Ryan Nelsen vs Tim Bezbatchenko.
Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that Nelsen or Bezbatchenko alone were to blame for everything. Rather, I'm saying that what the power struggle between them represented was the biggest problem.
And it all started with Nelsen being retained as manager.
Let's start at the end of 2013. Or, more specifically, a month or so before that when Tim Leiweke was culling the entire organization. The long overdue reset was 98% effective in ridding TFC 2.0 from everything associated with TFC 1.0. Oddly and insanely Leiweke didn't flush everything down the toilet. He left one, um, thing floating.
Nelsen should never have been hired--at least not as a manager. He might have had a good role to play as an assistant coach working with defenders or even as a GM. His greatest accomplishment was in working his connections back in the Premier League. He helped bring Defoe to Toronto. He helped bring Julio Cesar to Toronto.
He also helped bring Hogan Ephraim to Toronto, so let's not overstate the talent identification abilities.
However, it was likely those connections that appealed to Leiweke and allowed him to convince himself that he could keep one aspect of the failed 1.0 Reds around. Leiweke likes shiny things and Nelsen could introduce him to them.
The problem with that is he hired a guy in Tim Bezbatchenko to be his GM. A guy that clearly had a different vision on how to build a MLS club than the Nelsen/Leiweke strategy of parking iconic British images outside overpriced sports bars.
Leiweke either should have kept Nelsen and expanded his role, or he should have hired Bezbatchenko and allowed him to build his own team, including a new manager.
Instead he tried to play it down the middle and created a disastrous power battle that eventually and predictably blew over at the first hint of trouble.
Now, we don't know whether the roster weaknesses were the fault of a clueless manager that refused to work with his GM, or the work of a clueless GM that refused to build the team his manager wanted.
It's probably a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. A team that had stressed the need for having a common vision throughout the organization at every turn in the off season was once again exposed as clueless.
Despite that the club was plugging along in the middle of the pack for most of the season. Then the injuries started and the depth was exposed. That slump corresponded with the implosion of the MLSE board room.
Leiweke was out, news that was met with a shrug by Raptors fans, a parade by Leafs fans and a Bloody Big Panic in TFC circles. See, for a brief moment under Leiweke TFC was the equal of the other two. Now, it was back to normal.
It was here that Bezbatchenko pounced. Apparently sick of being overruled by a guy from a lower rung of the flow chart, Bez engaged Nelsen in a brief and very public pissing contest. Then he showed him who was boss.
Since Leiweke no longer cared about MLSE, and MLSE has never cared much about TFC beyond the SUM cheques it gets to cash, there was no one to oversee what was going on with the dysfunctional soccer team.
So, Bezbatchenko's rash temper tantrum drastically changed the team's direction over an all-too-familiar 72-hour period of prime TFCing.
Stunningly, the eight annual coaching change worked as well as the previous seven did.
So, here we are. Essentially TFC is back to the type of oversight it had in the early days under Mo Johnston. Now, as then, the board of directors of MLSE is too busy running its hockey team into the ground to give much thought to the soccer team. With it they are happy to let the weird soccer guys run it. And Bez is easier to understand than that Scottish guy was.
For better or worse this is Bezbatchenko's team now. That might not be any better than if it was Nelsen's team, but either way we needed that clarity that last January.
And, because we didn't get that clarification TFC is still very much, well, TFC.