Caps not keen on another `cupset'
Canadian Championship match pressure will be on Whitecaps to avoid third straight early exit
It should be personal. It should be very, very personal. By all rights, Phil Dos Santos should be bringing fire and brimstone as he prepares his Valour FC squad to face his former team in the Canadian Championship — the one that sacked him and his brother Marc, the Whitecaps' head coach, last year while they were on an eight-game unbeaten run and two-game win streak.
But the Winnipeg-based Valour's general manager and head coach is just looking forward to seeing some old friends on the Vancouver Whitecaps, sharing some handshakes, hugs and wine with old friends — but only after what he hopes is an exciting, competitive Canadian Championship game at B.C. Place Stadium on Wednesday night. And he promises he won't follow the game with any hamburger posts to social media, either.
“It's fun. It'll be fun, right?” the former Whitecaps assistant coach said last week.
“I was happy when I saw the bracket and I saw that there was a chance (to face Vancouver). We'll leave it all out there on the field, and at the end we'll see what the results can be.”
The Dos Santos brothers appeared to have finally turned the Whitecaps' fortunes around last season, but they were sacked by CEO Axel Schuster, who said the recent wins had left “fake impressions” and that their firing on Aug. 27 had absolutely nothing at all, not a single bit, to do with a second straight Canadian Championship loss to Pacific FC the night before.
Schuster's difficult decision to part ways with the coaches only came with wrestling over a 4 a.m. Uber Eats burger — which Marc Dos Santos gleefully alluded to in a since-deleted Instagram post after his new/old LAFC team beat the Whitecaps earlier this season.
Their firings should, however, underline the most important fact: This Canadian Championship game means everything to the Whitecaps. The road to winning an MLS Cup or Supporters' Shield is a much longer, difficult journey compared to the four games needed to raise the Voyageurs Cup.
But Vancouver's 2015 title is the only one they've won. Toronto (seven) and Montreal (five) have won 12 of the 13 competitions, though the Whitecaps have been runners-up more times (seven) than TFC and Montreal combined (six).
And the Caps have the dubious honour of being the only Major League Soccer side to lose to a Canadian Premier League team, and doing so twice. Phil Dos Santos was on both of those Vancouver teams, but now he's on the other side of the equation.
“It's fun to go into a game where the responsibility or the pressure is not on you,” he said. “I want to go and enjoy knowing that we still have a few cards that we could play. It's extremely difficult, but like I experienced, it's not impossible — and I want the guys here to also believe that.
“Yes, there's a bit of ghosts (for Vancouver), but you know I don't want to get ahead of myself here. They're still the favourites to win, and if someone has a doubt about that it's because they don't understand the dynamic of a team in that league versus a CPL team.”
First, it's money. The average salary in the CPL is around $40,000; in MLS it's $373,000. Then there's talent — or, at least, how talent can be broadly quantified. In last year's matchup, the Caps had a market value of US$37.7 million compared to Pacific's $3.7 million. Clubs are required to have at least three Canadian starters in the game, but while the Whitecaps can draw heavily on a global player pool, CPL teams are required to have a minimum of six domestic starters and are limited to seven imports on the team. As well, the CPL is skewed to development, as three of their domestic players have to be under 21 but play at least a combined 2,000 minutes per year.
But this is a Cup tournament. And history is littered with examples of minnows leaving the bigger fish belly-up in “cupsets.” And the difference in talent might not be as big as the dollars make it out to be.
“There's so many factors that come into play that I never think it's just down to one team being better than the other or one being an underdog,” said Valour winger Brett Levis, who spent six years with the Whitecaps organization and watched their first CC loss to Cavalry FC in 2019 from the bench.
“How many games have they had in the week? How many days have they had to recover? What resources do they have? And I think that overall, the difference is not huge. Obviously, most MLS teams are a lot more experienced, they have a lot more money to buy players. But any given day, a top CPL team will compete.
“(Being an MLS team), you have everything to lose. It's like you cannot lose to a CPL team. That was almost the message going in (in 2019). `Play your game, do what you do, but don't lose to the CPL team.' So there's a lot more pressure than you might think. It doesn't help the MLS club when they're looked at as you must win, and that you should win.”