USA prepares for Germany tussle while neighbours Canada stay home again

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jun/26/us-germany-canada-world-cup

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To hear some Canadians tell it, at the moment, we’re all a bunch of pathetic losers. Their beef? Canada has been unable to field a men’s team at the World Cup since 1986, and it’s making us all crazy, apparently. “It starts small, the odd flag on the occasional car,” Declan Hill, the journalist who reported major match-fixing schemes in the game, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen, “but soon it develops into a full-blown, humiliating national mania.”

He’s talking about the kind of thing you’ll see at the moment in any major Canadian city. In Toronto that ‘mania’ is probably at its peak. Entire districts of the city transform into pockets of foreign countries. Little Italy, obviously, suddenly becomes a bit more Italian. Little Portugal splits itself into Portuguese and Brazilian camps. There are Argentinian and Colombian fans with flags adorning their cars (including the hoods) driving by. The Dutch are always out, too, brightly dressed and brightly hopeful. And of course, the English fans are around as well, sulking in corners, hands covering our faces, averting glances.

The World Cup, Hill wrote, brings out “those sickening Canadian traits of sucking up to foreigners while tolerating failure of our own.” Not to mention that other sickening Canadian trait of being sickened by our sickening Canadian traits.

It’s not an entirely surprising thing to Canadians to watch each other revert to past international connections – a multicultural country like this one tends to allow a lot of latitude when defining one’s nationality. But taking a step back, it is a bit strange. Not necessarily the adoption of our respective old countries in lieu of a national side to support, but the deeper problem: why is Canada so bad at soccer?

The US shared our pain for a time, too, but those days are long gone. The fervor with which the Americans have adopted soccer in the last 20 years, and this World Cup specifically, offers a compelling juxtaposition to Canada – another large developed, rich, industrial nation in the Concacaf zone. Thursday’s game between USA and Germany, for example, will be a clash of a legitimate soccer dynasty versus a legitimate up-and-comer. The US didn’t like being an international laughing stock on the men’s pitch, so they did something about it. Canada, on the other hand, languishes still.

I mention the men on purpose. As it happens, our women are quite good. Canada’s women’s national team is currently ranked seventh in the world, just behind Brazil and ahead of England. And which country will play host to that other World Cup, the 2015 women’s tournament? Why, it’s Canada, of all places. And how about this: unlike any of her male counterparts, Christine Sinclair, the women’s team captain, is a household name. In 2012 she won the country’s Lou Marsh award, handed down each year to the top athlete in the nation, past winners of which include Steve Nash, Sidney Crosby and Wayne Gretzky.

But it’s perhaps those last two names that are a signal to at least part of the problem. According to the Canadian Soccer Association’s current “strategic plan” for “leading a soccer nation”, there are 850,000 registered soccer players in the country, making it “by far the most popular team sport” in the nation – more popular, in other words, than hockey. And yet, shaking off hockey as the main goal for the most athletic Canadian kids, particularly boys, is a difficult thing. Many of those registered Canadian soccer players – young and old – use the sport as a way to keep fit between hockey seasons. The sidelines of soccer fields across the nation are filled with soccer parents, but many are moonlighting; hockey remains the real athletic draw – for now, anyway. Canadian youth hockey enrollment has stalled recently, and that cheaper game – soccer – may begin to look enticing to some.

In the meantime, if the success of Major League Soccer in Canada is any indication, things are already looking up. Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps drew more fans on average to their games than all but one other MLS team in 2014. Toronto got an average of over 22,500 fans to BMO Field in 2013. In both cities, attendance jumped from the previous two seasons (helped along surely, in Toronto’s case, by a big-name acquisition in Jermain Defoe). Even the lowly Montreal Impact managed a top-10 finish on the attendance chart in 2014, pulling in over 19,000 on average to each game. Perhaps more importantly, each club has established academy teams to cultivate young talent.

At those lower levels, too, there is promise, even if the steps now being taken to improve things offer another explanation for just how bad things have been.

The CSA’s new plan for the sport involves support for “the development of elite-level, semi-professional regional leagues” to bridge what it sees as existing gaps “between high-performance youth players and national/professional team selection.” That includes, apparently, plans for the facilities they’ll use to be “world class”. Beyond that, it also calls for an alignment of national governing soccer bodies, so that national and provincial operations can be streamlined and coordinated.

Those may be ambitious goals, but that they are still goals at all at this stage suggests meeting them is long overdue. In fact, that we’re seeing the strategic plan at all seems an accomplishment of sorts. The 2014 plan is the first that is not solely an internal document. “For the first time, we have reached out to the Canadian soccer community, looking for ideas and guidance,” it brags.

In sum, all is not lost. The indications are, generally, that Canada’s soccer development is heading in the right direction. Perhaps one day soon, Canadians will proudly hang a Team Canada soccer jersey next to their Team Canada hockey sweaters. Of course, with plenty of room left over for the Old Country kit, sickening as it may be.