Clubs talk to players endlessly while they are under contract.
At some point the acquiring club has to deal directly with the selling club and negotiate. Because of the release clause, MLS/TFC got fooled into thinking they could avoid that. A mistake.
The issue is that because of the nature of what happened here, it all immediately broke out in public, without the ability to “drop it” or whatever. Plus the context (Genk's various competitions, and their place in them) made it really reputationally worse than it otherwise would be
The way to think about this.... If Al Hilal had “signed” Giovinco in the middle of the 2017 playoffs, without ever talking to the team, and it actually wasn’t true because of some technicality... how would we have felt?