That’s interesting. What does he think TFC is offering season ticket holders at the moment? I’d be curious.Originally Posted by Ultra & Proud
Honestly, this has been the worst sports experience in the city for the last decade. We just barely got enough air out of the championship to keep us all going. Otherwise it’s been like rooting for the Washington Generals.
That was when I asked him to remove my credit card number from the account. He was obviously not happy about it and the tone of the chat went south. Very abrupt after that. Almost like I insulted him personally.
I am not so certain of that.... long time Argos Fan - but let's be real, it's a 1 in 9 chance of winning and SOOOOOOOO many qualified Canadian Candidates to be the president. If they are basing his tenure on that then Fire the MLSE Board. Seriously, and he can't hang his hat on Apple renewals because Apple knows how to track the source of the subscriptions and losses therein.
Maybe this should be called the "Bill Manning wishful thinking thread." 🙂
I honestly doubt there's too many outside of MLSE hq that want him to stay, but what we want doesn't determine what the MLSE board will do. I'm sure they want to win, but they still have the mistaken idea that Manning is the guy to turn things around when it's him that sunk a winning franchise.
What we don't know is how much the overall ticket buying base even really knows about him, you have to get a feel for what those outside of supporter groups feel, are they pushing the club for change? Do we have a sense of that?
Remember The Man, The Legend, The Goal 5-12-07 and All That #9 Left On The Pitch, Thanks For The Memories !!!
The general population don't have to know who manning is or have an opinion, they just have to not buy tickets. That's what gets him fired
And I'd also again say the average Tfc supporter, given how niche this team is, is more "hardcore" than normal. You have to have quite an interest to get seasons for this team. We saw that here when we weren't sure if the Bradley out sentiment would be reflected in the crowd and it was, he got booed out of the building every time
He's a charming guy. He's easy to like on a personal basis. I think he largely has been able to coast on that for years.
Now that crunch time and hard decisions are coming down, he seems to this point to have been very much out of his element.
I'm not certain he'll survive the end of the year.
I do think he wants to win and do the right thing; I just don't think he's ever had the tools -- because he hasn't needed them -- to analyze, dissect and rebuild something of this magnitude.
I get the sense he's under a lot of pressure to produce results now. How much of that is from above and how much is him reading the heat -- which I'm not sure he really did until they started booing Bob at games -- is unclear.
I suspect his past successes weigh heavily on his side, despite largely being built on existing club infrastructure.
So they'll give him at least one more go on the coaching hire, because the argument is that no one would've foreseen Bob's tenure being so disastrous.
But I also think people here see his job very differently from the board.
We see him as involved in sporting operations and directly involved, the guy running the show.
And that hasn't been his role. It wasn't why they hired him. If anything, after Lieweke showed so much strength and involvement, they wanted a guy who was more hands off and wouldn't be quite so ambitious.
He's an executive who has spend most of his time on how they generate revenue. As long as we still had a couple of playoff appearances and made good money, no one was really paying attention to the forest, just the trees.
Most of his decisions in terms of hiring the people who actually run the sports side have been based on already knowing and liking those people, which usually also amounts to trusting someone. Not always, but certainly professionally. In MLS 1.0 and for most of 2.0 -- really right up to the TAM era -- that was how the league ran.
I think on a personal level, he was naive, and now feels a bit betrayed and foolish. It's been a good number of years since trusting your associates in MLS -- the old boys network -- was no longer good enough to put together a competitive team, and he has pivoted too late.
It has required dual disasters to shake him from that and towards the more modern approach.
If I'm a board member, that would strike me as a fatal flaw, a lack of general ruthlessness as a boss. Sometimes, it's just the job, and you have to be a dick. And he has not been willing to do that. He has not enforced rigid standards, he has not iteratively improved his workforce, he has not created a culture of improvement and excellence. Frankly, half of the shit he has written off as "just one mistake" has been shit Lieweke would never have brooked for a second.
