Cirque du Montréal

Another year, another coach for the Team Formally Known as The Impact

Photo by Humberto Chávez on Unsplash

There’s an old Canadian soccer proverb that goes like this:

Those who yell clown the loudest often require the biggest shoes.

Ok, it’s not old. I just made it up. Let me explain.

Fans of CF Montreal have long called Toronto FC “clowns” because they see the organization as being forever incompetent. Although this interpretation isn’t without some truth — TFC’s history has been a tad…inconsistent — it does tend to ignore that five-year stretch where the Reds were arguably the second most successful team in Major League Soccer (Seattle gets the No 1 spot during that time, as much as it might suck to admit it).

The clowns wear a star above the crest. And stars are forever.

Beyond that, the accusation conveniently ignores their own club’s history, which has been rather…inconsequential, save a few near misses over the years.

The No Longer Impact’s almost won the CCL, almost made MLS Cup, and almost were the darlings of the 2022 season.

In all three cases, they failed to build on the almost and have instead mostly just puttered along as a lower-table team in MLS that occasionally pokes its head up above its station for long enough to, well, almost matter.

The most consistent thing about CF Montreal has been a quick trigger on change. The club notoriously goes through managers like I go through pints of Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Fudge Core ice cream (I really like ice cream).

If there is one truism about MLS, it’s that teams that are constantly changing their approach are constantly failing. So, this type of manager-of-the-moment strategy is deeply, deeply flawed.

Some might even say it’s a clown-like move to fire managers willy-nilly.

Related: Today CF Montreal fired manager Laurent Courtois. He had only been given 40 games in charge and that came after the previous manager, Hernán Losada, was also only given 40 games in charge. Neither manager was tearing it up — Courtois was at 1.2 points per game and Losada at 1.28 — but in both cases neither was particularly underperforming the talent level at hand.

When evaluating the move, it’s difficult to separate today’s decision from the history of the rest of the knee-jerk moves (a history that includes, it should be noted, allowing Wilfried Nancy, thought by many in MLS to be the best manager working in North America currently, to walk). Today probably has as much to do with the restructuring of the sporting set-up announced in November as it does with Montreal’s 0-1-4 start to the season, but there’s also a certain level of I’ll believe it when I see it with that announcement too.

Meanwhile, assistant coach Marco Donadel takes over as the interim manager as Montreal looks for the next guy it will fire before he has a chance to end the clown show.