It should come as no surprise to anyone who had read a Toronto sports section in the past two weeks -- or CSN earlier this morning -- but on Friday it was confirmed by Tottenham Hotspur that Jermain Defoe will be joining Toronto FC at the end of February.
While fans have had time to let that move sink in already, there are a couple of things that will take some getting used to, as announced by Spurs:
TFC is scheduled to play Tottenham in a mid-season friendly on July 23. And, perhaps more jarrringly for some, the move includes a four-year "Advertising Rights Agreement" \with TFC owners MLSE, which includes "promotional, branding, experiential activities, advertising, broadcasting, social media and digital rights across the 4-year agreement and at all MLSE properties and media sites. MLSE will stock, promote and sell official THFC merchandise at all their retail outlets and support the THFC Official Canadian Supporter's Club." (emphasis mine)
So, if you're a TFC supporter who also supports Arsenal, how are you feeling this morning?
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
Now, as someone without any ties to England, its Premier League or its teams, I'm in no position to moralize about the merits of that second point, because quite frankly, I don't really care about it. If signing that marketing deal was all part of the cost of bringing over a top striker who can help my team (Toronto FC) reach unprecedented heights, I have no problem with it whatsoever.
Same goes for the friendly, to a lesser extent. I've railed against MLS midseason friendlies for years, still don't particularly like them and won't be attending TFC vs. Tottenham. But as Kevin Payne so maladroitly said last year, I may as well get used to their existence -- and, again, if this year's circus was the price of doing business in the Defoe deal, well then, perhaps I can swallow my pride and outrage and just let it be.
But some folks may be unwilling to swallow their pride and outrage when it comes to TFC explicitly aligning itself with a specific Premier League club. For folks born and/or raised in England, it may be difficult to reconcile supporting a club that's perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a satellite of a club you were brought up to despise.
However -- and here's where I'm going to moralize -- if you're a Canadian-born soccer fan who adopted some non-Tottenham club as your favourite, for one of those wonderfully arbitrary reasons that people in this city latch themselves onto foreign clubs, getting angry at your hometown team simply for aligning with a team in another country (one you may have never even visited in your life), is fairly ridiculous.
But I've said my piece. What do you think about everything that's apparently coming along with the Defoe-to-TFC deal? Is it worth it?
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