Toronto FC acquired striker Chad Barrett yesterday afternoon.

Officially, this time.

Barrett, who led the Chicago Fire in scoring in the first half of the season, has been with TFC since the weekend and even travelled with them to Monday night's game in Salt Lake City, but didn't actually become part of the team until yesterday.

That's when 36-year-old striker Brian McBride signed his contract with the Chicago Fire, allowing Major League Soccer to complete the paperwork that finalized the McBride-Barrett trade Chicago and Toronto agreed on last week.

A signed contract from McBride was the last obstacle in a deal that took nearly two months to close.

In late May McBride, who has 30 goals with the U.S. national team, announced he was returning to the U.S. after four years in England playing with Fulham. A Chicago-area native, McBride wanted to play for the Fire, but TFC owned his MLS rights and two month of sometimes tense, often stagnant negotiations followed.

Then last week the two teams agreed on a deal that would send McBride's rights to Chicago for 23-year-old Barrett, a first-round draft pick in 2009 and allocation money.

But because the trade involved McBride's rights and not the player himself, he actually needed to sign with the league to make it official.

Though he acknowledges it took longer than usual to acquire the player's signature, McBride's brother and agent, Matt McBride, denied suggestions that the Fire purposely delayed signing McBride hoping to inconvenience conference rival TFC.

Instead, he said the order in which the deal was made slowed down its closing.

Normally a player in McBride's position would first sign a contract with MLS, and then the league would assign him to the team that held his rights.

In this case, Matt McBride points out, the two teams involved made reached an agreement first, and then sought a signed contract from Brian McBride, slowing down the trade process.

Right now McBride is in Hong Kong with the U.S. Olympic team as they prepare for the Olympic Games.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear how close 35-year-old Scottish striker Paul Dickov is to signing with TFC.

The former Manchester City forward is mulling offers from Toronto, Blackpool and Leicester City.

Yesterday the Blackpool Gazette reported that Dickov was set to join TFC after rejecting Blackpool's offer, but a few hours later the BBC's website reported that Dickov was still negotiating with Leicester City.