Timing of pay dispute in Canadian soccer smacks of incompetence
The men qualified for Qatar in March; how can this be coming to a head now?
It took 36 years for the Canadian men's national soccer team to return to the World Cup, but almost no time at all for that joyous momentum to careen straight into the ditch that is the messy world of soccer governance.
In an industry that has in recent years been rife with corruption scandals and kickbacks, shot through with slush funds and court cases, citizens of any particular country could be forgiven for just hoping that their national governing body doesn't commit outright fraud.
But it turns out that plain old incompetence can have disastrous effects as well.
Fans of the newly ascendant men's senior team, last seen celebrating their Qatar qualification amid the frigid winds of Toronto's BMO Field in late March, could be forgiven for assuming that Canada Soccer had finally sorted itself out.
Despite decades of failures in which the Canadian men were routinely drubbed by tiny, impoverished nations to our south, there was a World Cup qualifying campaign under coach John Herdman in which the team wasn't just competent, but excellent, tops in their CONCACAF group. Coming after the women's senior team had just won Olympic gold in Japan, it certainly seemed like the people in Canada Soccer's executive offices were doing something right.
But the events of the past few days have forced the consideration of another question: is the recent on-field success of the national teams that much more remarkable given the baffling displays of the leaders at the top of the organization? More to the point, are its teams miraculously good despite flawed leadership?
The contract impasse between Canada Soccer and the players on its men's team, which has so far seen them skip two training sessions in Vancouver and then refuse to play a friendly match against Panama, and which could yet imperil two more matches this week, appears to have a lot of disagreements between both sides but is mostly about money.
Nick Bontis, president of Canada Soccer, gave that part away when he talked on Sunday night about the “fiduciary health of the organization” and said that the men's players asked for a contract that would have put Canada Soccer in a “financial position that is untenable.” You don't say those kinds of things unless you simply don't want to hand too much money across the table.
That both sides of this negotiation have differing views on fair compensation is not surprising, but the shocking part is that Canada Soccer let it come to this point.
How did they manage to get to June before they had exchanged proposals? Did they just assume that the players, giddy as they are at having made it to Qatar, would take whatever was offered? Did they not realize that, by waiting until the eve of this international window in the global soccer calendar to hold talks in earnest, they were handing all the leverage to the players?
Underpinning some of the contention between the players and Canada Soccer is a deal signed in 2019 in which a new agency called Canadian Soccer Business paid a flat annual rate to the national organization and in exchange took control of its media and broadcast rights, while also founding the Canadian Premier League. The players say they only just recently learned of this deal, and they complained in an open letter on Sunday that Canada Soccer had effectively given away the store right at the time when the national teams had become lucrative properties.
They aren't wrong about that, but the timing is key: When Canada Soccer was making that deal in 2019, it was selling a product for which there was little or no market. The country's big sports broadcasters had no interest in paying for national-team broadcast rights, and no desire to televise a would-be upstart domestic professional league.
Mediapro Group, based in Spain, bought the package and launched Onesoccer, a new outlet, to broadcast the games. They bet on Canadian soccer, and it paid off with an Olympic gold medal for the women, and what will be significant interest in their upcoming World Cup qualifying campaign, and huge ratings for the men's team romp to Qatar.
But it was also a 10-year deal. Would Canada Soccer have locked itself into a long-term arrangement had it known the successes that its senior teams were about to achieve? That is beside the point now, but if Sunday's statement from the players is accurate, it reads like they have only just discovered that Canada Soccer is in no position to capitalize on their senior teams' popularity with televised matches that could be sold to the higher bidder. If Mediapro made a winning bet on Canadian soccer three years ago, then there was a losing party to that wager, too.
Canada Soccer has defended the 10-year deal as a key source of long-term, stable funding, and that is fair, especially when the media properties were in no kind of demand three years ago.
But these are explanations it ought to have offered to its players some time ago, not as it is scrambling to get their signatures.
And scrambling to get them to take the pitch.