bizarre time-wasting behavior unconnected to anything resembling actually fixing the problem there. I dunno, I might also have a plan for some of the boring stuff, like, say, talking to a New York Times stringer getting ready to savage your reputation to the most influential audience on the planet.

I can’t have this. Our championship game up there will turn into a lightning rod of dissent and maybe as a consequence, a complete joke at this rate. I’m going to have to get involved. Whether it’s dealing with the fans, finding a Soccer GM/President for that team, or managing the relationships with the supporters and the journalists up there, you are going to start seeing a lot more of the Don and I up there in Toronto.

Guys in the stock market here have a saying: “make your first trade your worst trade”. When traders put on a losing position, they know to fix it by reversing engines hard and getting out, not by doing something else to prove how smart or tough they are, that only makes it worse.

The guys who originally thought that saying up must have been thinking of MLSE.

MLSE pushed that market too far in terms of pricing (I understand how that happened, no problem there), but the cardinal sin is that they bungled the response so badly. This sorta-kinda-but-not-really apology, and the fake reduction in cost/games, this is unforgivable. I need to understand the office politics a bit better up there, I think, because there is really no rational explanation for it.

Generally, I’ve had a bellyful of these guys. Any chance we get, from designing the expansion draft rules, on down the the simplest roster rule, we are going to lean just a bit towards helping Vancouver and Montreal, and away from TFC. It’s just not worth the trouble.

It's about both maximizing revenue and market development now. They’ve lost the plot in Toronto.

Oldtimer
10-18-2010, 08:18 AM
so true!!!

ManUtd4ever
10-18-2010, 08:24 AM
Well done...

ensco
10-31-2010, 08:14 AM
Well, we adjusted the gameplan slightly after sitting down with Garber and Abbott. We decided to stick with the ground campaign, stay on the apology message and do the town halls, for the existing seat holders, and only unleashed the air campaign after the renewals were done.

Leiweke and Garber put together the Klinsmann deal. Nobody here really knows if the guy is just renting his name out, or if he’ll actually take this thing seriously. We’re paying him a lot of dough if it’s the former. It helped with the Board that he is smooth. He talked about his buddy Gretzky when he met with us – very clever – he actually looks a lot like Wayne, it’s weird. So we’re calling him the Great One, in the halls here.

See the problem is, whatever it was that we had to say to the season ticket holders, it was way more than we had to say to the waiting list. We have thousands of seats to sell, fast, to new customers, and no story for the reps. New customers aren't mad, so they're much harder to engage. They need the stimulation with the big names much more than the wailing masses of existing supporters, who mostly come back regardless. But it has to be fresh, it will get stale fast. That's why we did it this way.

So we brought the Great One in, we're announcing it early next week, and now we’re starting the media name-drop-carpet-bomb on coaching candidates. Trust me, if we think we can get away with it, we're putting Pele, Maradona, and the President of Bolivia out there as guys who called TFC asking about the job. It helps that the agents for some of these guys actually do call. Although it's probably just trolling for competitors to deals they have lined up elsewhere, to drive those negotiations. So we help them and us out by leaking it. What a business.

We’ll be doing more of that over the next few days, should have the waiting list primed by early the week after next.

One other thing – decided to let the scribes know that “the whole management team is staying, Cochrane, Brennan, everybody, we’re building something here”. Doesn’t matter what the Great One, or whomever he hires, wants. These primadonnas can't be trusted. No matter what happens down the line, the organization will have clear set of loyalties to only one individual. Yours truly.

ensco
11-09-2010, 11:25 AM
The quick start is history, and the Leafs are, once again, pretty much the worst team in the league. That means Boston will get another top pick, maybe first overall. (By the way, anyone see the move Tyler Seguin put on Halak in the shootout a couple of nights ago? He just about put the poor guy’s jockstrap in the rafters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9Fe_OjN0A)

Burke owns this whole thing now. Those are his players out there. He knows it, and he’s starting to crack. He’s been going on about the Canucks fans, as if they matter around here, but he can’t get his story straight. First he said last week that they never booed individual players. Then a few days later he said they would only go after players, and not the coach.

Saint Brian’s honeymoon is just about over. The way he constantly sells his hockey 'philosophy', as though nobody here has ever heard of hitting, scoring, defense, goaltending and hard work before, is rapidly becoming a joke. He’s starting to take on the same bunker mentality Mo did. He may come apart at the seams soon. It could be quite a spectacle.

Same for Cufflinks. That team is unwatchable. They're on lists out there already, as one of the 10 worst teams in NBA history. Triano saying “what the f$%& do you expect me to do about it” on TV, that pretty much sums it up. This city is awash in Raptors tickets that you can’t give away. The NBA is a troubled business and we need to get smaller. Stern’s been talking contraction, and he’s not kidding. Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Minnesota all lose boatloads of money, and we're worried we may be joining that group next year. Our 8-10K of season tickets, at an average $125/ticket, actually looks decent by NBA standards. The danger is that it’s going to 4K after next year's renewals. There is a major, major potential problem looming here.

Dribbling the ball on the TFC GM front, don’t want to be too anxious there, I’ll get someone on my terms, someone who isn’t looking for total control, in due course. What do any of us know who the GM should be, anyway? Worst case, Leiweke and Abbott will find us someone in the new year.

We stabilized the TFC renewals with the Klinsmann news cycle. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a disaster. We have about 4,000 or 5,000 season seats to sell, but we also have time, ie the whole offseason, to come up with a story and sell them. No rush. We’ll do some hoopla around the MLS Cup, maybe bring the Great One in and show off our new prize poodle to the fans.

It would help if LA wins on Sunday. But if Beckham doesn’t make it, I’ll paper BMO for the MLS Cup to make sure we have a full house, and a good party.

We will put on a good show for the Board, while the rest of the empire is burning.

ensco
11-26-2010, 05:24 PM
Jean Reno (OK that’s not his name but that’s who he reminds me of) and Brennan were in my office Monday talking me through the players they’re looking at in the MLS draft. One thing I like about these guys is that they’re straightforward and honest. They told me that (i) they don’t have a single scouting asset that isn’t a Mo guy, (ii) they’re not really sure what NCAA stands for, and (iii) they think Wake Forest is in Hogwarts. So I told them to deal the first round pick for someone they’ve actually heard of, before the whole world figures it out.

