The darkest timeline

On Michael Bradley's retirement

The photo above is my laptop’s Home Screen. It shows a moment that I, along with a great deal of you reading this, experienced, but that increasingly feels like a fiction we collectively imagined.

As it is an image I look at every day, it’s one that holds no surprises for me. I can close my eyes and picture every inch of the photograph. As such, I don’t often look at it anymore.

With one exception. The figure in the middle that’s holding the MLS Cup. The intensity of Michael Bradley jumps out. His image dominates the photograph in the same way that his personality dominated Toronto FC then and every year that he has been a significant part of the club.

I think it’s telling that it takes a moment to find Sebastian Giovinco in the photo (bottom left, partially covered by the SYSTM icon). Great talent, but not the heart of TFC. The team went on when he left (almost won another MLS Cup and Shield, in fact). But, when Bradley’s role started to fade, the club lost its way.

In general, I’m someone that puts a lot of stock in numbers — performance metrics that show exactly what a player is contributing to a team. Conversely, I don’t put much stock in intangibles like leadership and heart when evaluating a player’s importance.

I said “much stock” not none. In Bradley’s case, you could not ignore the basic truth. Even when he started to lose a step, the team was still better off with him in the mix. Look at this season. When Bradley was with the team they were an mid-level, underachieving team that drew too often.

When he went down with injury — and especially after he left the club to recover — they became a tire fire.

For TFC fans, 2023 is truly the darkest timeline. So, it is fitting that the club’s brightest light would announce that he is leaving at the end of the season.

It checks out that in this crappy (I spent a considerable amount of time looking for a more professional word than crappy, but in the end I concluded that crappy was the most professional word available to accurately describe the year) season would end with a player this important to the team and the fans to just walk away.

There’s no indication that he will be part of the team moving forward. Not as an ambassador or special advisor or anything. Unless there is an announcement to come, he’s just…gone.

So, yeah, crappy.

Maybe that’s a choice by Bradley and that he just needs a little time before he’s ready to come back. However, it’s hard to not include the separation in with a lot of other things that, collectively, have made this team less important to its fans, less connected to its history (both good and bad years — the bad years of the past still had a soul) and, seemingly, lacking in any idea of how to get its groove back.

The saviour of a manager couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the first 6 weeks of his job, for God’s sake.

From a purely football perspective, it was getting towards the time when a plan needed to be put in place for Bradley’s exit and evolution towards his next role. Something that would have allowed for that transition, without the sudden removal of his leadership and presence.

That’s what a functional football team would have done.

Instead, fans have five days to figure out how to say goodbye to the most important player to ever play for the club.

Then five months to figure out whether they still care about a club that seems to have completely lost its way.