Time is on their side.

A group, headed by Joe Belan, is “not going to rush things” as the end goal remains the same: to bring a Canadian Premier League soccer team to Saskatchewan.

The target date, at least for now, is 2021.

While the so-called beautiful game is threatened globally by an ugly virus, long-term plans to establish a CPL team in Saskatoon remain in place.

While the ongoing COVID-19 threat has forced the cancellation of upcoming pre-season exhibition games scheduled for this weekend in Saskatoon between the SK Selects and FC Edmonton at the SaskTel Soccer Centre, the Saskatchewan group continues to move forward.

“We’ve always said we’re not going to rush things,” said Belan, the SK Series lead organizer. “We’re going to take a very methodical approach. We look at last year and we had nothing; it was a blank canvas. At least we were able to establish a foundation. Now we want to build on that.”

The way the CPL is set up, it can be “very successful” in a province like Saskatchewan, Belan added.

“Saskatoon, at 300,000 (population), and Regina, at 250,000, and then all the other smaller cities, like P.A. (Prince Albert), there’s enough of a population base across Saskatchewan that I think can support something like this and really feel like they can call it their own,” Belan said.

Steps have been taken to secure an upgraded stadium at Prairieland Park in Saskatoon in preparation for a potential 2021 CPL season.

“We’ve said we’re trying to be ready for the 2021 season, but there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve that,” he admitted. “Our biggest lead item is the stadium, which we plan to do over at Prairieland (Park), but there are still a number of things that need to be done there to be able to have that stadium ready to play by 2021.”

Plans are to use the Exhibition grandstand, which seats about 5,000, he said.

“We feel that it would create about the right atmosphere to showcase what soccer’s all about. What we’ve seen from our market studies is that people who’ve gone over to Europe or who have watched Toronto FC or a Whitecaps game, and they’ve seen the environment of watching soccer, people have enjoyed it, even if they are not necessarily soccer supporters but they’re captured by it.

“Once we can create the right environment and show the product in that domain, we’ll get a lot more people converted — or at least willing to try and come out and watch soccer.”

Belan believes the talent pool of prospective players has deepened.

“We’re elevating the quality of the product on the field,” he said. “It’s part of a multi-step process we have going on. For us, as I’ve said repeatedly, we were never endowed versus a lot of the other markets that joined the Canadian Premier League in their inaugural season. We didn’t have a stadium solution. We didn’t have an established group of players to draw upon here. So we had to spend that investment in developing some of the young players.”

GOAL IS COMPETITIVE TEAM, NOT BOTTOM-DWELLER

Belan says that youth movement was on display last year in the SK Summer Series, where there was an emphasis on younger talent. It was an opportunity for them to rise up and step up to the challenge.

“They did a great job,” Belan said. “Again, that’s part of the plan to be able to have local players that can ultimately be good enough to compete at that level. So, when I look at it, we were way behind all of the other markets in terms of preparedness. So this is all part of the process to be prepared so that, when we join the league, we are doing so from a position of strength and that we’re not a bottom-dweller.”

Belan wants to build a competitive team, and, hopefully, field a winner.

“One thing I’ve learned from this market is that people have some patience for teams, but if you’re a perennial losing team, there is not going to be a lot of patience to support that. So, not to say we’re going to win a championship every year, but we have to be competing and we have to be challenging for that, year in and year out.”

The Saskatchewan group had begun expanding its operational staff before the pandemic hit.

“Last year we started on a volunteer basis because we had no resources on the ground,” Belan recalled. “We didn’t even know who to talk to in order to get things started. Like any business, you start with one or two people that are doing everything from writing the press releases to sweeping the floors. But we found that the (SK) Series just grew in terms of complexity and time requirements. That’s when we started bringing in more full-time and part-time people to work because many of the volunteers, they have full-time jobs.

“We’re very appreciative of the time and effort they put into it, but it got ramped up to a level where we almost needed a full-time organization, which is good. That just shows the organization and the whole project is going. If we were still stuck in volunteers, that means we’re not progressing, necessarily, to the next level.”

They’re trying to build something and move away from merely selling tickets and transactions and entertainment to “selling more of a membership and an investment, and getting people to really invest in the club and the whole project,” Belan stressed.

“Rather than people saying they’re going to buy tickets to this game, we are really looking for people to be making more of a commitment to say, ‘This is our club; this is our team.’ ”

MLS’ LOS ANGLES FC MODEL

Belan added that they’d like to follow a model in place with Major League Soccer’s LA Football Club with community shareholders.

“They have 30 investors across L.A., all of them are dire-hard Los Angeles city supporters,” he noted. “They come from different areas — whether it’s entertainment or sports or culture or business. They’re known in the community so not only do they make a financial investment but they’re out supporting the club in other ways. We think we can take that model. I’ve spent a lot of time with the owners of LAFC, trying to understand their engineering, if you will. I think there are some applications for what we can do here in Saskatchewan as well.”

The end result could be a hybrid business model mixing private and community interests.

“It’ll integrate better in the community and the province than just being viewed as a private enterprise,” Belan said.

“We look at it very objectively so it’s not like we’re trying to put a square peg through a round hole. You just look at the situation here and what’s the best solution. You take ideas from different areas but you ultimately customize it for what’s best here. We think that model would do very well here.”

dzary@postmedia.com

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