So that’s how a guy that was on an expansion draft list got acquired for a first rounder. Not great I know, but that’s what I’d rather do than rush the GM hiring thing. I may as well wait and hear what the Great One has to say. Only sign of him that we've seen in the last two weeks was a wire service story with his comments on the new manager of Bulgaria. Not expecting much from him, to be honest, he gave us something to talk about to the wait lists, anything more is gravy. No matter. Maybe Reno and Brennan will do. They’d be cheap, which I always like.

If I never hear the words MLS Cup again, it’ll be too soon. The ticket thing is mostly done, we still have tickets to sell, but we’ll figure out some sort of bundled promotion once we sign a player or two.

Btw, the CFL has grown their TV ratings 150% in the last three years.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/football/cfl-targets-generation-next/article1814225/

What’s really interesting is to analyze where all that market share came from? Care to guess?

Ratings for MLSE properties have declined sharply since 2007. Last Sunday, Argos-Als drew 2.3 million for a blowout, and the MLS Cup got…..36,000. When Colorado or whomever scored the winning goal at 11.30pm, the ratings were probably more like 3,600.

Jesus, in 2007 we told the Board that we would take TV share from the CFL. What a debacle.

Peddie owns the TV rights management side of the house.

This is just another reason that you can start fitting the Pedmeister for that golden parachute harness now.

Oldtimer
11-28-2010, 08:48 PM
I suspect it's true that some sort of bundled deal will be coming....

VoxPopuliCosmicum
11-30-2010, 03:41 PM
This is just another reason that you can start fitting the Pedmeister for that golden parachute harness now.

You're kinda close to this whole mess, huh?

fetajr
12-01-2010, 10:12 AM
Does fake Anselmi want Rogers to take over or what?

tfcmanu
12-01-2010, 12:41 PM
Does fake Anselmi want Rogers to take over or what?

Drum Roll Please.....:drum:

ensco
01-26-2011, 08:25 PM
Gone. I want him gone. Now.

This is why I wanted Cochrane in there, because, like Mo, I could just tell Cochrane to do something, and he would do it. I was thisclose to getting it done, when Cochrane blew it by putting out that inane “Dero’s not going to Celtic” press release without knowing all the facts. Why couldn’t Cochrane have just kept it quiet for a few more days? I think he snapped reading all those stupid message boards saying he was too green to be GM, and then went out and proved those clowns right. That episode killed Cochrane’s credibility with the league, and even I had to agree with Abbott after that, that he wasn’t ready. So now I have to wait for WinterMariner (if these guys had more of a sense of humour I’d call them the Chilly Sea Dog Duo or something) to get there on their own. Sigh.

We all know what happened. Dero was going to hold out when he got here in 2009, but Mo said, leave it to me, we did, and Mo got him signed. Then, when Dero found out neither I, nor anyone else, had any idea what he was talking about when he said he had an “arrangement” with Mo to become a DP, he damn near climbed the north end scoreboard with a rifle. Right then and there.

We let this go on because we didn’t really get why he didn’t get it. So Dwayne, you had a verbal deal with Mo? Harharharhar you lose. You got bamboozled by Mo, welcome to the club. We figured he’d come to his senses by now. But after today’s shitshow, it’s now obvious that he’s deranged over this, so it’s time to cut the cord. I feel sorry for the guy, but he can’t pee on our rug like this. Just make him a free agent by mutual consent, or move him back to Houston, or to San Jose, for a bag of pucks or something, and move on.

But it’s not that simple for the Chilly Sea Dogs, because they are truly lost at sea in a January storm right now. They don’t know what they have, who they could pick up, where the men’s room is, or who to trust. I'll bet that it's precisely because they know I want to be rid of him, that they are wondering, maybe we should go the other way, given what these suits have done to this team in the past. Maybe they think they can put up with Dero’s BS, because maybe the alternative is worse, and world soccer is full of this BS, or so everyone tells me. I could care less. I want him gone.

Meanwhile I have to sit on my hands, because the perception that I’m a meddler, is hurting my ability to meddle. I need that ability down the road more than I need it now. So I wait.

Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

Auzzy
01-26-2011, 09:20 PM
Dear Tom,

All this, less than a year after you apparently prevented Preki from trading Dero -- what do you say to that?

Pookie
01-26-2011, 09:24 PM
"...the perception that I’m a meddler, is hurting my ability to meddle"

That's funny stuff right there. :)

Waggy
01-26-2011, 09:34 PM
Dear Tom,

All this, less than a year after you apparently prevented Preki from trading Dero -- what do you say to that?

Given the way Prekis trades went, do you REALLY believe it would have been a good deal for us at all?

Auzzy
01-26-2011, 09:36 PM
Given the way Prekis trades went, do you REALLY believe it would have been a good deal for us at all?

Where did you read that I think it would have been a good deal for "us"? I was just asking Fake Tom, what he thought about all that now.

Waggy
01-26-2011, 09:37 PM
Where did you read that I think it would have been a good deal for "us"? I was just asking Fake Tom, what he thought about all that now.


heh, oops. my bad. Sorry fake tom

Gobi
01-27-2011, 11:25 AM
How is it I'm only finding this thread now?
Genius stuff, Ensco. Scary-good.

Batman
01-27-2011, 11:39 AM
gold!

Lucky Strike
01-27-2011, 11:40 AM
Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

Love the line and the reference!

Gobi
01-27-2011, 12:02 PM
^Ditto. Smart guy!

bgnewf
01-27-2011, 12:12 PM
well done. insight in the form of satire.

:)

ensco
01-29-2011, 10:41 AM
The journalists have moved on, but the biggest sports story in Toronto in decades, the coming sale of our little enterprise here, is slowly coming to a boil.

It’s been a couple of months since someone “at the highest level” spilled the beans that Rogers had bid for MLSE. Who was it? Peddie, because he was angry at being tossed only a day or two before? Rogers, because they wanted to put pressure on MLSE to do a deal quickly, before Bell has a chance to counter (Bell is still bogged down at the CRTC with the CTV acquisition, and won’t be in the right position to play for this for a few months yet)? Or did someone at Rogers maybe do it because they wanted to see what the stock market reaction to something this radical would be? All of the above? Who knows.

The Board will wait for Bell, so this will take a few months. So the likely buyer is one of Bell or Rogers, but there are some wild cards out there. Tanenbaum talks a big game, but doesn't have anything close to the kind of do-re-mi this would take. There is always the possibility that Jim Balsillie could buy it, and there are a couple of Russian plutocrats that might enjoy the perks that go with owning the “Manchester United” of professional hockey. Not least of which is having lined up somewhere to run to, if things go wrong in Russia. (Think the events in Egypt this week aren’t on those guys minds?)