Despite the inference that he is top-down in the Athletic piece, I would say the exact opposite was true; he has effectively silo'd himself, which in government bureaucracy can be a very effective deniability tool, but in private industry is death.
I know until he flew out to Cincy and New England he seemed pretty convinced Bob could turn it around, but then watched us on the road, in person. Paid close attention to the offense, paid close attention to the body language. What he saw in the first half of Cincy was the Italians trying, putting balls into the box, creating chances, but having no supporting cast.
At that point, I believe it clicked for him that it wasn't just Bernie being an immature dick and Insigne whining a little; the emperor had no clothes, tactically and personnel wise.
Personally, I have very little trust or faith in people to be consistently excellent. Their track record and their evidence have to support and address how they're going to do the job, or you get rid of them.
One of these, Ali Curtis, is a guy he's known since they both played together briefly when he got out of college in the mid 90s. In o ther words, he hired his buddy, who he saw as bright, because Ali can, among other things, weave quite a skein of superficially intelligent bullshit. Thus the 300-page plan at New York.
During Ali's early tenure, Manning was still involved. He helped swing the Pozuelo signing with the usual charm offensive. But then he was essentially convinced by his department heads that they didn't need "constant interference" and he backed off. That would've been around the end of 2018, by my reckoning.
Instead of finding a balance between involvement and letting them work, he went from avidly interest and involved to barely paying attention.
Since then, he has been hands off most of the time. He felt he'd hired "good people" and they'd run the sports show while he ran the business side.
I'm pretty sure he's aware of how fatal an error that was an is now quite neck-deep in everything. But I'm also sure he's gambling on Hernandez coming through for him, as he does not have the background to properly make football decisions himself, and most of those who might have, have left.
If you want to get into the deep reeds, I'd say he deferred most of the team to Ali and Jack Dodd. Neither did a competent job. When Bob arrived, he decided the fix was to take all the authority away from Dodd, who was still here, and vest it in Bob, whose track record at LAFC suggested enough recent success to be a safe pivot.
But a) Bob's not nearly as competent, open or flexible enough to run his own show and B) Dodd took it as an affront that he wasn't getting the GM roll and an internal culture war of sort started, with Dodd cast as the traditional guy who ran scouting and acquisition via contacts, and Hernandez cast as the replacement who wanted to go strong on analytics and recent performance data.
Dodd was "promoted" to technical director in Portland in the same was Ali was "promoted" to run Nextpro, which I think amounted to Manning and both men calling in favors and finding them soft landings.
If he makes it out of this with TFC as part of his job still, I suspect it will either a) be a minor miracle or b) be exceptionally lucky that he listened, after all the other bullshit he's accepted for years, to the contrarians. The style he's governed by since about 2018 is badly out of date, way past its prime.
Like I said, I like him on a personal basis and genuinely think he's trying. He seems to feel genuinely shitty about how he's handled things. I just think he's in quite far over his head. I've seen people turn worse situations around before, but it's rare and incredibly difficult, not to mention draining.
The biggest question is what are the odds that this time he picks the right people to do the job?
I think 25% would be too optimistic based on his previous hires. This is where the board & Bill should be concerned. And us too but I figure most of us expect him to hire some friend of a friend who has a USMNT connection and repeat the cycle of failure all over again.
Suspect this would be more of an @ MLSE Eaves matter than a Manning matter. Besides, technically, IMO, MLSE has reasonable, contractual wording, grounds to challenge the decision and the subsequent unusual attempt to directly collect from them.
I'd say the odds of that are exceedingly slim -- the hiring friends part, not the 25%. That might be optimistic, on track record.
My impression is he's quite unhappy with so many "friends" tanking and has been convinced that young guys like Hernandez who are arguing for Billyball are the way to go.
I think when a person doesn't really know what to do to fix a bad situation, they end up relying on the advice of others a lot, so what we get out of this is going to be a complete crapshoot.
