Canada’s got talent despite SuperDraft snub

Lack of a homegrown player in first round just part of off year, local officials say

It was six years ago that the last Major League Soccer SuperDraft came and went without a Canadian player being selected in the first round. Until Friday.

Eight Canadians had gone in the first round since 2013, led by Brampton’s Cyle Larin, the top pick in 2015. Five players were invited to the MLS combine a year ago, and all were among the first 55 selections of the 2017 draft.

There wasn’t a single Canadian among the 60 combine invitees this year. So what happened?

“It’s really classified just as an off year because the conveyor belt of players that are moving forward on the male side,” said Gary Miller, the technical director of the Ontario Soccer Association. “There’s a lot of things being put in place to make sure that greater numbers will be produced long term.”

That includes the growing Ontario Player Development League. Launched in 2014, the league has rolled out one age group a year. Today, it starts with the under-13 age group and goes up to under-17, which then feeds into League1 Ontario. With the launch of the Canadian Premier League, set to debut in the spring of 2019, Miller foresees many of the League1 Ontario players mov- ing up to a level even higher than they’re playing at now — helping to push more Canadians into the limelight.

The league is also expanding across the province, making sure more players are being identified.

“Toronto FC, in their academy they continue to select some of the top young male players, especially in the GTA, but there’s a lot of top young players in outlying areas as well, as far as Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, London and so on,” Miller said. “Those players are now coming into the OPDL and they’ll have an opportunity to compete as well.”

Still, Miller said MLS is largely an American-focused league.

“We’re happy that we’ve got Canadian players in there from the beginning but who knows, if there’s two players of equal ability, it’s probably the American that will go in,” he said. “But from a system point of view, we’re improving the number and quality of players that are coming to the system.”

Greg Stamkos agrees. The commissioner of the Soccer Academy Alliance of Canada — its members include the clubs that produced Larin and Adonijah Reid, now with FC Dallas — said American players are being watched a lot more than Canadians, especially those who haven’t moved to the U.S. to play. Most of the Canadians who have been selected in MLS SuperDrafts of late were products of American universities.

“If you’re a Canadian player, they still haven’t figured it out in my opin- ion, MLS has not, to look and see Canadian universities, kids that are not in university yet, the17-year-olds, the16-year-olds that are here,” Stamkos said. “We have lots of talent.”

Stamkos puts some onus on the MLS clubs in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, as well as the Canadian Soccer Association, to make sure the men’s side of the game continues improving. He was buoyed by former men’s national team head coach Octavio Zambrano telling him late last year that he planned to send out more scouts than ever before to identify more Canadian standouts. Zambrano was fired earlier this month, replaced by former women’s national team head coach John Herdman. Stamkos hopes the Englishman follows up on his predecessor’s promise.

“There’s a lot of kids in Canada that get missed,” he said.

Miller insists the light showing by Canadians at this year’s MLS combine does not reflect the country’s assets. “This is definitely not a sign of the future,” he said. “A sign of the future is the conveyor belt and the funnel being filled with a lot of top young players.”