The Canadian women’s national soccer team is ranked fifth in the world, but Christine Sinclair believes that to sustain that success, or improve upon it, players need to be able to play closer to home.

Women looking for a professional environment are forced to leave Canada because of the absence of any pro teams. The semi-professional League 1 Ontario is the top option in the country. That doesn’t sit well with Sinclair.

“I don’t know how to get there but it’s something I’m very passionate about. It needs to happen, sooner than later,” said the 36-year-old Canadian captain, who has plied her trade for the Portland Thorns of the National Women’s Soccer League for the past six years.

Sinclair and her Canadian teammates were upset by Sweden in the round of 16 of the Women’s World Cup. The eight countries that reached the quarterfinals all have professional women’s leagues. Canada, home to approximately 300,000 registered female soccer players in 2018, and Brazil are the only two countries ranked in the world’s top 10 without professional teams back home.

Dutch coach Sarina Wiegman, whose team reached Sunday’s World Cup final before falling 2-0 to the U.S., believes the Netherlands’ rise has been helped by improvements at the club level back home. The Dutch were European champions in 2017.

“The potential for the Netherlands has been there for a long time,” she told the Associated Press this week. “Since 2007, when the Eredivisie (the top women’s league in the Netherlands) started and players got better facilities and could train more, the players developed so much that they improved.”

Canadian Soccer Association general secretary Peter Montopoli said the next step for women’s soccer in this country is to have a professional team or collection of professional teams in Canada. That would likely involve solidifying ownership groups to invest in women’s soccer or working with the existing pro league south of the border.

University of Toronto sports marketing expert Richard Powers doesn’t think there’s a business model for a league of their own just yet. Sinclair may be a household name to many Canadians, but other names don’t yet offer the same marketability.

“Drawing a couple of thousand people, that’s not sustainable in the long run with a women’s professional soccer league,” Powers said.

But a team? That could work. Powers suggests starting small and getting creative if need be, pointing to models such as the Toronto Wolfpack, a professional rugby club based part-time in Toronto that competes in England, or the recent Major League Baseball proposal to split a season between St. Petersburg, Fla. and Montreal in an attempt to boost flagging attendance for the Tampa Bay Rays.

“Something like that, where there would be a limited numbers of games, it would become a little bit of a novelty and something we don’t see very often,” Powers said. “That it itself would probably attract people.”

Joining forces with the existing NWSL — similar to what Toronto FC, the Montreal Impact and the Vancouver Whitecaps have done with Major League Soccer — is an idea Sinclair floated this past May. Issues like how national team players from both the U.S. and Canada are allocated would likely have to be worked out, as well as commercial divisions, but league president Amanda Duffy has previously called the relationship with Canada Soccer a “valuable” and “evolutionary” partnership.

Four of the NWSL’s nine teams are associated with MLS franchises: the Thorns, the Houston Dash, the Utah Royals and the Orlando Pride.That setup means some of the carrying costs, like staffing and facilities, can be absorbed.

Canada’s three MLS franchises are all taking different approaches to incorporating the women’s game into their clubs.

Toronto FC president Bill Manning said this week that the club has had surface-level discussions about possibility adding women’s teams, either starting at the academy level and building up or going top down by investing in an NWSL franchise.

“As we get into the 2020s, it’s certainly an extension we’re going to look at,” Manning said.

The Montreal Impact are looking to build their way to a senior women’s team, starting with an affiliate program launched earlier this week that will see coaches from the club’s new scouting and development centre offer training sessions with boys and girls from participating clubs, according to Patrick Leduc, the administrative director of administrations. That could lead to girls’ academy teams or a senior squad.

“That’s a couple of years down the line but that’s part of the picture I have in my mind,” Leduc said.

The Vancouver Whitecaps operate two full-time development teams “with a vision for growing women’s soccer,” according to chief operating officer Rachel Lewis. Current national team members Jordyn Huitema, Julia Grosso and Jayde Riviere all spent time in the Whitecaps development program. Vancouver previously “looked very seriously” at an NWSL team, said Lewis, who believes “the best model for success would likely come from leveraging the infrastructure of existing clubs.”

The NWSL is the third attempt at a professional women’s league in North America. In the midst of its seventh season, it is still dealing with slow growth, a need for sponsorship and a lack of television exposure. There are success stories like the Thorns, who average around 17,000 fans a game, but Portland’s president of business, Mike Golub, says the league is still evolving.

“The short answer is it takes committed investors. It takes the right facilities. It takes the right infrastructure and the willingness — like any league of any kind needs, any young league — to grow, invest, sustain challenges, including potential losses early on, to create a foundation for a viable league.”

The financial investment for an MLS franchise to enter a team in the NWSL would vary depending on the existing infrastructure and how it translates between teams. Golub said that 22 per cent of Portland Timbers’ season-ticket holders are also Thorns season-ticket holders, with 30 per cent of Thorns subscribers making the same investment in the Timbers.

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Golub believes women’s pro soccer can be viable in North America with right owners and resources. The Timbers took on the women’s team expecting it to be an investment and not profitable, but the Thorns now outdraw some MLS teams.

“We took this on because we felt, first and foremost, that there should be a viable women’s professional soccer league in North America and that young girls throughout our continent should have a top-flight league to aspire to and play in. By virtue of the, that national teams will be well-served. That’s inarguable. You see that manifesting in other countries now.”

If Sinclair gets her way, Canada will reap those same benefits.

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