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TORONTO - Toronto Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf summed up his teams latest loss in one word: unacceptable.The Maple Leafs were handed their second ugly loss in as many games, suffering a 9-2 beating at the hands of the Nashville Predators at Torontos Air Canada Centre.When you get beat like that in professional sports, its embarrassing, said Phaneuf. To get beat like that in front of your home fans compounds the issue.Coming off a 6-2 defeat to the lowly Buffalo Sabres on Saturday, Toronto (9-7-2) was flat from the get-go against the Predators and couldnt play itself back into the game.Toronto allowed three goals in the opening period, prompting head coach Randy Carlyle to yank starter Jonathan Bernier after only 20 minutes. He gave up three goals on 12 shots. Bernier was replaced by James Reimer, who allowed six goals on 25 shots over 40 minutes of work as the Maple Leafs dropped their third straight game.Taylor Beck led the Predators (11-4-2) with a pair of goals, both of which came in the first period. Filip Forsberg, Calle Jarnkrok, Roman Josi, Eric Nystrom, Mike Ribeiro, Derek Roy and Colin Wilson also scored for Nashville.Pekka Rinne stopped 29 of the 31 shots he faced to record his NHL-best 12th win of the season.We were good offensively, everyone was making plays, said Beck. Those games are fun. You know theyre not all gonna be like that, but theyre fun to play, certainly for the winning team.Mike Santorelli and Nazem Kadri scored in the third period for Toronto, reducing Nashvilles lead to 8-2. Late in the third a fan threw their Maple Leafs jersey on the ice, briefly halting play.Toronto sniper Phil Kessel echoed Phaneuf after the game.I mean its unacceptable, right? This is embarrassing, said Kessel. You never want to have this happen. We got beat pretty good two nights in a row.Carlyle characterized the loss as an awful performance owned equally by the teams entire lineup.We need a better performance from everybody, he said. Goaltending is part of that, defence is part of that, offence, all those things combined for the team effort. It was a team effort in the loss tonight.The Leafs came unhinged less than two minutes into the game when Beck scored his first of the period after he chased down a loose puck in the Maple Leafs zone and let loose a quick wrister that beat Bernier.Roy scored his first of the season midway through the period before Beck scored his second of the night — and third of the year — to put the normally defensively minded Predators up 3-0 after a period.That was the end of the night for Bernier, who was replaced by Reimer when the Maple Leafs took the ice for the second period.Reimer turned aside 13 of 14 Nashville shots in the second. He couldnt stop Nystrom, however, who went top shelf on a 2-on-1 with 1:15 remaining in the period to make it 4-0 Nashville heading into the third.Thats when things went from bad to worse for Reimer and the Maple Leafs.In a span of just over five minutes, the Predators, who are now 6-2 in eight games this month, scored four times to increase their lead to 8-0.They came out playing quick, aggressive, and we didnt execute well, and we played slow, said Maple Leafs defenceman Cody Franson. We didnt move the puck quickly, we didnt move it cleanly, and they ran good routes and forced us to play a lot in our D-zone.Toronto showed signs of life later on in the third, scoring twice in a two-minute span thanks to Santorelli and Kadri, but that was as close as the Leafs would come.Wilson scored the games final goal at 17:28 of the third. Red Auerbach Jersey . 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Iwakuma pitched seven strong innings to stay unbeaten in road games since last July, leading the Seattle Mariners to a 5-2 win over the Cleveland Indians on Tuesday night.When Deloitte released the inaugural edition of their superb Football Money League table, Arsenal pipped Manchester United at the post to claim the BPL title, Real were crowned European Champions, Jean Chrétien was our prime minister, Bill Clinton was on the verge of been impeached and, with the additions of the Miami Fusion and the Chicage Fire, MLS was in the throes of its third season. Meanwhile, having just celebrated his third birthday, Cristiano Ronaldo was likely dreaming of one day leading his team out at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in a Champions League semi-final against Manchester United. Back then, English football’s winningest club had just been anointed by Deloitte as the richest club in all of world football. Trailing in their wake, and by quite a distance, was Real Madrid in the runners-up spot and Bayern Munich rounded out the podium. Not much has changed, you’re thinking. Well, think again. Back then, Manchester United and Real Madrid’s combined income was ￡160 million ($285 million.) Today, that figure for the biggest one-two knockout combination in all of world football has grown in astronomic proportions. They now sit at a truly mind-boggling €1.064 billion and growing. This works out to a jaw-dropping $1.425 Billion. From my economic perch, this represents, over the lifetime of the Deloitte Football Money League, an almost tenfold increase in incomes. Their inaugural edition represented income garnered from the 1997-1998 season. Following the release of the most up-to-date and 18th edition earlier in the week, it confirmed that, not only did Real Madid win a fabled Decima in Lisbon last May,the Spanish giants have monopolized top spot with Deloitte FC for exactly a decade now. What’s that they say about success on and off the pitch going hand in glove with each other? According to Deloitte for 2013/2014, Los Merengues banked €549.5 million, the equivalent of