Weak soccer system symptom of national inferiority complex
As Major League Soccer (MLS) kicks off its 20th season and Toronto FC its ninth, what are Canadians to make of their combined contribution to Canadian soccer? And is there a broader lesson for the spirit of the times in Canada?
Full confession: I come from a line of soccer fanatics, including my father, who heads Spartacus Soccer Club. In a past life, I captained York University’s varsity soccer team — today the best university side in the land — and played professionally with the Toronto Lynx, the predecessor to TFC. My teammates on the Lynx were Paul Stalteri and Dwayne De Rosario, arguably the most accomplished soccer players to have ever come out of Canada.
Count me as a staunch admirer of both MLS and Toronto FC. I am cheering for their great success. However, let me be firm in saying that any success they enjoy is completely independent of the continued impoverished, benighted state of Canadian soccer and the ersatz system that we continue to hope will produce players like Stalteri and De Rosario. To be clear, Stalteri and De Rosario achieved what they did not because of Canada’s soccer infrastructure, but decidedly in spite of it.
MLS is a great American achievement. It was launched shortly after the 1994 World Cup hosted by the U.S. in order to build a serious American league that would sit at the apex of a proper American soccer development system. Two decades later, the U.S. men’s national team continues to qualify with great ease for every single World Cup, MLS enjoys 20 strong teams (employing scores of American players) with generally strong balance sheets, good attendance, and, to be sure, very credible standards of play. Hats off to our American brethren.
What is the Canadian footballing response to the American example? Do we, like nearly every country on Earth, build our own excellent league in order to drive the national soccer system? Nay, we settle for three teams — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — in the American structure and call it a job well done.
What is the result of this job well done? On the nearly 30-man roster of each of the three “Canadian” teams, there are all of six Canadian players on TFC, six on the Montreal Impact, and five on the Vancouver Whitecaps. Meanwhile, nearly a half-dozen players on the Canadian men’s national team — today ranked117th in the world — sit without any footballing contract or employment whatsoever.
This state of affairs is not the fault of the Americans, who have somehow failed to employ Canadian players. They owe us nothing. It is our own fault for still being patently colonial in our thinking — and not just in soccer. For it is not economics as such that prevents Canada — population 35 million and constantly growing — from building men’s and women’s sports leagues (in soccer, but also in basketball, baseball, and yes, even hockey) and countless other key national institutions across the expanse of our country, but instead a national mentality that, notwithstanding its many strengths, still readily subordinates, colonially, to the imaginations of nations we deem superior.
After all, unlike the National Basketball Association or Major League Baseball, MLS is, by global soccer standards, a middle-class league. It has no active footballing geniuses in its ranks. And yet, as with all things in international life, there are the builders and those who live on the terms of the builders. The Americans have, again, done the building and we have quickly (perhaps unconsciously) folded to their imagination and energy. The consequences of this subordination are ours alone to reckon with.
What’s to be done? For starters, let’s stop making excuses about our “smallness” and, in concert with this, our exceptional circumstances by dint of our proximity to American civilization. The smallness is in the mind, and our exceptionality is far overstated. We need to build, build, build, and courageously so. Australia’s recent triumph in the Asian continental soccer championship — the third-most-difficult continental championship in the world — is no accident: it comes from a deliberate national effort to build a bona fide Australian soccer league and a world-class sporting infrastructure in support of it. Even Ukraine, broken and impoverished from its revolution and the Donbass war, still has a world-class national league that supports a terrific national outfit.
Are we Canadians builders, or are we content to live on the terms of the builder nations? I would like to think that the former is the truer. If I am right, then the building of a real soccer system will surely be one of the simplest of many far-greater challenges this century — from business to the arts to brute geopolitics — where proof of concept is everything.
The Americans have, again, done the building and we have quickly folded to their imagination and energy