Everybody knows big change is coming, but nobody knows what it means. We’re all in a kind of dream state at 40 Bay. Lots of closed door conversations. We’re all trying to stay focused, but it’s tough. I could be CEO, or out, or anything in between, with any of these potential owners. I don’t know, and there’s no way to know.

In the meantime, I try to remember that this is a great gig, and that I have a lot of laughs. Yesterday’s papers gave me a chuckle.

Nobody in this town has owned the scribes like the Pedmeister. After all these years of accepting, like Pablum, statements from the Pedmeister about what a moneymaking machine he is, I guess the journalists are now finally getting their shots in, now that’s he’s been marginalized. Guess what two different hotshot journos accused him of yesterday: costing MLSE millions because the teams weren’t winners.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/mlse-ceo-peddie-has-everything-but-the-trophy/article1880732/

http://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/nba/raptors/article/929632--feschuk-raptors-flops-on-court-but-champions-at-gate

Have they been reading my old diary entries? Fake Tom is nothing if not falsely humble, so while it’s true that there may be some other explanation for it, dear reader, allow Fake Tom a wee spot of over-the-top endzone dancing on this! As Sun Tzu said: “The wheels of justice grind slow, but grind fine.”

DOMIN8R
01-29-2011, 11:19 AM
http://www.etftrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/gold-bars.jpg

Oldtimer
02-02-2011, 08:40 AM
I wonder how Tom got the TSN deal going?

Beach_Red
02-02-2011, 09:55 AM
^ Especially after that Peddie interview where he dreamed about a single channel owned by MLSE that showed Leafs, Raptors, TFC and Marlies, "Imagine what we could charge for that," he said.

That is a house divided.

ensco
03-08-2011, 10:22 AM
Things looking up in the room, I think. Despite all the problems we had in the fall and winter, you can't help but feel better about things, even though I hardly know who any of the players are anymore. That was an ugly loss on the weekend, but I think it'll all come together if we just stick with it and show some patience. Glad we stuck with Wilson.

They're breaking out the lampshades over at Teachers. They can have a proper auction for MLSE now. The CRTC approved the Bell/CTV/TSN deal yesterday. It'll close in April.

http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/static/business/article1932449.html

This was no layup, this deal concentrates a lot of power in the media space, but given the setup between the big companies and the regulators in this world, you put enough lipstick on the pig, you can get almost anything done...

We're feeling festive too. Nobody is a better event planner than us, so we've been brainstorming about the 2017 anniversary for the Leafs - it'll be the 100th for the franchise, and the 50th since the last Cup (unless we somehow....never mind).

http://www.torontosun.com/sports/hockey/2011/03/06/17515926.html

Even I know talking about this 5-6 years early is pretty...lame, but given the general state of suspended animation around here (lame duck CEO, likelihood we get sold this year)...well, what are we supposed to do all day, besides pray that the NBA players go on strike so that the Raptors can avoid big losses next year?

TFC still giving me headaches. Despite everything that we did last fall, we took a pretty significant hit to revenues this year. The TSN deal was the right thing to do, but our ticket guys are worried it could cost us at the gate - all those Saturday night games are a gamble. So I put the word out early - don't even bother talking to me about a DP. I'm not going to run a loss-making division in the company, in a year when we are for sale.

Beach_Red
03-08-2011, 10:40 AM
This was no layup, this deal concentrates a lot of power in the media space, but given the setup between the big companies and the regulators in this world, you put enough lipstick on the pig, you can get almost anything done...



You mean Regulatory Capture, Tom?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

ensco
03-13-2011, 06:47 AM
Preseason all finished. Game on.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/teachers-move-closer-to-mlse-sale/article1940018/

Tanenbaum still peddling a story about how he wants to buy. He doesn't really have the dough to play here, but he's doing what I would do, trying to convince any buyers out there that they have to deal with him, and/or maybe collect a few extra million for his trouble. That right of first refusal is valuable.

Colangelo (and I for that matter) being hung out to dry in the meantime.
http://www.thestar.com/article/953142--feschuk-number-cruncher-standing-in-way-of-colangelo-s-new-contract

ensco
04-03-2011, 02:45 PM
Very quiet around here. Beautifully, blissfully quiet. It may be the sound of victory.

What’s the story you’re not seeing in the papers? It’s the one talking about what might be going on in the Teacher’s sale process. Not that I’m privy to any actual information, but it makes you wonder if there's anything going on in the MLSE sale process, because you’d probably have read about it if there were. Everybody runs to the papers in this town.

In the meantime Teachers are paralyzed, which paralyzes all of us. The sale announcement, which effectively derailed the Peddie search process, is starting to interfere with operations. For instance, the Board can’t make a decision on Cufflinks. More broadly, the Raptors are a cringe-inducing dumpster fire. Makes you wonder just what the renewal situation actually is there, but if there's a big problem, well, because of the strike, it may not be visible for a year. (This may be part of the explanation for the timing of the Teachers announcement. Just wondering.)

In any event, I can't influence much what of happens if MLSE is sold. But I have some ideas on what to do if it isn't!

If MLSE isn't sold, Teachers will have to appoint a new CEO without a full and proper search being conducted. Which means….maybe…. Get out the Salami and Cheese Mama, this ball game could be over!!

http://twitter.com/swirsk054/statuses/9632525865459712

So I need to keep things tidy while this plays out. We moved Dero, I told the Board I’d handle it, and I did. It only took this long because it’s important that WinterMariner found a buyer on terms that were acceptable to them, because they can’t have it look like this was something I did.

This is shaping up to be a great year. We’ve sold both the Leafs and TFC fans on a youth movement, which may enable us to avoid spending money on players this year, which would be helpful. (I’ve told the Board that I may need to spend a few bucks on the soccer team for a name DP in the summer if TFC stink the joint out, and renewals look wonky, but I’m hoping not to have to do that).

Cuchulain
04-03-2011, 06:35 PM
Just found this thread. I love it!!

Alonso
04-03-2011, 07:15 PM
^^^Isn't it great... and depressingly true at the same time

ElvistheEvilScotsman
04-03-2011, 07:20 PM
I declare this diary entry to be 100% true.

Alonso
04-03-2011, 07:28 PM
^^^^ LOL

ensco
05-05-2011, 11:01 AM
Had a good round of golf today. Finished it with a fantastic bottle of Opus One. Played with the guys who run our private equity investments. As always, they were full of gobbledy-gook on "benchmarking", " beta", "building enterprise value" blah blah blah...jeez these guys bore the hell out of me sometimes.

