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Oh, to be the shirts, shorts and socks of Kyle Bekker and Emery Welshman on laundry day.
A one-rinse cycle gets the sweat out and not a touch of detergent more is used to rid their kits of those non-existent grass or mud stains. Freshly laundered and delivered as they always are, it may seem tedious for these two players to dress up every game, sit on the bench and wait for a chance that sometimes – oftentimes – never comes.
Bekker and Welshman were drafted this year by a Toronto FC side looking to not only fix a tarnished reputation from the season last, but also looking for ways to gain as much valuable allocation money as any team can at such an event.
Yet the 2013 season is now soon behind us, and all the promise of this Canadian duo ripping up enemy opposition is also a thing of the past. What started as potential has now become a pragmatic realism that has become clearer and clearer as the months rolled on:
Bekker and Welshman did not live up to the hype surrounding them in 2013, and it’s probably not their fault.
At the beginning of the year, many stories lauded praise for Kevin Payne and company for drafting Canadian! It was, after all, a master stoke in draft dealing, to send pick number one all the way down to 16 and still come home with two local heroes. Bekker quickly made the national team! Welshman, having played alongside Bekker in his earlier years, would surely follow suit, yes?
At the start of preseason, I made two claims in this article: one, that Toronto FC drafted for cash and not for quality, and two, this draft could only be seen as a success with hindsight, after seeing just how Toronto FC used the allocation money gained compared to who it missed out on drafting this season.
I also outlined the criteria that Kevin Payne and Toronto FC would need to follow to make for a strong draft:
“Payne needs to convert this allocation money into at least two players of noticeable quality.”
So, then, the (literally) million-dollar question is this: did Toronto FC spend its allocation money well?
Running down the list of players Toronto FC signed, there wasn’t a lot of allocation money used to sign numerous players. Footballers like Justin Braun, Gale Agbossoumonde, Robert Earnshaw, Jonathan Osorio, Ryan Richter, Darel Russell, Bobby Convey and Mark Bloom did not cost any allocation money for Toronto FC.
In fact, during the course of the season, Toronto FC picked up even more allocation money by trading Luis Silva to D.C. United, and sending Ryan Johnson, Milos Kocic and, eventually, Maximiliano Urruti to the Portland Timbers. The club may have also gained allocation money for the sale of Darren O’Dea.
Where did Toronto FC use allocation money? The details are not 100 per cent clear due to Major League Soccer’s policy of nondisclosure of finances. However, Toronto FC did use some of its allocation money to sign Matias Laba and Maximiliano Urruti and most likely used allocation money to pick up Alvaro Rey and Jonas Elmer.
This being the case, Laba and Rey make for effective use of allocation money, while Elmer can be seen as depth. However, the fact that Toronto FC could have spent over $1,000,000 in allocation money to sign Urruti is a horrible mismanagement of funds, because the Argentine forward was traded within a month of signing.
There are conflicting reports that Toronto FC signed Urruti using some sort of league fund for Designated Players. Lino DiCuollo, MLS vice president of competition and player relations, said that a league DP did not exist, and that Urruti was signed just like any other player in the league. However, a league fund rumour persisted. It’s still not clear how exactly Toronto FC managed to sign Urruti, but in any case, the signing of players wasn’t the only way Toronto FC used allocation money.
Player salaries have been a big talking point as of late with the signing of Tim Bezbatchenko as the new general manager of the club. The focus moving forward seems to involve correcting the state of the salary cap. This implies that Toronto FC’s salary cap situation was in dire straights, something Ryan Nelsen has not kept a secret.
There have been numerous references to the amount of work done by the club’s management to fix the salary cap situation. Again, details are murky, but it’s safe to say that with Richard Eckersley and Stefan Frei looking closer and closer to an exit, the team is still not okay financially. Allocation money may have (and probably had) been used to bring down the salaries of existing contracts for the season, in order to fit players like Darren O’Dea into this year’s limitations.
With all that in mind, what this whole situation ultimately boils down to is this – Toronto FC used allocation money to sign Matias Laba and Alvaro Rey. Those two players, of obvious quality, have made Toronto FC a better team. On these two transfers alone, Toronto FC can walk away from the draft having made the right financial decisions to effectively gather enough funds to sign two players of long-term quality.
However, another question now arises: how much of the money gained from the MLS SuperDraft was used to sign Rey and Laba? Another question, of greater importance, is this: could Toronto FC have signed those two players without trading down in the SuperDraft, using the allocation money gained from the trade of Luis Silva, Ryan Johnson/Milos Kocic and the sale of Darren O’Dea?
If the signing of Rey and Laba fell within the bounds of Toronto FC’s normal allocation amount, supplemented with the money gained from trades within the league, than the “extra” allocation money that the club gained from the SuperDraft would have been used to either bring down the salary cap or sign, well…Maxi Urruti.
So, in the end of the day, Toronto FC could very well have traded the first round draft pick to fund the signing of Urruti, only to trade him soon after. That first round pick could have been used to sign a better player.
Is trading pick number one a better choice, looking back, than drafting players like Andrew Farrell, Walker Zimmerman or Kekuta Manneh? That’s tough to say. Are those three players better choices than Emery Welshman or have more long-term value than a one-month spell with Urruti? In terms of quality, they may just be.
The benefit of drafting Welshman was in the cash gained from trading down pick number one so many times. The club signing another Canadian was just the cherry on top. The way Toronto FC spent that cash, however, makes this whole point null and void.
How many days Welshman even has at the team is up for debate. Like Matt Stinson or Oscar Cordon before him, Welshman may just be released due to a combination of a lack of playing time and a lack of confidence from his head coach. A Canadian passport alone has spared the chopping block, since Welshman falls under the category of depth forward, like Taylor Morgan or Ashton Bennett before him.
While Manneh scores goals for Vancouver and Farrell starts in the backline for New England, Welshman hasn’t featured at all for Toronto FC apart from playing in reserve games. Bekker has featured, though sparingly, and to the chagrin of fans who want to see what the blond number eight has to offer in midfield. This year may just again be remembered as the year “Toronto FC could have drafted X.”
We’ll wrap this up with one final question: did Toronto FC “win” the draft this year?
The answer is yes, but not because of Kyle Bekker or Emery Welshman, or the allocation money gained to sign Urruti and then trade him for Bright Dike. No, Toronto FC comes out on top because of one simple factor:
It learned a lesson.
While the execution was poor, the decision to start drafting for cash and not for players signals a forward-thinking mentality at the club. The draft has become increasingly irrelevant as academy systems or local scouts pump out talent like Jonathan Osorio or Ashtone Morgan. Toronto’s choice to fix the salary cap and gain funds to do so rather than going after a big name is a smart decision, though its execution was poorly managed. With Leiweke and Bezbatchenko now in charge, perhaps next year’s draft will yield more of the same but with a better final product.
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