Before Tim Leiweke agreed to take the job running Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment four years ago, he asked a final question of the interviewing board members.
"If I came to you with David Beckham, would you let me sign him?"
The scenario worked on multiple levels.
First, there was the inference that only Mr. Leiweke could get players of Beckham's stature to come to this northern sports wasteland. Second, that making money was not his main concern. And third, that soccer was what he knew best.
"They said, 'Yes,'" Mr. Leiweke said later. "Then I said, 'If that's the case, why haven't you?' And they said, 'Because no one ever asked.'"
So that's how great teams are constructed – because someone thought to ask.
There is a straight line from that moment to early Saturday evening, when Toronto FC won its first Major League Soccer championship, a 2-0 victory at BMO Field over the Seattle Sounders in the MLS Cup.
After the final whistle, the players did the normal things winning teams do. They hugged and jumped around and had the obligatory singalong to Queen – We Are The Champions (ed. note: yes) of the world (ed. note: not quite).
You see this sort of behaviour quite a bit on TV, happening in other places. In the Toronto context, it was surreal. Nobody's supposed to win anything in Toronto. There's a bylaw.
A half-hour after game's end, irrational exuberance had already taken hold. One well-refreshed fan was sprinting through a throng of departing spectators, fists raised, shrieking, "BRING ON THE CUP!"
As that drunken idiot unsteadily wound his way through the crowd, you expected a typical Toronto reaction – that someone would trip him and then the mob would gently beat him for his impertinence.
Instead, people woo-hoo'ed him on his way. A few high-fived him, as though they agreed or something. We've come a long way.
Five years ago, all of MLSE's children were preparing to give up on real life and move back into the corporate basement. The Maple Leafs were entering (another) terminal skid, the Raptors were preparing (another) teardown and Toronto FC was having (another) "worst sports team in the whole world" sort of season.
What changed?
Before the teams transformed, MLSE did first. Beaten down by years of failure and energized by new ownership, it decided that it no longer wanted to be an insurance company with a high profile, providing steady results for institutional investors and none at all for its customers. Rather, it would become a charitable disruptor of local expectations.
Emboldened by the notion at the time that all sports-related concerns would experience endless, exponential growth, MLSE made a series of business decisions that made very little business sense.
Hiring Mr. Leiweke as CEO was the first of them. In doing so, the board ceded control to a spendthrift carnival barker known for alienating his employers.
But Mr. Leiweke had what the suits who had always run the place could not gin up in their quarterly reports – a heartfelt vision.
He planned out the Leafs' parade route and walked it by himself on weekends. He talked about how many cranes he could see from his apartment – a key Leiweke metric for growth. He thought of Toronto in a way the city did not think of itself – as neglected civic lump of coal requiring the right amount of financial pressure to become a major-league diamond.
From the start, MLSE's third team, Toronto FC, was the focus of his attention. The NHL and NBA are cap-controlled leagues with little room for creativity.
By contrast, soccer is a free-for-all. Any person with enough money, the right connections and a bit of luck can build a powerhouse.
Leiweke pressed the board to follow through on its Beckham promise, spending $100-million on just two players in a league with a (very malleable) $3-million salary cap. When one of them – Jermain Defoe – was an epic bust, he spent even more to replace him with Sebastian Giovinco, who would become the best player in the league's history.
He spent another $100-million refurbishing and expanding a perfectly serviceable stadium MLSE had built on the cheap less than a decade before. He convinced the board to construct a lavish training facility in the suburbs.
All of those unnecessary expenditures had one self-reinforcing effect – creating the image of a winner before anything had been won.
On Saturday, the gamble paid off. The winnings cannot be expressed in profits or EBITDA, but instead in relevance.
Toronto FC's MLS Cup is not just a soccer breakthrough, but the first major North American title won by any Canadian team in a quarter century. Joe Carter, the last great national hero on that score, is now a few years shy of collecting his pension.
The inexplicable investment in Toronto FC created a virtuous circle within MLSE, and in the city at large. The sort of people who would have never got on this sinking ship a decade before – Masai Ujiri, Brendan Shanahan, Mike Babcock, any number of players with credibility and choices – were drawn aboard.
As each new bold-face name signed on to Mr. Leiweke's vision, all the old saws about Toronto – that its top three sports were hockey, hockey and hockey; that NHLers were too afraid to come here; that it was cursed – began to fall out of currency.
Immediately after he'd been chosen the MVP of Saturday's game, Jozy Altidore – born in New Jersey, raised in Florida, professionally blooded in Europe – yelled out, "Toronto is the greatest city in the world!"
A few years ago, you couldn't have gotten a mayoral candidate to say that. They'd have been laughed out of the race. Now our sports carpetbaggers are claiming citizenship.
Mr. Leiweke was the first of those honorary Torontonians. He's left and moved on to new ventures, but on Sunday described the title as "an amazing night" and the place he left behind as "special."
"Those fans have been through a lot," Mr. Leiweke said, which is the starting point of any transformative change in the philosophy of sports ownership.
There's a truism that when the team wins, the players take the credit; when it loses, the owner takes the blame.
Toronto FC's players won the MLS Cup, but MLSE deserves the credit for making it possible when it really should not have been.
And suddenly, the corporate gang who couldn't shoot straight can't miss a target.
As a result, the rubes who'd grimly paid various iterations of that business to screw up chance after chance for decades, now believe in their bones that the future is not just possible, but assured.
Cathal Kelly