Why a Canadian Soccer League?

It’s an axiom that almost every Canadian men’s soccer fan’s fondest wish, after the senior national team making a World Cup, is that Canada join the civilized world and get a national soccer league. I say “almost” because for some people it is their very fondest.

The pro-Canadian league contingent is still the majority, if only in a “wouldn’t it be nice if…” sense. But opposition is growing. Some look at our three MLS clubs, two NASL clubs, and a USL Pro which will happily take Canadian clubs if we let them, and say “good enough.” Why would we want a Canadian league? A league that, even if it did prove sustainable, concedes our three biggest markets to MLS off the trot and could never be as good as the top American competition?

Of course nobody pretends a proper Canadian soccer league would be easy. Our history is littered with exciting national leagues that started up, ran out of money in half an hour, and was selling off the furniture before the leaves turned brown. The doubters use this to imply that, unlike the mighty Gambia or ultra-wealthy Honduras, we must rely on our more successful neighbour and take what we can get.

But American sports leagues, boasting big budgets and cities with a million people and nothing better than college football, go bust all the time. Sports are risky business, most teams lose money, and every twentieth-century success story began “we decided to burn millions of dollars.” Depending on how you count it took as many as four cracks at a serious national soccer league before MLS became established. Even the Canadian Soccer League, all seven tumultuous seasons of it, lasted twice as long as Donald Trump’s USFL and aeons longer than Vince McMahon’s XFL. A second USFL has spent six years trying to play a game.

If the Yanks said “we shouldn’t run the risk” think how much poorer our sports stations would be. But they don’t say that, because it is anathema to the American psyche to be second-class. The United States is next door to the biggest and best youth hockey leagues in the history of the world, each accepting American teams, and Uncle Sam still spends time, effort, and cash improving NCAA and the USHL because he is not content to be an appendix. They want to be the best damned hockey country they can.

It’s a treasonous sentence in this country, but: we could learn a lot from the Americans.

Patriotism is out of fashion in the smart, young, left-leaning set that goes to Canadian soccer games, but I don’t want Canada to be a second-class soccer citizen. I know that a Canadian league will no sooner surpass MLS globally than put a team on the Moon. But get a rabid American fan drunk and he’ll admit MLS isn’t passing the EPL in his lifetime. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want them to try.

Right now, when a Canadian MLS team makes money, it’s for the American who dominate Soccer United Marketing, under the aegis of the American executives at the top of MLS. They’re drafting American college players, developing the American soccer pyramid, and (let’s be frank) giving playing careers to more Americans than Canadians. The vast official league media is full of American stories, and the less competent reporters who take their cue from there talk them up. Landon Donovan’s retirement was big news: when Dwayne De Rosario goes it’ll be a ripple in a very big pond. Logically there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but nothing in sports fandom is about logic.

Meanwhile, from Victoria to St. John’s, many of Canada’s best cities have no shot at professional American soccer. These cities support junior hockey and sometimes Canadian football with great success but will never, ever, and I mean ever get into MLS. Their chance of seeing the NASL, while the league has to focus on its American markets by USSF regulation, is one in a million. And even if we let USL up here they’d face the same remorseless math. American leagues have to focus on the United States; that’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a fact of life.

So let’s aim higher. The Canadian Soccer League, remembered as a failure, still brought us players and teams that resonate to this day. Before the CSL, Domenic Mobilio was not on the soccer radar: today he is one of our most beloved, legendary players. The Vancouver 86ers, undefeated in 46 straight. The Winnipeg Fury, who kayoed those immortal 86ers in the 1992 final and brought us players like Geoff Aunger and Carlo Corazzin. I could go on, and it was all long before my time. Superstars on the world stage, teams remembered with the Arsenal invincibles? God no. But Canadian players on Canadian teams who left a legacy that still comes up whenever our fans gather.

By all means, let the Whitecaps and the Impact and the FCs remain in MLS if they wish. Let the idea of them joining our domestic league be as absurd as the Canucks playing in the WHL. The point is not to instantly create a league that can compete with the Americans: the point is to make Canada the best soccer country it can possibly be. A colony can never realize its full potential.