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“I have a real gut feeling,” Genier says. “Just given the numbers in amateur soccer in this province … when I came here (with the Rush), there was 1,500 people involved in lacrosse across the province. There’s 30,000 in soccer. I’m not a rocket scientist, but that says there’s a huge interest.”

Genier said there’s a local component to the prospective ownership group, but he wouldn’t go into further details on who he’s working with.

“There’s a lot of moving parts to this,” he said during a stop-over in Saskatoon, where he’s staging a series of meetings.

As the Canadian Premier League labours to get off the ground, it has two confirmed teams — one in Hamilton, and the other in Winnipeg. The former team is headed up by Hamilton Tiger-Cats owner Bob Young, and the latter will be tied in with the Winnipeg Football Club, which operates the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

The CPL, which expects to launch in 2018 or 2019, currently employs just one person — Paul Beirne, who was instrumental in launching Toronto FC’s foray into Major League Soccer. The proposed league, Beirne said Wednesday, is designed in part to strengthen the men’s national-team program, which is a non-factor on the world stage.

“We’re going to create a professional soccer industry that currently exists on a very small scale in this country,” says Beirne, who is the CPL’s project manager. “The outcomes will be a league that lasts for another 100 years, and a Canadian men’s national-team program that rockets up the international charts. Right now, we’re 108th in the world. We’re the highest-GDP nation in the world without our own pro league. It’s just shameful. We challenged each other: Instead of saying why we can’t do it, we said ‘what will it take in order to make it work?’ ”