Maybe Hernandez is brilliant and ends up being the next Masai; maybe he's crap and they're both let go in six months. That's who he's rolling his dice with, though. I think Hernandez predicted some of this happening and wasn't initially listened to, because the latest "bloody big deal" was making them all thing like overexcited teenagers about more glory years.
It has zero to do with manning
I only posted it as it's often said here MLSE don't care as Tfc is just a rounding error so they don't care about the wasted money
But they'll goto war with the city over a fraction of insignes wages. The point is they absolutely do care about the bottom line and Mannings wasteful spending has to have him close to the edge
Yeah, this is his last shot. They'll give him Bob, because Bob's track record meant almost anyone in the league would do the same. But the clear lack of involvement in day-to-day, coupled with the massive waste on the Italians, means this is it.
If they don't make the playoffs that might actually be it. But I suspect the standard will be how the new director and manager perform. The remit will have changed from "make us money" to "worry about the money" to "if you don't worry about the football, we're going to be too worried about the money to keep you."
Yeah. I would strongly get the impression they are evaluating Manning on something and there is a timeline. I go back to that presser. He looks ridiculously out of his shell uncomfortable off the top and not in a way where he’s scared of the press core. I think someone up top told him something. To reach this point is already silly and he should be gone. But I’d peg his safety as something less than 100% this year and less than 50% for 2024.
Switching gears for a second, I know we focus on infield results (as we should) but operations on other areas of the team also appear to be in shambles. Communication with fans is poor, concessions appear to be nothing more than lazy attempts to extract money from attendees, but I’d say the biggest downfall was that security incident against Montreal is a major black eye for the team. They should have proper oversight or direction over the security company to prevent that.
He’s really doing a poor job running this team at all levels.
^ adding to the above and back in gear.
Results Speak Volumes
2018 - Missed Playoffs - Pass though, injuries and focus on winning CCL
2019 - Finished 4th - Good result - MLS Cup Finals, CCL Round of 16, Lost to MTL in CanChamp
2020 - Finished 2nd - Covid played high volume of games again MTL and Vancouver who sucked, CanChamp, Playoff First Round loss
2021 - Missed Playoffs 13th E, 26th Overall, Lost CCL Round 2, Lost CanChamp Final to Mtl
2022 - Missed Playoffs 13th E, 27th Overall, Lost CanChamp to Vancouver
2023 - Currently Out of Playoffs - 14th E, 27th Overall, Lost CanChamp 1/4 Finals to Montreal ==> 7 points out of 30 available last 10 games
Talk amongst yourselves
Am curious, does anyone know how much Manning makes a year in compensation?
I think he knows he is done in MLS after this gig, so will do/say anything to continue to steal? a pay cheque. He has done way less with more than any other MLS team president given the payroll at his disposal. Its shocking how bad we are. And yet he thinks it doesn't mean he is doing a "bad" job.
Very good overview.
People can still disagree on some of the details, but the level of failure is indisputable. For example, I was fine with them letting Giovinco and Vanney go. But in both cases, this was long foreshadowed and very predictable. Yet both times they seemed utterly unprepared -- especially WRT Giovinco. There are plenty of other cases where they seemed ill-prepared and ended up making rushed or bad decisions, often after getting backed into a corner.
I think we often want some former players & coaches back, or want them to have stayed longer, because we have ZERO confidence that this team can find someone as good or better. There are thousands of players and coaches theoretically available around the world that could help in some way...
I AGREE!
RE some people saying, Manning seems to be doing OK on the business side -- season ticket sales were surprisingly good this year, probably based on the Bloody Big Italian Job. But I think much of that support is a mile wide and half an inch deep. With both Insigne and Berna struggling for a variety of reasons, and with the overall crap served up by the club, many of those people are not showing up at games, and I have a hard time believing many will renew. Plus, the board isn't going to want to blow that much money again. What rabbit are they going to pull out of the hat next to keep people semi-interested? Plus, I think advertising is pretty anemic, and there aren't many special events etc. to create a buzz.
