Second time around for CPL?
Victoria among contenders to host single-city tournament if return-to-play plan approved
Major League Soccer is returning to the pitch. Now Canada’s other professional league is also close to restarting.
The Canadian Premier League and its players are in the final stages of agreeing on a return-to-play plan which, in a scaled-down version of the MLS concept, would involved a single-city tournament.
The site has yet to be determined, but Victoria — home of Pacific FC — has been flagged as one of the leading contenders to host all eight CPL teams. One of the major concerns from the players’ standpoint was about health and safety, and Pacific player Marcel de Jong — president of the as-yet-unrecognized Professional Footballers Association Canada — said the league addressed a lot of them on Wednesday in meetings with teams.
“We were apprised by the league about the health and safety protocols in a very detailed meeting about that (and) the whole proposal, the whole tournament idea. The guys responded really well,” said the veteran left back.
“We had a good talk with the league. All the safety protocols are there, in place. They’ve looked after everything, everything’s been taken care of. They’ve got every scenario worked out.
“This is the only way for us to salvage the season … but we’re really, really happy to finally get going again — if everything goes well. Obviously, you know, things could change during the tournament or during the quarantine, but right now, I’m not worried about anything.”
The plan is for a seven-game, round robin schedule in mid-July, with each team playing each other once, followed by a knockout round.
Play beyond that seems unlikely, with de Jong saying the idea of a second tournament or Canadian Championship play was “unclear.”
One of the few remaining issues the players are hoping for some clarity on concerns the situation revolving around players’ families, whether they would be allowed to join the players in their extended absence, or if certain players could be issued extensions if being away from home proved too challenging.
“A lot of the guys, they’re single guys, and it’s not a big deal. But we do have some players who have kids, and have a spouse who works, and you can’t hire child care right now, in any province,” said Paul Champ, the Ottawa-based legal counsel for PFACan.
“So those situations are very tricky, and we think there should be accommodation for those players who do have family challenges like that. Those sort of special cases are ones that we’re going to want to talk to the league about coming up with special accommodations.”
The league had previously announced a 25 per cent deferral in pay for players, and pay cut by the same amount for front office staff. But earlier this week, the deferral became a permanent cut.
The CPL also proposed an additional five per cent cut that would be pooled into a performance bonus pool that would be distributed at the hub-city tournament. The teams put that to a vote with players, who reportedly rejected the proposal for a bonus structure.
Champ said the latter idea was too deep a cut for many of the players to handle.
“We support the position of the majority of the players, the vast majority of players, which is that they don’t support that. Our view is that it has a particularly negative impact on those players who are making the least amount … (and) we’re worried about the disproportionate impact,” he said. “There are a lot of players in this league who are making $20,000 or less. And taking any more money from them is pretty tough.”
Champ said the players are all sympathetic and understanding that wage cuts are inevitable during the COVID19 crisis, but they’re hoping to gain some additional insight into the detail of finances from the league, which has applied for the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) that covers 75 per cent of the first $58,700 in wages.
PFACan has yet to be recognized by the CPL as the official bargaining partner for its players, an issue Champ says the association isn’t planning on pushing right now.
“They’ve flatly refused to recognize us, but they’ve said they would revisit it at the beginning of next year. So we were pretty disappointed with that,” said Champ.
“It’s creating the situation that the league is facing now, where they’re kind of sort of trying to negotiate with 160 players individually, all at once.
“Basically, we saw ourselves as their megaphone or their conduit in terms of communicating with the players as a group, which we thought would be particularly helpful during this crisis, where they might have to be making decisions very quickly that might impact on conditions of employment or health and safety, or compensation.
“But right now, fighting over recognition during this COVID season just doesn’t make sense, so we’ll focus on that next year.” Both de Jong and Champ were relatively optimistic in their tone regarding the near and distant futures.
De Jong is confident a solution would be found for issues like performance bonuses, many of which can’t be attained because of an abbreviated season.
He also feels the league outreach has taken positive steps forward from their initial announcement of the wage deferral, which was dropped on players without consultation or warning.
