After spending 99 years pandering to petty regionalism, the Canadian Soccer Association today confirmed that it was prioritizing the pitch results over satisfying PEI (or Alberta, or...) soccer moms.
All three second round World Cup Qualifying games will be in Toronto -- the country’s largest city, media centre, easiest travel hub and location of its current best stadium and pitch.
The reaction from those outside of said city has been, of course, mostly reactionary and provincial.
“How dare they” cries the west. “Where is our game?” The arguments being made for moving the games around the country are almost entirely focused on what’s best for the fans. It’s suggested that by playing them all in Toronto they are “shutting out” fans from outside Central Canada.
At the risk of insensitivity, who cares? The critics are probably right. The casual fan in Calgary is not likely to jump on a plane and fly to Toronto to watch St. Kitts play in November. Newsflash: The casual fan in Calgary is only slightly more likely to drive across the city to watch St. Kitts in November.
Canada needs to win more to get the fans out. Everything the CSA does now should be focused on that one and only important factor. If you want to see games in the west then make a logical, competitive argument for it. If you can’t do that then at least be honest in admitting that you are mostly just upset because it’s not easy or cheap for you to get to the game. I have empathy for that. I do. I just don’t think it matters all that much in the big picture.
Playing games in Toronto make sense on multiple levels. A few:
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1 – Travel. Sure, there are direct flights from Europe to western locations, but they are far fewer and much longer. If you add 2 ½ hours to a flight from London to a player’s travel time that’s five total hours that he spends sitting on a plane. You might think that doesn’t matter or that it's petty, but when you fly direct from Vancouver to London you’re not jumping off the plane to play an international football game. The extra hours and jetlag don’t really affect your drinking.
2- Expense
BMO Field is set-up and ready to accommodate national team games. There is no additional expense to staging the games there and in the penny pinching CSA that matters.
3- Exposure
It’s a sore point outside of Southern Ontario, but it’s hard to ignore that fully 1/3 of all Canadians live within a 2-hour drive of BMO Field. It’s nearly ½ when you expand the distance to 5-hours. If your goal is to expose more fans to the team, Southern Ontario gives you your best bang for your buck.
4 – Media
Another sore point. Rightly or wrongly, 90 per cent of major Canadian sports media is based in Toronto. If you don’t play the game in their backyard then there is far less of a chance they’ll pay attention to it. If they don’t pay attention…again, less exposure.
5- Building a fan base.
If you play a bunch of games in a cluster then there is a good chance that you will slowly start to build that base. Yes, ideally we need that in multiple cities, but we need it in one city first. Playing a bunch of games in one city would also allow that stadium staff to work out security protocols to better deal with aggressive away support. If you move the games around, you have soccer naïve security staff at every new location (and don’t kid yourself – you play Mexico v Canada in Moncton and that Westjet direct flight from Toronto to Moncton would be packed full of…Mexicans going to Moncton).
6 – Stadium
And, finally, the most important factor of all. BMO Field is literally the only stadium in the country with a grass pitch that can hold more than 20,000. Saputo Stadium in Montreal will be in the mix for the next round, but the day FieldTurf went into Commonwealth Stadium was the day that it became very, very hard to justify playing national team games in Western Canada. And, spare us the FieldTurf-is-just-as-good arguments. Perception is reality and the players perceive FieldTurf to be crap. Don’t be surprised if the west is shut out in the next round too. A lack of a proper stadium kept the national team away from Toronto for nearly a decade.
Regardless, it’s unlikely that the CSA will play all three games in the third round in Toronto. Regional pettiness runs too strong in Canada to allow for the right thing to happen for too long after all. They’ll spread the games around and we'll be worse for it.