RE what am I doing about it: I don't think contacting ticket reps does any good. There seems to be no interest in hearing from SSH'ers. Also ties to ag futbol's comments -- I just don't get the feeling they care much about season ticket holders anymore, and/or they don't have any PR strategy.
Plus, it would have to be my seatmate contacting them, as he holds the seasons tickets.
Otherwise: I'm spending $0 inside the stadium when I go. I'm no longer picking up south end single tickets to games when my seatmate takes a pair. I think that's the case for many people. Resales when you can't make it have been anemic for a couple of years. I'm not even watching many games anymore, either when they're away or when I'm not at a local game. That was UNHEARD of in the past. Only saving grace is that I don't have to pay extra anymore when I do watch games, as we can watch them on Apple as SSH.
Honestly, I can't say I'm actively protesting -- I just don't care anymore. Caring is too much effort for this current band of bozos. That's also how I survive the games when I do go. I've had fun getting to know my neighbouring season ticket holders this season, and have had some nice chats. Although the schedule is so strange, so there's been a huge gap between games.
EDIT I know "not caring" isn't really good. I'm hardly a supporter anymore, after I was so very much into it in the past. But you have to re-evaluate things occasionally. What a strange setup, co-ownership by the country's two biggest media conglomerates, that are screwing us and the whole country in many different ways. High prices for tickets (especially new season tickets) and concessions -- what a crazy price increase for food & drink this year. Plus the management and players seem to not care often either.
Honestly, many things in the world are crashing and burning. There are other areas where I should invest any spare capacity in terms of time, money, and caring. And there are far more entertaining diversions, when I need that.
Last edited by Auzzy; 07-05-2023 at 12:56 PM.
this is it exactly, his 'doing well' on the business side is a temporary reprieve. The shit hits the fan when renewals come in and I think that could be the final straw for him. Unless one (maybe two) Messi matches bails him out, and it might, I expect season ticket sales to be alot worse next year than this one and that'll make his insane overspending even harder to stomach for top brass
The leading indicators (Second hand ticket market and % of butts in seats, which is low, I don't care what it feels like, we all have eyes and the games are recorded) are not painting a good picture for how this will play out.
agreed...this year's season tickets in large part due to the hype of the Italians coming last year...and even if we did blow with them as well and stink out the joint...it was always "next year" a full year with them and we will be a top team in the playoffs....
And now reality hits and we are done. If we sell the italians and don't replace with quality (real proven quality) lots of renewals won't happen.
Keep them, and lots of renewals won't happen thinking if we are THIS bad with them, how much worse will we be without them?
Sad to say but I have no interest watching a bunch of journeymen or tfc2 (at most) level players go out and lose game in and game out...nor do I want to watch any more early season late night games freezing my a.ss off......with no games on weekend afternoons.
If they are losing the die hard fans like ourselves here...imagine what the casual fan thinks..or those that came for the Italians hype...they won't be around either.
Right now we are locked in with seasons from last year...next year, it for sure will be way less....even if they somehow drop ticket prices...
This Apple tv crap also will end up costing many fans in the future who don't have it, won't get it and then don't watch us and lose interest or care about this team.
This will sound laugh out loud lazy but I wonder if we took the number of seats on stub-hub before kickoff and subtracted it from the max attendance if they would be less than their announced attendance number on some days, haha.
I would say the actual attendance is fudged by 75% to 100% on most home matches this year. Last Saturday they announced at 27K but there's no way. Maybe 16K. I remember when it was pretty packed back in 2019 when the only visibly barren areas were the top corners of the west upper deck and they announced those at 27K to 29K. It's totally not like that anymore. Whatever floats their boat but it's not a good sign going forward.
