Once again proving the theory that the best coaches are sometimes guys who weren't particularly good.Originally Posted by Amir.
Once again proving the theory that the best coaches are sometimes guys who weren't particularly good.
He has 10 goals lifetime in 75 MLS games. I wouldn't expect it.
They can have tests, doesnt mean he's performing well or impressing anyone. Not that I think anything of TFC's ability to keep players fit. In fact, you can add Ayo to their list of failures.
Look at the evidence. He's a shadow of the player he once was and the loan suggests the team knows it. He used to be a tank but could run 20 minutes without looking ready to keel over. Search images from 2019/20, there's a startling difference. Even Jozy at his lowest points looked much better.
Not gonna harp on this because I don't want to make it look like I'm fat-shaming. Good kid, I'm sure, but I have expectations for professional footballers, and this guy has become downright painful to watch. High body fat or not, his fitness levels are embarrassing.
People always say this but he was never good and never had a gas tank. He is a shadow of a shadow of a PR campaign at best like JMR is.
i can see tfc selling him for a minimal amount of GAM but still having to pay some of his salary next year, just to free up the u22 spot.
I thought he looks fit (but not particularly skilled) during MLS is back . I still can’t believe we didn’t sell then. The over hype on account of his dual nat status was considerable.
Apparently there’s a 23 year old scout who’s responsible for a lot of the Cassius unearthing… manning still very much not involved over the last 2 weeks
Moving onto FM23 scouting instead of Transfermarkt.
He's not going to change being hands off, because he believes it works if you hire the right staff.
He sees his role as keeping the team profitable and letting football people build the football side.
He just has faith in a different pair of guiding hands now -- Hernandez rather than Bob or Jack Dodd.
He's been sold on taking the more modern approach of eschewing "known quantities" and personal recommendations in favor of statistics and evidence of prior performance and future potential.
My understanding is he has no role in scouting or selection and hasn't since Pozuelo, other than Insigne. That's his position, anyway. I know Jack Dodd has claimed otherwise, but the version I get is that he was very hands on until Ali's second year, and then he took their request that he be less top-down to heart and divorced himself from their duties. In other words, he stopped paying close attention or interfering.
I was told pretty directly that he's accepted this needs to be done by a team using player performance data to target acquisitions properly.
If anything goes wrong this time around he's basically gonzo. The whole rebuild has to go perfectly.
The only thing he's involved in on the football side, as far as I can tell, is deciding on a new manager. They have targets already, they're just under contract. Most of his role is the business side, still.
Whether that plays into Ensco's notion that he's the walking dead, I don't know. Certainly, he's taking a shitkicking for a while now, and my sense is that some of that has been internal, so he might be president of the soccer side in name only.
I get no sense any of this has affected the Argos side of the job.
I always said this was the better choice for lazy scouting.
He's still reasonably quick. The one start he had this year, he had two balls over the top. He got called off on one of them but DID beat the defender comprehensively. On the second, he was run down, but the guy wasn't blowing past him, they were keeping pace.
I still think he's got some quickness. He's just never been a striker, really. He was a primarily a winger until 2019/20.
He's never learned tricky striker movement in the box. He can just try and beat a guy off his back shoulder. It's his only move.
He had a decent goal in pre-season, as I recall, where he thumped one on a half-volley from the right side of the box into the roof of the net.
But his lack of movement, combined with lack of playing time and service, reduce him to being a poacher, basically.
If a poacher's great, they can be a poacher and just get clean up goals all the time.
But most professional forwards above about English League Two level these days have to have more in their bag of tricks.
Certainly wouldn't hurt to have him lose 20 pounds, though. He's not fat, he's just too bulk. I mean, he's only 5'8. 5'8, 200 is weightlifter bulk, not soccer agile.
Multiple Premier league teams and managers have admitted to using it, and it now licenses a 'pro' version to teams as an official scouting database (one of several available).
I just don’t get it, at all. Seems like many of us (as complete novices) weren’t sold by him whatsoever while those “in the know” thought he was a legit prospect.
I just think any way you slice it before or after injury, winger or striker, he’s just lacking a lot of tools that would otherwise be necessary to be an effective pro.
His good U20 run with the USMNT caused a lot of his good press.
I'd say that's true of most TFC youth I've seen. Our dev pipeline is hot garbage, let's be honest.
They really do manage to get moved ahead despite a) not producing and b) lacking basic fundamental skills, in several cases.
The thing is, if you're bigger and/or faster/stronger than all the other kids your age, football is a sport where that can be enough until they're competing against others just as big/fast/strong, or in the rare case like JMR, with just as good ball skills.
All of these guys would do fine at the CPL level because everyone in that league has serious holes in their game.
Jordan's going the same way. When he was in the youth teams and at TFC II when it was in USL1, he was lethal because he could hold his ground in the box or cut in and he had a few good tools. He can finish with head and feet, he can reliably hit the corners of the net. So he mostly just had to be first to the ball.
Now that he's playing against pro coverage that isn't easily shaken, he's shown no sign of adapting his movement, of learning how to split central defenders or find the blind side. It's probably why they never give him a chance.
I think the bigger question is why we have such poor prospects in the first place, and why those athletic enough to have potential clearly haven't had good enough coaching.