almost $2 million a day every day for an entire year. If Real spent it all on player acquisitions last summer, they could have bought themselves a Galactico XI made up entirely of 11 Gareth Bales or six Lionel Messis. One wonders how many jerseys that team could have sold. It’s no surprise and based purely on the unprecedented multi-billion-dollar global broadcast deal, which kicked in last season, that the Barclays Premier League dominated Deloitte’s Football Money League table to the point that half of all clubs that make up the BPL now feature in the Deloitte top 20. Just like our traditional leagues - be it the NBA, NHL or NFL - soccer clubs have three core revenue streams. These are comprised of commercial, matchday and broadcast. Over the lifetime of the Deloitte Rich List, a trend which has emerged is that matchday revenues have become a shrinking percentage of the overall revenue. The reason for this is twofold. Very few clubs have seen increase in stadium attendances. Alongside this, the commercial side of football continues to grow at an increasing pace. In some cases, especially for those at the very top, their substantial rises in commercial income evoke irrational exuberance. Take Manchester United as example. Their new jersey sponsor, Chevrolet, who came on board at the start of this season, are reported to have signed a seven-year deal which will pay the Old Trafford club ￡53 million each and every year. Thanks to the Bank of Canada rate cut earlier in the week, that now works out the price of a pint and pie shy of $100 million per season. To secure such an iconic jersey, Chevrolet had to pay over 50 per cent more this season than insurance giant Aon had to for the 2013/2014 one. Not a shabby raise in pay by any stretch of the imagination. No wonder Gary Bettman looks on with envy. Theres no truth to the rumours, though, that 1-800-GOT-JUNK are in negotiations with the Leafs. Not done there. The club that Waynne Rooney captains starting next season will switch out of the Swoosh for those three stripes next season.dddddddddddd Their bill? ￡75 million per season. Adidass deal with Manchester United stretches a decade long. You do the math. Manchester United’s close to $1.5 billion apparel deal dwarfs any figure in all of world sport. Those world famous Yankee Pinstripes might now begin thinking, just as NYCFC hit the training pitch ahead of their expansion season, they’ve teamed up with the wrong Manchester outfit. So when we factor in just jersey and jersey sponsor-income - before Manchester United have even sold one of their tens of thousands of season ticket or the first pint is drunk of the hundreds of thousands which are poured each season at Old Trafford - the club Malcolm Glazer built into a highly self-sustainable global entity has already banked a cool quarter of a billion Canadian dollars. No wonder in this modern age of UEFA Financial Fair Play, it is no surprise to now know why the team that finished 2013/2014 well out of a lucrative Champions League spot and dropped from first to seventh in the BPL standing were still in such a tremendously liquid financial position to invest over ￡150 million ($290 million) on upgrades to the talent pool last summer. Im still not sure if the $100 million invested in securing the full time services of Argentine winger Angel Di Maria or lavishing over $25 million for borrowing Radamel Falcao from the tax haven that is Monaco for nine months will be looked back in time as the very best player investments of all time at Old Trafford. A fool and his gold are often parted, they say. At those prices, though, Juan Mata at ￡37 million this time last year almost sounds like a bargain. Let’s hope for the sake of the diminutive Spaniard he doesn’t become a tax write-off this summer. Louis Van Gaal might be the manager, but the boss these days at Old Trafford was likely schooled at Harvard. In lieu of BPL titles, they most certainly possess an MBA or two. Another disturbing trend we can garner from Deloitte over the past few seasons is that an immense divide is opening up between the haves and have-nots of European football. Plain and simple, Mr. Platini, your football rich have become more enriched, whilst UEFAs football poor are slipping further from the grasp to be in position to challenge for honours as agents for elite talent are not even returning their calls. Even the might of Juventus barely scrape into Deloitte’s top 10 these days. Amongst the top two or three in world football at the start of the millennium, it is no shock to learn that since 2006’s Calciopoli scandal, which rocked Italian football to the core and saw Juventus demoted and stripped of a pair of Serie A titles, their fortunes off the pitch have suffered a most dramatic decline. Such is the overall dominance and influence in the business of football by English club and one that is expected to grow over the short and mid-run, the blue half of Merseyside is the 10th-richest in England. Good for 20th in Deloitte’s table with income last season according to Deloitte of €144.1 million, Everton’s income expressed in USD terms works out at even $150 million. A certain just retired US player spent two very successful loan periods at Goodison Park and Landon Donovan certainly proved over his time with Everton that American footballers could most certainly live and thrive in the rarified BPL area. If Don Garber and his band of merry MLS men genuinely harbour intentions that by 2022 North America’s top tier of football is mentioned in the same breath as the finest leagues on planet futbol, the very first indicator we will get for that is when either the LA Galaxy, or maybe even New York City FC, will feature in Deloitte’s Football Money League. Noel.Butler@BellMedia.ca @TheSoccerNoel on Twitter ' ' '