At the turn, got updated on how the MLSE sale process is going. The guys main point is, it doesn't matter. MLSE is a minnow in the context of Teachers' overall holdings. So we put the shares out there at a high price, and see if some grillionaire bites. If not, we pull it down, no problem, pretend like nothing's happened. (Bit disturbing how all these private equity investments are tanking, oh well. Our resource holdings are up this year.)

Everybody's looking forward to the shindig in Vegas in late June. Nobody throws a party like Bettman.

ensco
05-05-2011, 11:03 AM
Can anyone show me another example of someone owning 66% of something, and having less rights or influence over that asset? What were our people thinking when they agreed to the deals that led us to here?

We have got a real mess on their hands. How could we not do that Rogers deal last year?

Tanenbaum's "right of first refusal" means that no one can buy our MLSE holding without dealing with Larry first. Which means Larry has to be paid. A lot of money. I have underestimated Larry. Maybe his money originally came from his old man, but this is the score of a lifetime. He has got us by the throat on this. Oh and guess what else? He's not the only one. As anyone who has followed sports for more than 5 minutes knows, Bettman and Stern effectively have a veto over the sale process for the Teachers shares. So that's three intractable hardasses that both us, and a buyer, have to deal with.

Does this sound like a situation that lends itself to an auction process? You'd think maybe one of our bureaucrats, earning 7 figure incomes to manage this investment, would have noticed that say, on ebay, you don't spend two months establishing your credentials, and dealing with rights of refusal, before bidding. If it isn't a clean and simple transaction, you can't have an auction. The format simply doesn't work when there are significant qualifying issues to deal with.

But the geniuses that we employ here just to advise on matters like this all said "Wait for Bell! We'll have an auction (and btw justify our massive salaries)". Like the sheep we always are, we let them do it. Guess what? Now Rogers is miffed, and no one else wants to run the gauntlet before knowing they have a deal.

Not to mention that our asking price is almost double what Tanenbaum paid only a couple of years ago.

One of these days we'll have to pull this off the market. But where do we go from here? These teams are all in various stages of real decline overall from an operating perspective, anyone can see that. We going to need a CEO, a head of the basketball operation, pronto, but given the hash we've made of this, A-list people won't come.

We're going to have to look hard at the Teachers investment management personnel, style, everything, because it's clear we're failing.

ensco
06-06-2011, 10:41 AM
The board kept Cufflinks on, and pretty much the next day Cufflinks slipped the shiv into Triano. Cufflinks has been wanting to do for a while, but he knew that the marketing department felt that having a “plucky Canadian coach” was useful, so he waited, at least until his contract got done. (He’s a canny operator, Cufflinks, it’s why he said maybe Jay could stay as an assistant.) Now Cufflinks is going to see if the marketing guys think a “winning coach” might be useful, but the problem is name coaches cost big money . Cufflinks loves Mike D’Antoni, who might be available, but D’Antoni got $24 million over 4 years, and there’s no way we’ll let him pay anything close to that, given the revenue erosion there.

Saint Brian has been quiet. That is one lucky guy. The late season surge, and the fact that Tomas Kaberle is playing horribly for the Bruins, but the Bruins now have to cough up and additional second rounder to us (it was a conditional pick that we got only if they made the finals) has everyone in a good mood. The guy in Leafland who is maybe having the best offseason is Ron Wilson – he hated Howard Berger, and Berger just got canned. Nobody here will miss him. Berger had the temerity to ask probing follow-up questions, and state that Leafs Nation were “clapping seals”, because of their blind support for such a terrible team. The gall.

The thing we’re most worried about is the soccer team. If we get new owners (something I think is a lot more likely since that thunderbolt from Teachers, buying the TD stake, hit in early May), the new owners, like us, are going to have trouble understanding this stupid sport. (For instance, why can’t anyone tell me how the hell the goal crease works in this sport? And what’s that funny circle outside the 18 meter box all about?).

I have to assume we’ll be sold, and get this stabilized before the new owners get here. Nobody cared when TFC were making money, but that’ll be over by the end of this year. No shows are running 50% or higher. The team sucks donkey balls. Problem is, we’ve put our faith blindly in a couple of guys we barely know, and so far we’re getting killed. (Why is it that only Lou Lamoriello gets to fire a coach a year, without everyone deciding that he’s the problem?)

The league office is really grumbling. MLS have made a big commitment to Canada, and we’ve put pretty much the most uninteresting, talent-deprived, team on the field in league history. Since we cannot lower prices (we don’t do that here, we’re MLSE), renewals are going to drop a lot unless we make an investment spend on a player or two, but it’s risky, these Displaced Persons (or whatever they’re called) seem to mostly blow up in people’s faces (we’re 0 for 2 on them ourselves).

I will have a plan in place before any sale gets announced. May have to go to war with the Board to free up the funds. This could be interesting.

Parkdale
06-06-2011, 10:49 AM
..... because it's clear we're failing.


would he ever really say that

ensco
06-06-2011, 10:57 AM
would he ever really say that

That's the diary entry of a director - plus it's only in the diary!

ensco
07-06-2011, 06:15 PM
So....

King Richard broke the vow of silence today to let everyone know that the price has dropped to $1.8 billion. This story is full of classic Pedmeister whoppers. My favourite is the idea that MLSE will be worth $3 billion to Microsoft in a few years. Some days I swear Peddie must be sprinkling magic mushrooms in his cornflakes.

http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/2011/07/06/grange_mlse_peddie/

But this interview is really interesting. This process must be stalled for him to talk openly like this. Also, $1.8 bills must be the minimum amount which Peddie gets paid a bonus for.

Saint Brian is really flashing some leg right now. He has been busy resuscitating a couple of moves from the Pat Quinn era, to give a booster shot to offseason box sales. One move is to bring in bigger name guys on the cheap, who are available because they are seriously damaged goods. Burkie did two on the weekend (Connelly and Lombardi), and if Wilson plays them with Lupul, maybe they can be called the Woozy line. The second move is to whisper to selected stenographers that there's a "possibility" that you might be bringing in a major star -in this case Stamkos, in days of yore Lecavalier and Lindros (the first time, by the time Lindros actually came years later, he was firmly in the damaged goods category). The fact that the "possibility" that TB will allow Stamkos to leave, is lower than the possibility of a major snowstorm in the Mojave Desert in July, seems to elude the scribe geniuses. Can the third move, the big-name, past-his-prime, coming-home, barely-able-to-skate-without-a-walker move (Jason Arnott now, Jeff O'Neill back in the day), be far behind? Burke will have mastered the art when he does all three in one move, as Quinn did with Jason Allison.

