Oh, Canada! ... Why can't you get your soccer act together?

It is more than four times larger than Honduras, which will be in South America this summer.

There’s something wrong with this sentence…
Anyway, as one of the “relatively small legion of passionate hockey supporters in our country,” I’m crushed over yesterday’s loss, but I also understand how much it means to Canadians. However, I think they’re slowly getting their act together in the soccer world. Toronto is one of the most successful new MLS clubs, Vancouver is joining in 2011, and as you’ve written about in this blog, Montreal is pining for an MLS side as well. Soccer in Canada is inching towards legitimacy.

I’m more Sharks fan than hockey fan and while I was certainly rooting for Team USA, I found myself more than a little relieved that Canada won. Mainly, it was because I didn’t want fans piling on HTML anymore than they already do, but also because I actually would have felt bad for Canada. I’m pretty sure the two parts of this are totally contradictory, and maybe absurd. At least it was an entertaining game.

because its not played on ice. Now that’d be entertainment.

My friend living in Canada plays in an indoor league in Toronto that has massive participation, but it must be tough to play outdoor due to the long winters. That being said, Russia, Norway, and Sweden don’t seem to have any problems being good in both traditional winter sports and soccer and they have long winters too.

… if the criteria are performance on the international stage and honors accrued for club, country, and self, then the best Canadian footballer is Christine Sinclair.

That aside, on the men’s side of the equation, I don’t think the nation as a whole needs to fall in love with football to start making an impact on the success of the national team. If what we’re looking for is to reach some kind of critical mass with population/player pool compared to the Mesoamerican nations, just capturing the attentions of, say, 40% of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and that span of Ontario from Windsor to Niagra would provide a metro area population that would exceed (barely) any seriously competitive CONCACAF nation not called the USA or Mexico. The thing that matters if hitting that player base that will actual promote a steeper skill growth curve. Having 100 kids making up a couple of 5 team regional leagues in each age grouping isn’t going to get it done very fast.

In terms of raw numbers, Toronto’s metro area alone boast smore people than most successful CONCACAF nations, but at this moment, they aren’t (as a group) focusing on playing soccer. Adding in the Whitecaps to MLS and the looming prospect of a team in Quebec to go along with TFC, and there will be a move for more youth to participate, which in turn could produce significant results in about 2 qualifying cycles (as the oldest of them start hitting age 20ish).

more than the US. Brilliant.

Starts with two factors the same as the US as of, say, the 1990s, and one different:

1) Sport wasn’t very popular in ‘the heartland’ of the country as a spectator sport. Much like the US the fanbase has been predominantly ‘new Canadians’, a motley patchwork that’s hard to bring together.
2) Local FA had no money to really grow the game

and the difference:
3) 30 million vs nearly 300 million people

For us, that difference allowed some things like Hosting a World Cup, which helped a lot on point 2, and everything has changed for the US since then. For Canada, they’re not likely to get a WC, so they’re going to have to go another way. It’s a ray of hope for them that the sport appears to be more popular in the largest few markets than might be the case here, that those cities are a larger proportion of the city (the three largest markets are over 10 million of the 35 million who live in the country, where the US, it’s maybe 45 million out of 305) that they have more realistic goals (it would be a huge boost to the game in Canada at this point just to qualify for a WC, let alone to win a game there).

They’re going to have to build largely through those big-market clubs, TFC, Vancouver, and Montreal. Because of the population demos, I think it’s almost inevitable that Canada will look at soccer differently when it has a tradition in all three major markets, and if they can each get a decent talent pipeline going, Canada does still have the long-term potential to develop a strong program (certainly in the Gold Cup before this most recent one they looked like a team to be reckoned with, and if they can ever get the infrastructure strong enough not to lose guys like Hargreaves or the younger de Guzman, they’ll be on their way).

Here in Chicago it is very very popular again. And our boy Toews betrayed us and our boy Kane let us down

Canadian Soccer Association is a huge mess. Add to it no quality coaches and you get the problem. Canada is failing in love with the sport; if you saw the hockey fans a lot had CSA scarfs. And I think we are forgetting that Canada did host the U-20s in 07’ and had one of the best attendences is history.