Well, we are officially nearing the end of the inaugural Canadian Premier League season, which soccer fans in the country have been tuning into throughout the summer, and now into the fall. While Valour FC has played over 25 matches, it’s still almost hard to believe that Winnipeg actually has a professional soccer team, as it’s something many fans in the city have dreamt about for a long, long time, since the Fury disbanded along with the Canadian Soccer League back in 1992.

The support in the Manitoba capital, as you can see on any Valour matchday, is raucous, passionate, and extremely loyal to the club, its staff, and most certainly its players. Despite this, the fans have certainly been tested in this inaugural season, as Valour fell out of the title picture early on in both the Spring and the Fall seasons in the Canadian Premier League, while also putting in a few disastrous performances at home in front of their own fans.

While the support will certainly not fade quickly due to a rather extensive soccer fanbase in the city, they may have to be patient to see their team succeed in the long run. Not that Valour can’t be successful sooner rather than later, the players have fantastic facilities at their disposal and a caring coaching staff as well, but there are a few factors that lie beyond the control of the club, that they will find tough to overcome as the years go on, especially when competing with some of the more advantaged sides in the division.

#CanPL goals per 90 (min 500 minutes)



1. Tyler Attardo (0.74)

2. Anthony Novak (0.70)

3. Easton Ongaro (0.69)

4. Tristan Borges (0.64)

5. Michael Petrasso (0.52) — CanPL DB (@CanPLDB) September 15, 2019 Winnipegger Tyler Attardo has been one of the standout players in the Canadian Premier League this season.

First of all, while the likes of Tyler Attardo, Marco Bustos, Dylan Sacramento, Raphael Ohin, and the rest of the Winnipeggers in the Valour squad have impressed in the Canadian Premier League, there are some worries that there isn’t anymore CPL-ready talent in Winnipeg at the moment. While there are some very talented Winnipeggers plying their trade elsewhere, such as Julian Avila with Seattle University or Moses Danto with Foothills, the concensus scepticism is that Valour already have most of the CPL-ready talent from Winnipeg on their roster. Even among the younger players in Tyler Attardo’s age bracket, there is some doubt.

This poses a significant issue for Valour, especially since they themselves don’t hold any control in the development of younger male players in this province as they don’t have a mens academy just yet. While they can of course find Canadian players from elsewhere like they have done to make up a good chunk of their roster, the fact that there is likely to be a CPL team in every major Canadian province within the next 3 years means that they certainly won’t be first in line to sign non-Manitoban Canadians.

The likes of Pacific, York 9, Forge, and the Quebec team that eventually joins will have an upper-hand in talent recruitment for years to come, and we saw that before a ball was even kicked in the Canadian Premier League. Pacific got to tap into the vast canvas of talent that Whitecaps 2 left behind, as well as essentially the entire BC talent pool. York 9 and Forge got first-dibs on the extremely deep and talented Ontario talent pool, including the talent in League1 Ontario and from the TFC academy system. Even apart from those 3 teams, Cavalry benefitted massively from having a Foothills team made up of mostly CPL-ready talent to choose from, while FC Edmonton had plenty of infrastructure already in place from their NASL days, including an academy and scouting system.

The 2 clubs left on the outside looking in, were HFX Wanderers and Valour. While Halifax doesn’t have a talent pool as deep as Winnipeg’s, both coaches, Stephen Hart and Rob Gale, had to rely on their connections through previous jobs to bring in players from all over the map.

In the combined CPL table, Valour and HFX are the 2 worst sides based on points total – that is no coincidence, and the reasons for this, as I explained in the previous 2 paragraphs, aren’t going to disappear in the long-run. In fact, it might even get more difficult.

Of course, while Valour suffers with no men’s USports soccer teams in Manitoba anymore, they do have the small benefit of having WSA Winnipeg in town. WSA play in the USL League Two, and helped produce a few of Valour’s homegrown talents: Raphael Ohin, Tyson Farago, and Ali Musse. While WSA may very well become a sort of “B Team” for Valour, and perhaps you could already consider them something of that sort, they aren’t going to be producing CPL-ready players on a year-by-year basis. Sure, a gem might come along every once in a while, but it’s simply not enough to rely on too heavily moving forward.

We return to paradise in October.



Secure your seat for the SECOND-LAST home match of our inaugural season!



🎟️ | https://t.co/L2GaEHuMnu

📍 | IG Field, Winnipeg, MB

⏰ | Saturday, October 5th, 2:30 PM CDT #ForValour | #CanPL pic.twitter.com/wsL3Nlgrqp — ValourFC (@ValourFootball) September 23, 2019

The Manitoba Major Soccer League’s Premier Division is also home to some talented players, but once again the general level of talent is nowhere close to that of League1 Ontario, Whitecaps 2, or TFC II, which other sides in the CPL have been able to feed off of.

So yeah, unlike the Winnipeg Jets, Valour will be unable to feed off of the North American draft system which doesn’t give talented young players the ability to pick which city they play in. In soccer, the player always has an option, and for Valour to challenge the likes of Forge and Pacific in the long-run is going to be an extremely difficult task that will come down to shrewd, intelligent recruitment, quality coaching, and a good club infrastructure.

And of course, the fans will play a massive part too – this is something that Valour’s big brother, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, have thrived off of over the years. Winnipeg may not be a massive, modern, and beautiful city like Toronto or Vancouver, but for a professonal athlete, the passion of the fanbase often plays a large role, and the Blue Bombers having a strong fanbase has allowed them to attract great players for a long time.

If the support at IG Field can stay strong and continue to showcase their passion as the years go on, then they may be able to guide Valour over the obstacles that promise to make life difficult for them in the landscape of professional soccer.

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Mahith Gamage Website An avid football fan right from his first experiences with the sport, Mahith Gamage has been dabbling in football journalism for a few years now, creating his own world football blog and podcast, freeflow football, whilst featuring frequently on many other football media outlets, covering European football. With the start of the Canadian Premier League in 2019, Mahith began coverage of his hometown club, Valour FC, through NSXI. He enjoys spreading his knowledge and opinions of the beautiful game to fellow football fanatics in Canada and throughout the world, using articles and tweets, thriving particularly on tactical analysis and player scouting. You can find him tweeting about world football day and night, at @mahithgamage.

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