TFC causing us a lot of anxiety right now. We brought in a striker named Danny, maybe because the market research seems to show that our fans love strikers named Danny. The Great One, or Klinsy as everyone in TFC management calls him (just to show what world hepcats they all are), got involved to find us a German player with a funny name and an even funnier nickname, the Lollypop. (I don't think I want to know where that comes from!). I hope these guys can play, because this plane has lost so much altitude in the last year, that you can hear the sound of the waves smacking the fuselage.

Part of me wishes we hadn't made it into this Cacacoffee tournament, but we played an expansion team that is even more snakebit than we are (and that is saying something), so we eked it out, and here we are. We can't sell tickets to these stupid games without dropping prices, and even then, I doubt we'll sell many. So we'll mostly hold the line on pricing and probably be 75% empty for those games....not great optics, but nobody will notice. The Board pays no attention to these games. We are praying for a strong second half so that we can sorta kinda hold the line on pricing, come season seats renewal time in the fall.

Off tomorrow to hit the links with Cufflinks, who seems to have it in his head that we have to have a new Raptors GM underneath him all of a sudden. After he explains the case for this to me in penetrating detail, I will explain to him how the departed Scotsman already pulled that razzle dazzle on us, not that long ago, so Cufflinks had better come up with something better, if what he's looking for is to create a scapegoat that can be sacrificed.

Batman
07-06-2011, 06:28 PM
very nice indeed. Funny thing is, when I heard Colangelo was looking to hire a GM, I immediately had the scape goat thought as well.

mdc 77
07-07-2011, 06:27 AM
A bit of nitpicking...Quinn was not the GM for any of those signings, that was Ferguson's work.

Good article on MLSE, Peddie and his $25 salad.

ensco
10-08-2011, 05:03 PM
As the inspiration for this has now sadly run its course...I too will now take my leave. Namaste.

http://www.fakesteve.net/2011/10/one-last-thing-r-i-p-steve-jobs.html

Oh....by the way....there's a deal in place....they're just dickering with Larry now...all we can do now is wait.

It's going to be beautiful.

VoxPopuliCosmicum
11-25-2011, 10:25 AM
Heeeeeellllllllllllooooooooooooooooooo???????????? ??

There's a reason people leave the stage after a good show: so they can be called back for an encore.

ensco
12-10-2011, 09:45 AM
I know I know, I’ve been dead for three years. Doesn’t mean I don’t still have opinions.

I spent years with Larry, pretending to enjoy his company, just to get us positioned for this. The issue was always going to be price. Rogers has always traded around 6 or 7 times its cash flow. We could never make a major acquisition for 20x cash flow without the shareholders taking massive dilution (by “shareholders” I mean myself, I’m still by far the biggest shareholder, through the Rogers Control Trust.) The Leafs have always been for sale, ever since Ballard died. We just never saw a way to the finish line.

When I moved upstairs, we had to put the nice Indian fellow in, because picking one of the kids would have caused a war in the family. None of them were up to it, anyway. We weren’t expecting much from Nadir and, frankly, until yesterday I would have said he is a modest man, with much to be modest about. The stock price, ARPU, EBITDA, none of these have gone anywhere since I slipped the surly bonds.

But by god, he fooled us all. What a deal.

Throwing a gigantic amount debt on MLSE is the key to the whole thing. Getting someone to lend $500 million like that, to a sports property! is pretty interesting, seeing as for most of my career I couldn’t borrow $50 million against actual hard assets.

Anyone who remembers me remembers how I loved to load on the debt, whenever possible. Putting all that debt on it does lots of interesting things. It gets the cash required to buy it down. It gets Bell to the table because they (and we) only have to come up with $500 million, and we both get to tell the market that it’s a cheap price to pay to control the TV rights forever (and nudge nudge wink wink we’re never competing with each other for these rights again….is this a great country, or what? Where else could you get away with something like that?).

By keeping Larry around, we both (Bell and Rogers) own less than 50%, so we don’t have to consolidate the business on our books, which means we’ll have only a little earnings and cash flow dilution, and no increase in reported debt for accounting purposes.

And this is where all my hard work with Larry over the years pays off: when push comes to shove, as it will about 5 minutes after this deal closes, who do you think Larry’s going to side with? We spent years at each other’s dinners in Forest Hill. Our families know each other. How many parties do you think Larry goes to in Montreal?

When people figure out that we have saddled this team with so much debt, that we can't actually run the teams properly, it will get interesting. I wonder how long that will take. That Glazer fellow we met at Donald Trump's parties in Florida had a bit of a problem with that, as I recall. I'm glad I won't be around for that.

My hat is off to Nadir. I always said “The Best Is Yet To Come”. I mean it today!

Oldtimer
12-10-2011, 09:57 AM
ROFL!!! :rofl:

Heart of Stone
12-10-2011, 10:00 AM
Does Tom Ass-salami have an unusually large head?

ensco
04-29-2012, 08:20 AM
OK, given the amount of grief I’m taking, I’m back to set a few things straight.

This stupid soccer team, it was supposed to be the place where I earned my chops for Peddie’s job. Instead the thing is about to blow up in my face, we are the laughing stock of the sports world. TFC has the worst record of any franchise in North American sports (and maybe the entire sports world) since its inception. That goddamn smooth-talking German Gretzky lookalike, who is now far too busy to return my phone calls or emails, said he knew this Winter guy, which is interesting, considering nobody seems to understand a word Winter says. If the Leafs and Raps weren’t also tire fires, I might be able to skate this, but I’ve got no good move now. If I have to, I’ll move the Dutchman out in a couple of weeks, find an interim solution, and do something permanent in September during the renewal campaign. If I’m still here.

It amazes me. You all think the problem is “MLSE”. Did anybody out there happen to read the biography of the bank executive that is actually the person at Teachers in charge of MLSE? Did you see a lot of sports management expertise (or even operating company expertise of any kind) in that background?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/the-mystery-woman-behind-the-blockbuster-mlse-deal/article2384140/

If Bogers take over, notice I said if, more on that in a minute, at least they have a background in operating subsidiaries. They’ll hire a sports management guy, and manage him properly, ie let him manage the process of deciding how to balance investments in the future with the demand for cash today.

