Breaking down the All Star vote with Juan Toja

By: Robert | July 9th, 2007

I want to go back to something I briefly discussed in last Friday’s “Free Kicks.” The MLS All-Star voting wrapped up a week or so ago and the results were announced last Thursday. FC Dallas midfielder Juan Carlos Toja received the fifth highest vote total, appearing on 34.159% of all ballots. But as I said on Friday and what I want to discuss in depth today is that the way these numbers broke down revealed some very interesting things.

In case you don’t understand how the voting was put-together, the fans, players, media and coaches/GM’s all had an equal 25% share of the vote. The All-Star team uses a 3-5-2 formation, therefore the top three vote-getters at defender, five midfielders and two forwards are selected to start the game (plus the goal keeper, of course.) To figure out what percentage of ballots a player appeared on, simply divide the number attributed to fans, media, players or coaches/GM’s by 25 (and move the decimal point to the right two places.) If we do this for Juan Toja we see he appeared on 6.11% of the fan’s ballots, 48.64% of the ballots from the media, 23.9% from the players and 58.96% of ballots from the coaches/GM’s.

It should be no shock to anyone that the media loves a good story. Juan Toja appeared on the third highest number media of ballots and the only two players to appear on more were Eddie Johnson (who before he left for the Gold Cup and Copa America was notching hat tricks like they were going out of style) and Juan Pablo Angel (who seems to be scoring even more.) Its easy and fun to discuss goal scoring, especially at that rate but Juan Toja doesn’t score goals, at least not like Eddie or Angel; what Toja does is control the midfield and lead the attack and while his position is not nearly as full of statistics as those forwards it’s even more important. But makes Toja memorable and what the media always seems to play up from the moment they first discuss Toja in any broadcast is his “rock-star” hair (in fact the All-Star press release itself uses the term “rock-star” to describe him.) Does Juan Toja deserve to be on the All-Star team? Of course he does, but considering the way the media frames the discussion about him there’s no doubt he’s been helped by his locks.

Fun Toja fact for the media: Four months ago Juan Toja came to this country not knowing a word of English. His advances in learning a new language have come so fast he now attempts to do his American media interviews entirely in English (for comparison’s sake it took me years to understand someone speaking French slowly)

The Players 23.9% vote also provokes some interesting questions. Normally you think of the players as the ones who know best what’s going on on the field. But Juan Toja has probably been the best and most consistent attacking midfielder all season, yet the players placed him on the least amount of their ballots (of anyone in the starting XI.) How could this happen? In my opinion it comes from the fact that Toja, at 58, is the far and away league leader in fouls committed (more on this team-wide phenomenon in a later post.) Since those fouls don’t lead to goals allowed no one remembers, except the players who either have to spend time faking those injuries or dealing with the scrapes, bumps and bruises that come with being on the field at the same time as Juan Toja. I guess its obvious MLS players are quite vindictive.

The coaches and GM’s understand the value of Juan Toja the most. They understand that he controls the midfield; that he leads the attack, but more than that Juan Toja is a player you can always count on. [At the time of writing] Toja had played more minutes than any field player in the league and his talent plus his consistency are something’s you can build a successful team around. Plus his tie for second in game-winning goals means he’s there when his team needs him most. In essence Juan Toja is a coach’s kind of player.

The 6.11% fan vote speaks to the marketing problems of MLS in specific and soccer in general in an ESPN America. I’ve already spoken on how Toja can control the field with the best of them, but fans (and SportsCenter) love goals and that’s not what Juan Toja is doing on the field. Until recently MLS spent all of its advertising dollars showing off goals and great saves but spending little time promoting what happens on the other 80% of the pitch. The low percentage of fan votes also speaks to the inherent nature of domestic leagues, to produce and promote home-grown talent (this is not just MLS, every league does the same thing.) Therefore the Columbian-born Toja, who’s not a goal-scorer like countryman Juan Pablo Angel, in his first year in the league will be on the short-end of the promotion stick, couple that with the fact that most fans don’t know enough about other teams and just vote for the home-town players and it will take time before Juan Toja is a “household” name.

July19th tune in to (or go to) the MLS All-Star game and see Juan Toja take his place among the league’s best because he’s from Dallas where the FC stands for “finding commendations.”

HOOPS PRIDE!

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