On April 27, the Canadian Premier League will kick off with its first ever match. Years in the making, the CPL has been eagerly anticipated by the Canadian soccer community and could completely change the Canadian soccer landscape.



This is the history of how the league came to be.



Five years ago, in between bites of local salmon at famed sushi restaurant Miku on Vancouver’s waterfront, Victor Montagliani dared Scott Mitchell to change how he thought about Canadian soccer.



Their lunch had been cordial enough, with Mitchell, CEO of the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats, echoing to the then president of the Canadian Soccer Association what many had said for years: Starting a Canadian soccer league was just too weighty an undertaking.



Montagliani, well aware of Mitchell’s sports business acumen, didn’t want to hear the conventional line of thinking.



“Anybody can tell me why this won’t work,” Mitchell recalls a...