But unless and until Bogers take over, MLSE is a subsidiary of a pension fund. Not an investment of a pension fund, a subsidiary. Teachers control the Board and, except for the fact the Larry has some contractual rights to be on the NHL Board of Governors (rights which actually went away when Teachers bought TD’s stake). We did, and still do, what Teachers wanted us to do. Which was and is, pump EBITDA (ie this year’s cash flow) because the investment always has been, and always will be, for sale. That’s what Teachers does – it buys and sells stuff, it never runs anything. Except this. MLSE is the only significant enterprise it has ever owned a control position in.

So don’t complain to me about the fact that we are charging the season ticket holders for the Liverpool friendly, when we used to give those games away (and every other team in MLS gives those games away). We don’t care, because we’re “Teachers”, not “MLSE”, and Teachers doesn’t intend to be here down the line when the season ticket holders give up in anger. It’s the next guy’s problem.

A bunny with a very good nose is telling me that Bogers could be having problems at the Competition Bureau (they were originally supposed to be through that by “summer”, now it’s “September”). Gee, how could that be? What could be wrong with two huge competitors forming a monopoly to control a property that may have the impact of eliminating the possibility of new entrants emerging in the wireless or internet sectors? In a country where we already pay amongst the highest prices anywhere in the world for these services? I can't imagine.

If Bogers don’t close, then it’s “business as usual”, ie we’re for sale, we run the business for cash, and the dysfunction continues. I think Larry’s got it in for me (you’d think he would make at least once public supporting statement of me during this interim period, but his wars with Peddie made him crazy towards all of us) so I may well be moving along in that scenario. I have a contract, got to hand it to Richard, he knew the rules, unswerving loyalty requires big contracts for his lieutenants, so I’ll see this out either way.

But I’m telling you, if Teachers is still in charge after all this, you all may as well give up. They don’t know what they’re doing. We do the best we can around here, but it’s been hopeless, really. They’ll just replace me with someone else who doesn’t have the power to do what the job requires. Anyone who wants to blame me, or “MLSE”, can go pound sand. Take it somewhere else. Like Jane Rowe’s office.

sarsippius
04-29-2012, 09:01 AM
Gorgeous, that last entry.

ryan
04-29-2012, 02:07 PM
bloody LOL

narduch
04-29-2012, 02:17 PM
Good stuff.

I think the competition bureau will eventually pass the deal though. They will just force the sale of certain assets (Bell's stake in the Canadiens and maybe Gol TV).

los sonadores
05-10-2012, 12:39 AM
Very good stuff. The only 'flaw'.. and it's not really a flaw... just the way fiction is supposed to be: the fake Tom Anselmi seems considerably smarter and more interesting than the real one.

Richard
01-10-2013, 06:03 PM
Please continue this diary. :smile5:

Belfast_Boy
01-11-2013, 10:39 PM
This is awesome, but all good things have a little Payne involved. Time for an entry from Kevin or Nelly?

ensco
01-12-2013, 10:05 AM
The Burke thing is a sideshow, the bosses can't have guys bragging about how they don't have to take orders from the man. He had to be taken down.

Pour encourager les autres.

The real move was the takedown of Tanenbaum. He is contractually entitled to go to his beloved NHL Board of Governors meetings, but only as a figurehead, an empty suit.

In a flash, everything Larry fought for, when he had all the cards in the Teachers sale, is gone. He thought he would hold the balance of power between two bitter rivals, but surprise surprise! we live in Canada, and these guys only pretend to compete.

It's over. Bettman et al will smile at Larry but talk to Cope/Mohammed, or their designates, from this day forward.

Larry is totally screwed - his 25% minority interest would be very tough to sell, given the dominant position of Bogers, and why would those guys buy it from him?

Next up - the new overlords publicly piss all over the internal plans for the teams. "We are hitting the reset button". This is from real reporters, not sports section stenographers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/maple-leaf-sports-and-entertainment-we-are-hitting-the-reset-button/article7265097/

The air war is underway, and you can see the ground war coming. They are going to do the village.

I think I just found out I'm about to be fired in today's paper.

ag futbol
01-12-2013, 12:06 PM
I’d call that article required reading.

You know purely from looking at Tom’s performances over the last couple of months says a lot about how things transpired. When he was named the COO he looked relatively upbeat and there were a few groans from us about things being business as usual. He must have really convinced himself that he was their guy.

The way TFC was handled really served as the canary in the coal mine. When the season was over clearly Tom had final say and Bogers hadn’t quite settled in yet. We must have been planning to hold on to Mariner. Everything we heard suggested that, they looked so sure of themselves. Then as we saw in emails shortly after we start hearing talk about “needing a soccer president”. Looking back that sounds so canned. He didn’t think we needed a soccer president, he was TOLD we needed a soccer president. The new direction might have been suggested by the league, but the orders came from the new owners.

The Payne presser, Anselmi looks shocked, because he knew then what we are seeing now. He’s going to be charged with doing all the dirty work for the new owners and when that’s done he’s going to be fired or marginalized in a fashion similar to the way Burke is. Somebody with integrity would quit and realize the damage that’s being done to their career. Not Tom!

Fitting end to a MLSE executive we could have only dreamed of. I am enjoying watching this guy suffer.

billyfly
01-12-2013, 12:54 PM
As some of you know - I work for one of these companies.

Time will tell if they will be successful.

Oldtimer
01-12-2013, 02:55 PM
Absolutely bang on, as usual. That article is also very enlightening. Larry is in a no-win situation, and Anselmi is just there to wield the axe. Should be very interesting. Change is coming.

Oldtimer
01-13-2013, 08:24 AM
http://www.thestar.com/sports/leafs/article/1314321--maple-leafs-new-ownership-gives-knife-in-brian-burke-s-back-another-twist-dimanno


Maple Leafs’ new ownership gives knife in Brian Burke’s back another twist: DiManno

Anselmi's clearly not in charge here.

OgtheDim
01-13-2013, 09:12 AM
Dimanno's stock in trade is bemoaning faceless bureaucracy. The Burke apologists bemoan how this was done. The other point of view points out that Burke did not have a coherent plan moving forward to deal with some obvious issues.

Thinking through those two reports, its pretty obvious the board got those binders of analysis from somebody other then the current hierarchy. And what they saw was lacking with the Leafs, and TFC, was an ability to discuss issues in depth.

Which is probably one reason why Payne got the go ahead to hire Nelson - Nelson was able to discuss issues of the team succinctly, and provide a plan.

I also get the strong suspicion the BOD didn't like Mariner's inability to provide a coherent plan.

Regardless, Nelson's hiring had to get BOD approval.

