We begin with a simple question:
Why are there so few Canadians with coaching jobs in the vast world of professional soccer?
Instantly, come the contrasts.
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We think of Canada as big. It bottoms out at Point Pelee National Park, well out into Lake Erie, and runs all the way to the North Pole. It stretches as far into the icy, choppy Atlantic as Cape Speare, Newfoundland, and doesn’t cede sovereignty until the Yukon-Alaska border. This is a parcel of real estate so vast, its geographic centre is actually north of all the provinces – on the west shore of Hudson Bay in Nunavut.
And yet, in soccer terms, we are tiny. Four professional teams. The odd and occasional division-three league. One lone appearance in soccer’s greatest spectacle, the FIFA World Cup.
We also know that Canada is rich. The standard of living here – compared to most of the rest of the world – is luxury. The vast treasure trove of resources – both natural and human – hugely enviable.
And yet, in soccer terms, we are poor. Youth soccer is a thriving business, certainly, but the Canadian Soccer Association, up until recent times, was stumbling by on along about $13-million per year – most of it raised through fees on amateur players, the vast majority of whom are children.
Welcome to one of the industrial world’s smallest, poorest pro soccer set-ups. Want to coach? All too often, it's here’s your clipboard, check back in with us at the end of the season and tell us how you did.
“I get asked all the time: ‘How did you get to the national team? How did you become a professional?’ says CBC commentator and former Canada captain Jason de Vos.
“And I honestly can’t answer that question, because it was such a winding, pitfall-laden trip up the ladder. For every step forward, I took two steps back – and sidewards steps. I’ve told people countless times, as well, that if I could count the number of times I was told I wasn’t good enough to play at the professional level, I would long ago have run out of fingers.”
De Vos is offering us lesson one in Canadian coaching development. It’s an after-thought part of player development. This story will often seem to be more about players than coaches. That’s a function of how deep the neglect has been.
“The guys … and girls who make it to [the pro] level, they don’t do it because of the system,” he adds. “They do it in spite of the system. And that’s why the system needs to change.”
If the route up the road is this difficult and confusing for a player good enough to captain his nation and a side in the English Championship, what chance does a coach have?
As head coach of the San Jose Earthquakes of MLS, Frank Yallop is the exception. The exception. The only exception. The lone Canadian bench-boss of a top-flight professional soccer club in any kind of a high-profile league.
"My big thing is if we want to take this game seriously in Canada, we have to start to do that at the CSA level, at the provincial level and the professional level,” Yallop says.
“I felt it was more of a pastime for the provinces in the national program. It wasn’t the priority. It was on the back burner the whole time. The men’s program was never really supported by the provincial level, because their job is to run their province, and not to run the national team.”
Again, the interconnectedness. Just as de Vos points to obstacles hindering players, Yallop goes straight to problems with the national team, which he ran from 2004-06. Whatever coaching development Canada has done, up to now, has been dragged along with a more all-pervading tide.
“Soccer’s still not a mainstream sport here,” says Nick Dasovic, who was interim head coach of Toronto FC for the closing weeks of the 2010 season, before giving way to Aron Winter.
“It’s getting there, but with only four professional clubs that can only employ a maximum of ten to twelve coaching staff, that right away limits the opportunities to get jobs."
Ray Clark has been director of player and coaching development for the Canadian Soccer Association since 1992. He’s been a constant contributor to whatever’s been going on for the past two decades. And right away, he points to resources.
"Well, when I first came in, one of the biggest problems was we didn’t have any money.” Clark says.
“When we came into the earlier part of this century – with Holger Osieck [coaching the national team] – things picked up a lot. We had an influx of money, and new ideas from Holger, and that was a great boost for us. We started to actually invest in coaching development, whereby we would subsidize coaches coming to the B-licence courses, for example. Three-quarters of the cost of the course we paid, to make it viable for coaches to come in. And the program took off.”
Took off, but how far did it fly? Yallop, for what it’s worth, did his coaching certification in England. Dasovic started in Canada, but was urged to start over from scratch when he started taking UEFA courses in Scotland.
When I started working on this story, several key people quickly told me – off the record – that the Canadian A-licence program isn’t taken seriously in big soccer countries, and that it puts too much emphasis on nutrition and fitness, and not enough on tactics and man-management. Not surprisingly, Clark disagrees.
“I think whoever says that hasn’t been involved in our program for at least fifteen years,” he counters. “Coaching is very much tactically based now. There has, obviously, to be an emphasis on fitness as well, because if the player’s not fit, he’s not going to be able to get through a game. But it’s nowhere near what it used to be back in that time.”
A bit of a non-denial denial. The encouraging news is, the entire Canadian A- and B-licence programs are being completely overhauled, and new courses will be rolled out in the next couple of years.
Charlie Cuzzetto, president of the British Columbia Soccer Association, wishes he’d had stronger coaching in his playing days. Now, looking forward, he’s optimistic that the overall quality of Canadian soccer coaching is on the rise.
“In the long term, we want to make sure the players can control the ball and move into spaces – have that good soccer sense, and have confidence on the ball,” Cuzzetto notes.
“We have to adapt our coaching methodologies to do that. All around the world, there are different challenges. But why do other countries produce these kinds of players in a pipeline? We have to be missing something. We’re producing some good players, but what about exceptional players? Ones who are going to make it no matter where they play? We’re not giving our kids an opportunity to progress.”
It’s interesting to note that all these questions are being asked at a time when new answers are at hand. A significant governance overhaul at the CSA is moving control of the game away from bureaucrats, and into the hands of business and soccer professionals. The future remains unknown, but there’s a major commitment to move away from the past.
We still have far too few pro-level coaches, but agreement on how to train them may – at last – be about to bear fruit.
But we’re still dealing with a very strange, kid-heavy soccer pyramid in Canada, and that’s what we’ll examine in Part II.
Onward!