Auzzy -
Your post is very similar to where I am - APATHY - I simply don’t care very much anymore - this used to be this wondrously fun thing I got to share with my kid and other like minded folks - I’ve seen bad teams before as I’ve been RPB and TFC since year one (how many of us are even left?!) - but this isn’t just bad, it’s embarrassing and frankly not worth wasting my time on - life is too short to be miserable all the time watching this garbage - I sometimes find myself just watching on FastForward out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. It’s not like we’ve needed a top level striker or anything since the glory years - anyone could see that - and our answer year after year was to buy “projects” or “past their primes” to try to put the ball in the net - it’s like someone forgot that scoring goals is really important in terms of winning games and making people interested in your product as a form of entertainment…..
(I also miss going to Joes (and even seeing Coach GT with a big smile happy to see us) immensely and not having it around anymore has hurt our particular group tremendously in my opinion in terms of creating a “home” for us to meet at)…..
TFC was a big part of my life that I looked forward to every week during the season and could enjoy even if it was just a small niche market that followed the team. Now it’s horrendous scheduling in mostly awful weather to watch a minor league team play with hugely overpriced talent that simply came as a cash grab and could care less about this team succeeding.
Sad what we have become - we are simply an embarrassing afterthought…..
Manning is typical MLSE executive, nice guy, good at marketing the team but little or no technical skills for the job. Nice guys stay on at MLSE even after a series of very bad decisions. Caldwell and De Guzman have both ripped TFC and are calling out poor decision making and team selection. That was all driven by Manning. He has to be let go. My only hope is that they decided not to pull the trigger until the new CEO is in place and he/she can pick the new executive team.
maybe this legend in his own mind should of taken the club for 4 games.instead he gave it to dunny the sacrificial lamb.what a coward/clown.day one ssh.i will not renew if the argo prez is still around
Now Larry and the telco’s are fighting each other over sale of his share. I’m sure this can only mean good things.
Please someone break up this sports monstrosity for the good of the city.
Seems we received a similar e-mail and had some credit to still suddenly and quickly use. Apparently, according to the following, we may have been forced/tricked into making that spend; in our case in-person at Real Sports to meet the deadline. If accurate, for all you hammers, this is another nail to seal Manning's MLSE employment coffin. This deviation from that situation's original agreement with SSH's would have certainly required his approval as TFC President and feels more like an unnecessary and desperate attempt to influence a reporting period number.
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/TFCpics/status/1671600355510046722
Last edited by Mr. Inbetween; 07-06-2023 at 02:51 AM.
This guy has destroyed my passion for football - to reflect on 2016/2017/ early 2018 and 2020- and to not feel that certain way since 2020- is heartbreaking- in a time where people are dealing with personal health, mental health and financial instabilities this guy has really gutted my feeling towards our local footy team- not to mention increasing seasons tickets by 22% during a downturn economic year where interest rates are increasing. SMH.
If it wasnt for Canada men;s im not sure if i still would have stuck around. I mean ive spent more on Canada Men's in the past two season VS. TFC ( although Canada Soccer Federation isnt no better) - at least the on field product is some what entertaining to watch.
I dont even have anger towards the guy- but I guess respect that he has finessed his longevity on us TFC supporters dime.
The fact a lot of dead money is wasted paying people to not play for TFC or to sit at home and get paid.
I guess the best way I can describe it is- as a reflection of the TFC pitch- from 2017 it was at peak shape and has deteriorated yearly since- true reflection on how the club has been mis-managed.
Oh and the lack of security to cut cost is incredulously stupid and clearly doesnt care for any of the fans.
Interesting. When I complained about this to my rep, he pointed out that in the season ticket renewal e-mail, they mentioned the June 30/23 date. Which is fair, I guess, but the fact that the credit expires at all is a big fuck you to fans who left their money with the club.
So an email from last fall is the governing rule here? How about sending an email a month before with some home games to actually use the credit up? The late email is a total FU.
This organization needs to remind itself that its cocky attitude of we have the highest payroll in the league and we can hose our fans is over. They’ve got at least three years of yet another rebuild and they will be bleeding season ticket holders in the fall.
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