Beach_Red
01-13-2013, 11:27 AM
The Burke thing is a sideshow, the bosses can't have guys bragging about how they don't have to take orders from the man. He had to be taken down.

Pour encourager les autres.

The real move was the takedown of Tanenbaum. He is contractually entitled to go to his beloved NHL Board of Governors meetings, but only as a figurehead, an empty suit.

In a flash, everything Larry fought for, when he had all the cards in the Teachers sale, is gone. He thought he would hold the balance of power between two bitter rivals, but surprise surprise! we live in Canada, and these guys only pretend to compete.

It's over. Bettman et al will smile at Larry but talk to Cope/Mohammed, or their designates, from this day forward.

Larry is totally screwed - his 25% minority interest would be very tough to sell, given the dominant position of Bogers, and why would those guys buy it from him?

Next up - the new overlords publicly piss all over the internal plans for the teams. "We are hitting the reset button". This is from real reporters, not sports section stenographers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/maple-leaf-sports-and-entertainment-we-are-hitting-the-reset-button/article7265097/

The air war is underway, and you can see the ground war coming. They are going to do the village.

I think I just found out I'm about to be fired in today's paper.

So much fun in that Globe article. I like the line about there being some risk, as if that's a crazy idea, risk before reward, what is this, some kind of competition?

And this: "But Teachers, accountable only to its members and the Ontario government, could safely ignore the catcalls from fans. For BCE and Rogers, each with millions of customers in the heart of Leafs country, the public-relations stakes are somewhat higher. Losing could rub off on their brands."

Rub off how? Is there a way to watch TV or use a cellphone in this city without paying either Rogers or Bell? How many people are going to sign up for Techsavvy and cancel their cable? Wind? Mobilicity?

I hope Bogers fix the sports teams in this city, but to say their reality is any different from the Teachers is fantasy.

ag futbol
01-13-2013, 11:43 AM
Dimanno's stock in trade is bemoaning faceless bureaucracy. The Burke apologists bemoan how this was done. The other point of view points out that Burke did not have a coherent plan moving forward to deal with some obvious issues.

Thinking through those two reports, its pretty obvious the board got those binders of analysis from somebody other then the current hierarchy. And what they saw was lacking with the Leafs, and TFC, was an ability to discuss issues in depth.

Which is probably one reason why Payne got the go ahead to hire Nelson - Nelson was able to discuss issues of the team succinctly, and provide a plan.

I also get the strong suspicion the BOD didn't like Mariner's inability to provide a coherent plan.

Regardless, Nelson's hiring had to get BOD approval.
Looking at this from afar, I've found it pretty funny how the press has covered Burke. It's almost like the new management has challenged the natural order of things, with the media moaning that a lame duck GM was hard done by and fired at a time that was illogical. Seems heavily at odds with what the average leaf fan says who you talk to. I guess we're not the only ones who feel like the press has their own agenda.

ryan
01-13-2013, 12:03 PM
So much fun in that Globe article. I like the line about there being some risk, as if that's a crazy idea, risk before reward, what is this, some kind of competition?

And this: "But Teachers, accountable only to its members and the Ontario government, could safely ignore the catcalls from fans. For BCE and Rogers, each with millions of customers in the heart of Leafs country, the public-relations stakes are somewhat higher. Losing could rub off on their brands."

Rub off how? Is there a way to watch TV or use a cellphone in this city without paying either Rogers or Bell? How many people are going to sign up for Techsavvy and cancel their cable? Wind? Mobilicity?

I hope Bogers fix the sports teams in this city, but to say their reality is any different from the Teachers is fantasy.

I don't think it's being looked at the right way with this.

Will Bogers brands lose out if these teams still don't win? Possibly a bit, not really likely, I dunno.

Could Bogers reel in a lot more money if these teams win? Absolutely. For previous ownership? Wouldn't have made too much of a difference. This is the key I think. If we all can agree on anything, is that corporate greed is undeniable. These teams win and more people will be subbing for Leafs TV, Raps TV, GolTV, Sports HD packages, Mobile TV packages, etc, etc.

ensco
01-13-2013, 12:58 PM
So much fun in that Globe article. I like the line about there being some risk, as if that's a crazy idea, risk before reward, what is this, some kind of competition?

And this: "But Teachers, accountable only to its members and the Ontario government, could safely ignore the catcalls from fans. For BCE and Rogers, each with millions of customers in the heart of Leafs country, the public-relations stakes are somewhat higher. Losing could rub off on their brands."

Rub off how? Is there a way to watch TV or use a cellphone in this city without paying either Rogers or Bell? How many people are going to sign up for Techsavvy and cancel their cable? Wind? Mobilicity?

I hope Bogers fix the sports teams in this city, but to say their reality is any different from the Teachers is fantasy.

The situation may be hopeless, but I do see Bell/Rogers as fundamentally different than Teachers.

1) Teachers was terrified of public scrutiny, in a way that was pathological. Notwithstanding the fact that it turned out to be a good investment, it was inappropriate for a pension fund to own this (and really, to have a control position in anything). This is the vacuum that all of Peddie, Anselmi and Burke exploited. Acting like the controlling shareholder would have exposed Teachers to the kind of adverse coverage Bell/Rogers are about to start getting. But Bell/Rogers are used to it, people rip them in the papers every day.

2) Teachers was clearly goosing EBITDA at the expense of the long run (i.e. the cost of spending to the cap to finish 10th, and keeping up the illusion that the teams are close, is less than rebuilding properly and taking the big revenue hit ), and this is not necessarily what Bogers will be doing.

But I suspect we have traded one set of corporate dysfunctions for another, which is the root of the anguish in you post.

God must hate Toronto sports fans.

Alonso
01-13-2013, 02:28 PM
So much fun in that Globe article. I like the line about there being some risk, as if that's a crazy idea, risk before reward, what is this, some kind of competition?

And this: "But Teachers, accountable only to its members and the Ontario government, could safely ignore the catcalls from fans. For BCE and Rogers, each with millions of customers in the heart of Leafs country, the public-relations stakes are somewhat higher. Losing could rub off on their brands."

Rub off how? Is there a way to watch TV or use a cellphone in this city without paying either Rogers or Bell? How many people are going to sign up for Techsavvy and cancel their cable? Wind? Mobilicity?

I hope Bogers fix the sports teams in this city, but to say their reality is any different from the Teachers is fantasy.


This guy.

No cable. Free to air better then cable HD quality tv, with about 32 channels or so. More then I need.

Tecksavvy unlimited internet which gets me any show in HD or movies that I want. Thinking about adding the American version of Netflix as well.