TFC Academy, let's be honest, has produced almost no quality professionals relative to the thousands of kids who've gone through it. In fact, the few kids who've had real potential and made it have nearly all been kids they excused early or who quit and went elsewhere first.
Look at any of the young players in this league like Cremaschi at Miami, Noel Buck at Philly, the sixth-round pick from college at orlando Duncan maguire. These are all guys under 22 who are absolutely ready to compete coming into the league, just like kids that age in Europe.
In the top leagues now, if a kid hasn't made it by 22, they're generally sold. We have to get to that sort of level of productivity.
Enjoy the donuts in San Jose, fatass.
(sorry, I needed to vent.)
Ah, true! Forgot about that. Yes, he was quite promising at those levels.
It’s a lot to unpack. Certainly many dimensions to it (as you outlined above).
Here is my 10,000 ft level observation about why a lot of our youth players fail to improve: we have conditioned (or allowed) them to believe signing a first team contract is “making it”
Re: Jordan Hamilton. I think the physical tools were there. Skill was good enough where he had a foundation to enter the league. But nothing improved. He needed to put in more work to step up his game.
Not to sound too negative but football is often a zero sum business for players. Someone wins and someone loses. Anyone who wants to make it needs to know you have to outwork your competitors.
Last edited by ag futbol; 07-25-2023 at 04:08 PM.
That's a lithe CFL safety - maybe his data was put in the wrong sports science file
If we can sign Mbappe for 750 million this year and let him leave for Real Madrid afterwards, we might have a chance...
Hummel will take the 750 million
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/matshummels/status/1683850586368749570
Manning: He stopped Mbappe. He must be even better
Not gonna lie, as a man with a German mother, Mats Hummels and Per Mertesacker are two of my all time favorites. I'll die on the hill that Hummels was a top 3 CB in his day, but in those days your reputation was based on your FIFA pace rating.Hummel will take the 750 million
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/matshummels/status/1683850586368749570
Manning: He stopped Mbappe. He must be even better
Certainly not meant to combat your info, cheers
Didn't take it as such dude, all good. I'm also fully aware that the person feeding me info occasionally has their own take/agenda in all this.
https://twitter.com/TorontoFC/status...59DsZk9DA&s=19
Looks like Bern made the trip for leagues cup game tommrrow.
FWIW/FYI…
Check out this tweet at [URL]https://twitter.com/MichaelSingh94/status/1683942565899280384[/URL]
Another example of TFC's excellent player development
/s
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/MLS/status/1684008724552187909
You are making the mistake that people watching the Tour de France make. You are looking at the peloton, not the leader.
Diomande costs $1M. Insigne is so far in front in this race that you cannot see second place.
“What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.”
I've watched him a few times; he's a journeyman MLS player, but good enough to be a backup at least.
Why we just cut him after giving him six appearances, or something like that, is beyond me.
But I said the same when we got rid of Lovitz, and when we got rid of Shaffelburg, and when we let Tyler Pasher go. They were all serviceable at this level almost immediately out of school. Those are the players that MLS teams should hold onto, players who have room to grow but can already contribute solid substitute minutes and the odd start.
Part of this I blame on Vanney. He just refused to use more than about 15 key players each season and the young guys never got the confidence they need.
I think the fact that most of the decent roster players we release are American is also a reflection of the idea they had of building up tons of unknown Canadian talent and selling it for big money. Even before Alphonso, TFC was looking at development like it was a cash cow, instead of advacing the hardest working and most-motivated players.
We've just been really dumb in our understanding of how players grow, how their confidence needs to be built up but the desire has to always be there.
We let Shaff go to Nashville and kept Ayo only to loan him for a roster slot. We could've literally given Ayo to Nashville, agreed to pay his full salary for them so we gain nothing, kept Shaff and still be better off.
But that couldn't happen under Bob and under the assumption he's a winger. It never really occurred to them that his shooting percentage is really high, that he's got sprinter speed and can consistently hit the goal. He's a fucking striker, which is basically how Nashville uses him -- it's an outside left striker, but narrow, not wide.
It's very frustrating to me that fans, who have NO BUSINESS being able to make better calls than our front office, seem to able to do it so regularly just by looking past cultural conventions of MLS and American soccer and at what's actually happening on the pitch.
Oh, yeah... good point dude. I certainly missed that. Even if he gets healthy and comes good, he's clearly a 10-15 goal forward at best in this league, nowhere near the ridiculous sum he's getting.
With the alleged matching sponsorship deals, he's making $355,000 a week here, more than 90% of the Premier League. Truly the worst contract in sports history, relative to output.
(Actually, maybe not. There was a Leeds player who had a guaranteed deal, got injured and barely played for them. I forget his name. But he was paid the equivalent of $35,000 per minute as a result. But this ain't far off that.)
I think maybe the reason it's been stressed to me that Bernardeschi "could still be very valuable" more than once is that they might believe they can recoup their money on Insigne with a Saudi sale, but if they're seen as having to get rid of both, those who usually don't pay attention may do so once again, and heads may roll.
Watching Messi play last night, that’s someone who is massively bringing up the level of his teammates. Insgine and Berna really not offering anything substantial in this category. In fact, they don’t even bring up the level of each other’s play. We look better when only one (or sometimes neither of them) are on the field.
I’m struggling to see a future where either remains with Toronto.
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