“We’re happy the league is started discussions with us. It’s a great start forward … a positive step in a good direction.”
The person in charge of making the NHL more inclusive wants you to know things are going to get better.
Change is coming, said Kim Davis. And it’s coming soon.
The league will be more diverse. There will be black coaches, black general managers, even more black players.
“All of that is happening,” said Davis, the NHL’s executive vice-president of social impact, growth initiatives and legislative affairs.
“And I’m excited.”
Two years ago, when the league hired Davis to be its so-called “social justice warrior,” it might have been easy to brush off her optimism as overly ambitious.
This has predominantly been a white man’s league.
It still is. But in the past several months, we’re seeing a change in how the NHL wants to do business. And the most telling part is it’s the players who are calling for change.
The daily protests that have occurred across the United States following the senseless killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police have caused everyone to look at the world differently than we might have before.
Things are broken. They have been for a while now.
It’s not just in the U.S. — it’s everywhere, including the NHL, where systemic racism has gone unchecked for generations.
So it was refreshing to see Sidney Crosby release a statement saying, “I will listen and educate myself on how to make a difference” and for Connor McDavid to say, “The time is now for all of us to get out of our comfort zones.”
From Jonathan Toews and Blake Wheeler to Patrice Bergeron and Alex Ovechkin, more than 100 players — most of them the stars of the league — have spoken out against racism and the social inequalities that exist.
For Davis, who praised Evander Kane for getting the conversation started and calling upon others to lend their voices to the cause, it’s the kind of snowball effect that she believes could lead to a watershed moment for the NHL.
“I am so thoroughly appreciative and optimistic about the voices that we have heard,” Davis said.
“We have been planning for this work for as long as I’ve been here and before. But what this does though is it affirms that we’ve got allies and champions and partners that we’re going to be able to access in new and different ways. To have your players involved is a huge acceleration point. That’s what is different about this moment.”
Indeed, the NHL was presented with a similar moment in November when Akim Aliu came forward with allegations of racial abuse at the hands of Bill Peters, when both were in the minors. Peters resigned from his job with the Calgary Flames as a result and the NHL implemented a multi-pointed “zero tolerance” approach to inappropriate conduct.
But the difference then was Crosby, McDavid and others didn’t make statements. With the season still on, they went back to their day job. The momentum didn’t carry.
Now, with the season on hold because of the coronavirus, there has been ample time to listen, watch and ask hard questions. It’s a perfect storm, Davis said.
“In my household, we’ve been talking a lot about what makes this moment different, because this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the kind of blatant injustice and frankly chilling abuse on the main global stage,” Davis said.
“I think what’s different about this moment is that we were all paused. We all had a moment where we weren’t in constant movement and we saw it and we were consumed by it and were already stressed about the COVID pandemic and to face a racial pandemic across the globe, I think it was just a pivot point.”
Since then, Davis has been spending a lot of time talking on the phone with Kane and other black players, such as J.T. Brown, Joel Ward and Anson Carter, about what comes next. She wants to get to a point where there is more than just the average of one black player per team. The NHL needs people of colour in roles where they can make a difference, where they are the ones deciding on who gets drafted and who plays on the power play.
“We need training programs in place, mechanisms to remove the impediments that youth have (to play hockey),” Davis said. “Getting more coaches of colour in internship programs. Those are the things that are going to sustain us in the long haul.”
At the same time, Davis is cautious about moving too fast. There is a three-dimensional framework to all of this, she said. The final step is advocacy. But if the league is going to have the sort of change that she envisions, then the first two steps — awareness and allyship — cannot be skipped.
“Typically, people in positions in power want to jump right into advocacy without walking through the steps of awareness and allyship. And awareness is really about educating yourself and suspending judgment and understanding what brought us to this moment. The owners are ready to be listeners.
“It’s a long game. If we think we’re going to go from 29 current black players to 50 in a year, we’re fooling ourselves.”
We all had a moment where we weren’t in constant movement and we saw it and we were consumed by it.”
Kim Davis