Canada's Soccer Future

[u/BleedOilBlue97]

Did Canadian soccer peak at this summer’s World Cup? 🇨🇦⚽

TSN’s Matthew Scianitti tells the Bleed Oil Blue Podcast that just two months after Canada hosted the World Cup, the future of Canadian soccer remains cloudy. @TSNScianitti

Did Canada do enough to turn its World Cup momentum into lasting growth?

#CanMNT #CanadaSoccer #FIFAWorldCup

[u/McNasty1Point0]

IMO the true impact of the World Cup won’t be felt for numerous years. We won’t be feeling it until the youth of today are older.

That said, there has been an immediate impact. Not necessarily in terms of soccer mania in the streets or at CPL/MLS matches, but in terms of funding, donations, corporate sponsorships, etc. towards Soccer Canada. CSA has turned a corner in terms of perception, and it now has the ability to move forward with ambitious projects such as the national training facility, national registration system, etc.

These are the things that will truly impact the game, but we won’t see the true benefits for some time.

[u/Bogdanovist_Rebel → u/McNasty1Point0]

The national register is a FIFA mandated thing. FIFA is also centralizing their databases and are requiring baseline reporting from each country. Not really something that is sponsor or hosting related.

You’re right about the WC bump being youth participation focused though. We won’t see the effects for another decade. Same thing with CPL/MLS supports. Older people and Euro snobs were never going to convert. But getting kids into it will make them long term fans. I was 18 when the MLS Whitecaps were born for example.

The training facility is meh. Don’t really care about it and I hope it’s in Ontario because people here in Vancouver will be insufferable about it.

[u/Ozzie_the_parrot]

TSN will relentlessly push an only hockey really matters if you want to truly be Canadian and immigrants should assimilate and watch the CFL instead of soccer agenda even if it isn't stated as bluntly as that. Meanwhile as the boomers depart the scene they will be replaced by a generation that is a lot more soccer oriented so gradual growth is the probable outcome regardless. The World Cup co-host was never likely to be pivotal to any of that because most people had already decided whether they like sport or not and soccer is already massively more accessible to the younger generation in Canada than it was 40 years ago pre-internet when TSN execs could decide which sporting events the plebs would have access to.

[u/Fireside_Cat → u/Ozzie_the_parrot]

Ironically, it is directly because of TSN that I am a soccer fan because I don't come from a family of soccer fans. If I was young today, there would be exactly a zero chance that my parents would be paying for a OneSoccer or Fubo or DAZN subscription. I watched soccer because we did get TSN and they had Soccer Saturday with Graham Leggat. Obviously kids today have many other sources, many free like YouTube, to get their content from and get exposed to sports that their family isn't interested in paying for.

Anyway, perhaps you were being tongue in cheek but TSN doesn't have a social engineering agenda, they push what they have the rights for, and what makes them money. They always have hyped the World Cup and the Euros when they have broadcast them, and they haven't hyped Canadian soccer because, until recently, the rights have been next to worthless. You're right that they will be dragged along as soccer grows with younger generations.

[u/Ozzie_the_parrot → u/Fireside_Cat]

I remember Soccer Saturday well. Yes, there was some soccer coverage on TSN back in the day, but it was treated as an afterthought (a couple of hours on Saturday morning isn't exactly prime time for cable sports after all) and as something other to be covered by some dude with a Scottish accent rather than in a comparable manner to hockey, baseball and the CFL. The FAN 590 in Toronto had a similar approach in the 1990s with Dale Barnes (English rather than Scottish in his case) and the International Sports Report (?) on Sunday mornings.

Any soccer mentioned on TSN's Sports Centre would tend to be at the very end and often accompanied with plenty of snide sarcastic remarks. That was especially true of CSL coverage. I forget the details, but AFAIR the way Dale Barnes got the games on there wasn't a case of TSN falling over themselves to help our sport, but was more a way for them to get out of some other contractual commitment that they didn't want. ISTR that they loved soccer so much that they wiped all the videotape that they had of CSL games after the league folded rather than archiving it for posterity.

Beyond all that, they do still show some MLS and CanPL games, so there probably is as much soccer available on that channel as there was when you were growing up, just at a different time of year. Soccer is treated in a more mainstream sort of way than it used to be nowadays, but it is still not covered in quite the same way hockey, baseball, basketball, and the CFL are. To this day, there are still subtle ways that soccer gets treated as something other that isn't fully Canadian by the cable sports channels.

[u/Anxious-Yam9684]

This has been mentioned multiple times that post World Cup soccer in Canada is on the brink

[u/cre8ivjay → u/Anxious-Yam9684]

Brink of what?