D’oh Canada! Women players aim to thrive again despite officials’ failings

Twice in the space of a few hours on Sunday evening, the Canadian women’s football community mixed excitement with relief.

Footage beamed back from Melbourne showed pivotal playmaker Jessie Fleming taking a full part in training in advance of Wednesday’s World Cup showdown with Ireland. Having laboured to an underwhelming 0-0 draw with Nigeria in their tournament opener without the Chelsea midfielder, Canada is placing much hope on Fleming’s slight shoulders. And just a couple of hours earlier there had been a similar mix of emotions when Canada Soccer (CS) announced it would open the upper tiers of Toronto’s BMO Field for September’s Olympic qualifier with Jamaica in light of strong initial demand.

That was exciting, obviously, because tickets flying out the doors of the 30,000-plus venue is a promising sign for a crucial game on the team’s journey to defending its Olympic crown. But the relief came from the fact that opening up the added space was the clear and obviously smart decision to make and CS, for a refreshing change, didn’t make an absolute mess of it.

Bev Priestman’s side have sky-high hopes for this World Cup and aren’t afraid to make them clear. The reigning gold medallists from Tokyo and the seventh-ranked side in the worldhave been flag-bearers for the sport for a long time in Canada’s packed sporting landscape, the men only recently proving themselves worthy of wider attention. But they are also a team that achieved all they have while hamstrung by a chaotic, at times confrontational, national association.

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“We have been successful not because of our federation but in spite of our federation – for many years,” attacking midfielder Janine Beckie, one of the faces of this golden generation but an absentee from the World Cup because of injury, said earlier this year. Beckie was sitting alongside celebrated captain Christine Sinclair and two other team-mates when she delivered that line in March, the quartet appearing on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill to speak to Canadian MPs about how their quest for pay equity, professional standards and plain old respect had met the soul-destroying reality of a national association not fit for purpose.

Case in point: that gripping government appointment was the only time Canada’s women players have appeared on home soil in 2023, with CS unable to arrange even a send-off friendly for a team that has played just five of 27 games in their own country since their Olympic triumph. A golden opportunity to grow the game wasted, to almost no one’s surprise.

When the US sneezes Canada catches a gold, goes the tired adage here. Perhaps there’s evidence of delayed transatlantic transmission too, though, because football and how it’s been run in Canada has some uncomfortable similarities with the mid-to-late John Delaney era at the Football Association of Ireland.

The women’s team turned consistent Olympic podiums into gold in Tokyo in 2021, the men followed up by qualifying for a World Cup for the first time in almost 40 years. The country will co-host the next edition of the men’s tournament. This should be a boom time for football in a country where ice hockey, baseball, basketball and gridiron have long dominated attention. Instead CS is contemplating another B-word: bankruptcy.

In the past 18 months alone, both the men’s and women’s national teams have gone on strike, initially over collective bargaining negotiations but morphing into wider and deeper fights. When the women’s team saw its budgets severely cut for World Cup preparation camps earlier this year, they called for the sport minister to intervene.

“Enough is enough,” said Sinclair, the highest scorer in international football history and a seminal sporting figure in as she plays in a sixth World Cup at 40. “Canada Soccer must live up to its obligation ... to advance the sport, not drag it down.”

The turmoil belatedly led to the downfalls of president Nick Bontis and general secretary Earl Cochrane, both part of a tight-knit group of executives close to Fifa vice-president Victor Montagliani, himself a former CS president, who have retained control for well over a decade. New leader Charmaine Crooks, presented as an agent of change, has long-time ties to that same group, with sources telling Canadian outlets that Montagliani had tried to edge May’s presidential vote in her favour.

The crux of much of this turmoil and financial calamity centres on a controversial agreement CS signed in 2017 that handed over all sponsorship and broadcasting rights to a third party with the slightly preposterous title Canada Soccer Business (CSB). The deal guaranteed CS $3 million (€2.06 million) a year in revenue, but with both national teams soaring and a home World Cup approaching, those rights are now worth multiples of that. One local report suggested CSB may already be raking in $20 million in annual revenue.

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Just last week, communications firm Telus agreed an estimated $3m-per-year partnership with CS, the announcement coinciding with the start of the Women’s World Cup. Yet that money is immediately diverted away from the women’s team and the national federation to CSB, a group made up of club owners from the Canadian Premier League, the domestic men’s competition.

A FIFPro report published last week found that 30 of the 32 teams competing in Australia and New Zealand have domestic women’s leagues. The exceptions were Haiti, a country blighted by political and economic strife, and Canada, the world’s eighth largest economy.

Canada kicked off their World Cup with no deal reached with CS. That’s hardly surprising given that interim general secretary Jason De Vos recently revealed bankruptcy “has been discussed” at CS HQ.

Sinclair and her team-mates insisted that they have parked negotiations and are only focused on on-field matters Down Under. Yet a team that has played just two warm-up friendlies since April, in part because of its association’s issues, looked particularly rusty against Nigeria and now face Ireland desperately needing a win.

Priestman’s team are once again aiming to thrive despite being hampered by CS. Just how hampered? We may soon find out.