Wind mobile, unlimited everything including canada wide calling and data for cheaper then any Rogers or Bell plan.

The only money Bogers is getting from me is my TFC Season tickets.

ensco
01-13-2013, 02:46 PM
This guy.

No cable. Free to air better then cable HD quality tv, with about 32 channels or so. More then I need.

Tecksavvy unlimited internet which gets me any show in HD or movies that I want. Thinking about adding the American version of Netflix as well.

Wind mobile, unlimited everything including canada wide calling and data for cheaper then any Rogers or Bell plan.

The only money Bogers is getting from me is my TFC Season tickets.

Sure.

Once more than 25,000 people are doing what you are doing, Bell and Rogers will unleash the mother of all lobbying campaigns to stop this, it's already in full gear but I suspect we ain't seen nothin' yet.

OgtheDim
01-13-2013, 06:15 PM
Bogers already tried that.

Tried to make 3rd party providers pay more for using the systems the government basically paid Bell and Rogers to put into the ground. They wanted to charge $1 for what costs them $.0005.

They also tried to get WIND kicked out for foreign ownership.

CRTC kicked both to the curb.

****

Bogers doesn't like it when people don't do what they want. Its a corporate trait.

billyfly
01-13-2013, 09:15 PM
Treksavvy uses lots of the Rogers backbone is the irony in Telecom. Everyone uses everyone in the WAN biz.

ensco
01-15-2013, 04:26 PM
It was Larry trying to get Real Tom the CEO gig, that started this whole thing. Amazing.

http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/49318-New-Maple-Leafs-owners-quickly-take-charge-of-organization.html

Beach_Red
01-15-2013, 04:41 PM
It looks like it might be fun watching what happens in the NHL with a motivated Toronto owner.

Oldtimer
01-16-2013, 08:53 AM
It was Larry trying to get Real Tom the CEO gig, that started this whole thing. Amazing.

http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/49318-New-Maple-Leafs-owners-quickly-take-charge-of-organization.html

The backroom politics at ML$E is fascinating... good article.

It's clear that Larry is the root cause of the problems... imagine wanting to reward Tom for his incompetence with the CEO gig! It could be argued that Larry being reduced to a figurehead is a good thing. Finally some accountability after years of abject failure.

Whether Cope knows what he's doing is another thing altogether. Hopefully that will be the case.

Phil
01-16-2013, 09:05 AM
This was gold:


One observer had an interesting point about all of this. He said that under the previous ownership, the Leafs were concerned with winning only news conferences.

I can tell you with Tom in the pressers they won't be winning them. What a train wreck that Burke firing was.

I think its total chaos at that level in MLSE right now, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Oldtimer
01-16-2013, 09:34 AM
Fake Tom really had it right:




Larry is totally screwed - his 25% minority interest would be very tough to sell, given the dominant position of Bogers, and why would those guys buy it from him?

Canary10
01-16-2013, 10:13 AM
It's a very good article. Seems that the pattern of rewarding friends over competence goes all the way to the top in MLSE. If Bell/Rogers can break that down and make results/performance driven personnel decisions that alone would be a minor victory.

Alonso
01-16-2013, 11:04 AM
It's a very good article. Seems that the pattern of rewarding friends over competence goes all the way to the top in MLSE. If Bell/Rogers can break that down and make results/performance driven personnel decisions that alone would be a minor victory.


And hopefully the exit of Anselmi.

I shudder to think how his management style at TFC would translate into all the sports teams that MLSE own.

ensco
09-06-2013, 11:19 PM
Peddie called to tell me it's OK, think about Larry, he's a guy who invested $500M and his reward is he has the right to fetch Leiweke's coffee at board meetings.

I fought fights you never heard about. There were people who wanted to put ads on Leaf jerseys. People who wanted to crucify me for spending money on grass at BMO. Was there ever a more thankless job?

I spent 200% of my time on this goddamn minor league soccer team. Fucking Mo is the cause of all this. I bet my career on that SOB, and never figured out another way when he failed. Everybody acted like it mattered, it's the most bizarre thing I ever saw. I made hundreds of millions in TV rights renewals, but people think that's easy or something.

None of you understand. I wasn't supposed to be here. I went to Ryerson and the University of Saskatchewan. I built buildings for the majority of my working life. I am just like you. Maybe I didn't know what I was doing, but nobody does in this business.

I lived the dream.

Anyways, it's done, now that it's over, there's one call I have to make.

Corleone.

I gotta know - how much did he make on Sean Penn?

__wowza
09-07-2013, 02:43 AM
the end of an era.

Huyton
10-24-2013, 10:53 AM
Needs one last entry...

ensco
10-24-2013, 06:34 PM
The Burke thing is a sideshow, the bosses can't have guys bragging about how they don't have to take orders from the man. He had to be taken down.

Pour encourager les autres.

The real move was the takedown of Tanenbaum. He is contractually entitled to go to his beloved NHL Board of Governors meetings, but only as a figurehead, an empty suit.

In a flash, everything Larry fought for, when he had all the cards in the Teachers sale, is gone. He thought he would hold the balance of power between two bitter rivals, but surprise surprise! we live in Canada, and these guys only pretend to compete.

It's over. Bettman et al will smile at Larry but talk to Cope/Mohammed, or their designates, from this day forward.

Larry is totally screwed - his 25% minority interest would be very tough to sell, given the dominant position of Bogers, and why would those guys buy it from him?

Next up - the new overlords publicly piss all over the internal plans for the teams. "We are hitting the reset button". This is from real reporters, not sports section stenographers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/maple-leaf-sports-and-entertainment-we-are-hitting-the-reset-button/article7265097/

The air war is underway, and you can see the ground war coming. They are going to do the village.

I think I just found out I'm about to be fired in today's paper.

Nothing left to say, Huyton. They've done the village. No survivors.

It's been a slice.

Huyton
10-24-2013, 08:43 PM
Nothing left to say, Huyton. They've done the village. No survivors.

It's been a slice.

You are right. It's just that I'd enjoyed the entire series, and was hoping for one last entry.

Thanks for these...there were some truly inspired moments along the way.

ensco
10-24-2013, 08:50 PM
Thanks for these...there were some truly inspired moments along the way.

You are welcome. Thanks for the kind words.

I may not be 100% done here - I'm told the Peddie book is a festival of howlers. If I ever get around to reading that, I may have one last kick at the can.

Phil
10-27-2013, 12:08 AM
The Peddie book confirms most of our worst fears on so many levels. There may be entries here that are word for word.