As first reported on the @24thMinute Twitter feed last week, Doneil Henry has been sold.
To where, you might ask? Well, that's the thing. We don't know.
Toronto FC isn't saying, other than to say it's in Europe. When CSN reached out to MLS...crickets...
No one in Europe cares enough about a little known and at times struggling Canadian defender to talk about him.
So, we're left on our own devices. Normal sources in Toronto were as blindsided by this as the fans were. Outside of that world, in the shadows around the "I know a guy who played with a guy who played with x" world, there is more meat to chew on.
Not enough to report with 100 percent certainty, but, in light of today's news, it's enough to share with the usual caveats attached.
The suggestion is he's going to Cyprus (or is at least currently owned by a team in Cyprus--more on that in a bit). That's fairly solid. CSN was told AC Omonia, a consistent Europa League club, is who owns Henry. That info corresponds with a document CSN was shown, but was not able to verify, several months ago that seemed to show Henry as being property of the club.
Complicating this are suggestions that were made today that the club that does own Henry could still sell him on again. If that were to happen, TFC would get some of the transfer. Or, Henry could return to Toronto again. No one knows.
Murky stuff. The brash commercialism of it is way beyond the comprehension of most North American sports fans. The idea that you would sell a prospect, period, is hard for NA fans to wrap their head around. This is a plot to a bad episode of Castle.
The instinct may be to throw your hands in the air and just assume TFC is TFCing again. They might be, but this is more complicated than simple MLSE incompetence.
On one level, the Reds might actually be clever here. After all they sold a player but still got the benefit of having him on the roster. We don't know how much, if any, allocation money TFC is getting (or when they'll get it). However, it should be some. And, selling a player like Henry is standard operating procedure in world football. He wanted to experience Europe. Without knowing the fee we can't evaluate whether TFC did a good job here. We can conclude that the simple act of selling isn't bad, however.
Other than optically, of course. Why they didn't tell anyone is staggering. It's also very MLS. Our friends in New York have never met a secret not worth keeping, or information not worth controlling.
You, as a fan, find out only as much as they want you to and only when they want you to.
MLS is, after all, as much of a marketing machine as it is a football league. There was nothing gained by informing fans Henry was sold. So, why tell? That's not something many fans, nor CSN, may like. However, MLS doesn't really care.
And that's how we get to the following inconsistency: DeAndre Yedlin, is a young, homegrown player that was sold to an European team before being indefinitely loaned back to MLS. That move is being heralded as an amazing piece of business that underlines how great MLS' development is.
But, Doneil Henry, a young, homegrown player sold to an European team before being indefinitely loaned back to MLS is an example of incompetence?
Guess it depends on how you market it, eh?
I'll allow readers to decide for themselves why MLS embraced the Yedlin move and hid Henry's.