Was it worth it, John?

Endings are rarely pretty.

Photo by Junseong Lee on Unsplash

This is a strange one to process. For nearly as long as I’ve had a profile and a platform to write about soccer, John Herdman has been part of the scene.

Arguably, and often, the biggest part of the scene, actually. From the time that he came to Canada to coach the women, there has been almost a cult-like belief in his ability to do magical things.

He often did, to be fair. Herdman took the women from broken to contenders. He then did something that seemed even less likely — he took the men back to the promised land of the World Cup.

So, when he went to TFC, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that he might be able to bring the team back to the highs that they had under now-just-one-win-from-another-MLS-Cup-appearence Greg Vanney.

He made people believe in him, and anyone who expressed any doubts about what his ceiling with teams really were was usually shouted down. For many (most?), Herdman seemed untouchable.

That’s because he was untouchable. Until he wasn’t.

This is where it gets strange for me. We are now living in a Canadian soccer scene that does not include John Herdman. That’s not honestly something that I thought would happen for quite some time. His fall from grace came fast and it came straight out of left field.

There probably wasn’t an MLS coach more secure in his role than Herdman was on Canada Day. He won’t be TFC’s manager on Boxing Day. Wild.

In the end, the same thing took Herdman down that always takes down (and he was taken down. He resigned to save face. He would have been fired had he not taken this step) those who reach the near untouchable status: hubris. He thought he was smarter than everyone else in the room and that his actions wouldn’t have consequences.

They did. And those consequences are going to be severe. What was a career that seemed to have no limits has now been derailed. He will struggle to find work. I doubt he will re-surface in North America anytime soon. It’s a mess and it’s all of his own making.

Also a mess is Toronto’s re-building plan, which was tied to Herdman. This is a club that is more than a tad rudderless. There’s an argument to be made that getting rid of Herdman might not be the worst thing in the long term (his record since qualifying to the World Cup hasn’t been all that good), but this is still an unexpected and unwelcome bump in the road to being competitive again.

To say the they need to nail the next hire is an understatement.

Speaking of, in the press release today, TFC said that they would start their search immediately — and I’ve already heard rumblings that they might already have someone lined-up (we will follow up on that more in the days ahead) — but it’s hard to focus on that right now. Rather, today is all about processing what was once unthinkable.

John Herdman is gone.