Twitter loves a good rumour and for fans and media covering Vancouver Whitecaps, the lack of new player signings makes us hungry for any little crumb we can latch on to.
When ESPN Deportes tweeted out that MLS Golden Boot winner Camilo Sanvezzo was set to join Mexican Liga MX side Querétaro by this weekend, it soon snowballed into a mad night on the old tweety with the rumour growing arms and legs pretty quickly.
The subsequent fall out has been somewhat comical to follow, but what the whole situation has done is to reiterate how reliant the Whitecaps are on the Brazilian right now. Over reliant in fact.
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The Caps have been firm in their stance that no contact has been made to them from Querétaro, that Camilo is under contract and they fully expect him to be at the preseason training camp at the end of the month. And they need him to be. They don’t have a lot of top quality striking options at the moment.
Meanwhile, south of the border down Mexico way, Querétaro are giving the impression that they were told the striker was a free agent and questions are swirling as to the role played by Camilo’s agent in all of this shenanigans.
We still don’t know what is fact and what is fiction but as it stands, it doesn’t look like Camilo is going anywhere. At least not yet.
But it should be no surprise that he is attracting attention elsewhere after the outstanding season he has just had and you cannot grudge the player for trying to get the best deal and the most money he can on the back of it.
A player has a short window to maximise his talent in terms of cold, hard cash and it may be hard for Camilo to produce better than he did in 2013. He is also still relatively unproven at the top level so ideally needs a further stepping stone transfer. Ambitious Querétaro would provide him with that.
I would much rather see Camilo leave now, before the new season has got underway, than for some club to come in for him during the summer transfer window, whisk him away and unsettle the side. We’ve already had enough mid season collapses to last us for a while thank you very much.
Leaving now would also allow the Whitecaps a good chunk of time to find his replacement. They need to add to the striking department whether he leaves or not.
It doesn’t take a statto guru to know how reliant the Whitecaps were on Camilo last season.
22 of their 53 MLS goals (41.5%) came from the wee Brazilian. Looking around the League, only Marco Di Vaio in Montreal came close to matching that significant an individual impact in a team's goalscoring charts at 40% of the Impact's goals. After that, Mike Magee at 31.9% of Chicago's goals for the season was the closest contender.
Looking at the MLS Cup finalists. Claudio Bieler was Kansas City's top scorer in the regular season with 10 goals, just 21.3% of their overall total. Alvaro Saborio's 12 goals for Real Salt Lake was 21.1% of his team's overall total. Of the Conference winners, Diego Valeri topped the charts in Portland with 10 goals (18.5% of his team's total) and Tim Cahill in New York with 11 (18.9% of his team's).
Back in Vancouver, a further eight goals came from Kenny Miller and he missed a large chunk of the season, 13 games, through injury and international duty. He was still the team's second top scorer.
That productive pairing contributed 56.6% of the Caps’ MLS goals, with 11 Whitecaps getting themselves on the scoresheet in total.
Again looking around the League, only Houston Dynamo and DC United had fewer players finding themselves on the scoresheet with ten players, and you don't really want to be comparable to DC in any regard after the season that they just had.
If you take the top two scorers at each club, only Columbus were more reliant on the goals coming form just a pair of players, with 57.1% of their goals scored coming from Oduro and Higuain. Philadelphia came in at 52.4%, Montreal at 50% and the majority of the rest in the 30's-low 40's percentage range.
Do these stats actually mean anything? Well, naturally you can make stats say whatever the hell you want in most cases but they certainly back up my feeling that the Caps' over-reliance in Camilo to bang in the goals actually hurt the team.
Other, more successful teams, not only spread the goals around a lot more, but they also had a number of players significantly contributing to their goals tally.
And you need to have that. You cannot rely on just one player regularly scoring to get you through a 34 game regular season and come out of it as a credible playoff contender.
Every player has lulls and dips in form. Not to mention what happens when there is an injury to that key player and no-one suitable to step up and adequately fill his boots.
If you look at Camilo's game log for last season, he only started one of the first five games and didn't grab his first goal of the season until the sixth game at home to RSL, and that was an 84th minute penalty.
Camilo stuttered at the start of the season and so did the Whitecaps. This was partly due to Martin Rennie favouring other options but when Camilo hit his groove in May and June, so did the Caps. When the Caps started to stumble again towards the end of the season, Camilo went through a spell of two goals in nine games.
The Caps pretty much were a one man team. On the whole, they rose and fell with how well Camilo played.
When the transfer rumours started coming thick and fast, first from Norway and now from Mexico, the collective response from the Caps nation was what a devastating loss that would be to the team in every respect from production to popularity.
To lose a player that a team has relied on far too much would leave a massive hole in the Whitecaps squad. Not an irreplaceable one, but finding the right player to come in and perform immediately is what every club wants, but few get.
There is no-one in the squad just now that you would look at and confidently see stepping up and taking over to even come close to Camilo's exploits last season. It's unlikely he would even manage that himself anyway (I give you the fall of Wondo), but that is when he is needing those around him to help him out, but that help is not there right now.
You have Kenny Miller, who may or may not come back and if he does, who knows how long he will remain healthy with the beating his body will take on the BC turf. Kekuta Manneh may have a break out sophomore year, but it's a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of a 19 year old. Caleb Clarke is still on loan in Germany. Tommy Heinemann may come back but what will he really offer at MLS level. And then you have Darren Mattocks. We've seen the good from him in year one and the bad and the ugly from him in year two. Will he even be around for year three or will he be off for a fist full of dollars?
The current interest in Camilo should have the Whitecaps in full on red alert mode. If he doesn't go to Querétaro down the line, there is still a real chance that someone else will make a play for him.
If he moves on, the Whitecaps need a top replacement striker lined up right away. If he stays, the Whitecaps also need a top striker that can come in and partner him, share the workload and be able to step up when he is not at the top of his game and produce regularly.
If the current rumours have done nothing else, then it just reiterates how much the Caps rely on Camilo and just how ill-prepared they are if/when a move does happen.
Hopefully Carl Robinson comes back from his break with a new striker in the January sales. You have to feel he's going to need one.
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