Emotionally invested supporters of Canadian soccer have accepted certain truths, foremost being that the wins won’t come often. We’ve recently slumped to an even lower spot, in accepting that the goals won’t come often either. That’s right. The single most joyous aspect of the sport, something you celebrate in the moment regardless of whether you have more than the other team at the end of the game, the reason most people watch – even those have turned a rare occurrence for those signed up to support Canada. Not much fun, you might say. But that's the thing, it actually often is fun. It's the camaraderie that comes with sharing a passion between a small group across a vast and varied landscape. Perhaps like the followers of a cult band, but ones who hope their guys will someday make it big.
That’s why another accepted truth hurts so much. The one that says every time a bright prospect rolls out of the pipe into the group’s common knowledge there is a danger he or she will spurn the Canada shirt for the one of another, usually better, country. It’s just the way things work. There’s the initial fear, a period of uncertainty, and then either relief when they do pick Canada or a sickening sense of fate when they don't.
Counting myself among those aforementioned Canadian supporters as I do is why I’ve been following along with the saga of Mexican forward Carlos Vela with a mixture of bewilderment and fascination.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
Last month, the 24-year-old finally laid to rest the ongoing drama around will he or won’t he?!?! commit to the Mexican squad for the 2014 World Cup. The answer being that no, he won’t. In a vague public letter he said it wouldn’t be fair to take the spot of another player who had fought with the team during World Cup qualifying while he sat in Europe and brooded, delivering cryptic messages via various media about his international intentions. And through all of it, he’s never really addressed the crucial question surrounding what exactly his problem is in playing for Mexico. Various theories exist, ranging from pure disinterest to longstanding grudges against those who manage Mexican football. For a sense of all this backstory, please check out Martha Guerra's strong account of the whole Vela ordeal in the Telegraph.
Obviously some Mexican fans are quite upset and have thrown the word 'traitor' around less than lightly. Many others are simply confused, left to lament Vela’s absence as a terrible waste, both for the player and for the team. Canada has certainly suffered players who suddenly decided to stop showing up, and good ones too, like Tomascz Radzinski. But the general narrative around Canadian ‘defection’ involves someone turning their back on the team because of some sort of familial tie to another nation that supersedes what it would mean to pull on the Canada shirt. (The counterargument, obviously, is that given how the team is managed, that shirt doesn’t mean much.) So despite suffering a history of kind of the same thing – players saying ‘no’ to the national team – it’s hard for me to feel this as I believe a Mexican supporter would. Hard, but perhaps helpful, because thoughtful sports fans often become far too engrossed in their own woes, convinced that no supporter of any other team anywhere, ever could possibly have absorbed as much frustration and psychological damage as themselves.
This might be a good time to mention TFC supporters, who certainly have reason to feel aggrieved over what they've been subjected to over the past seven seasons. But it's still only seven seasons. Many sports fans wait their entire lives and then die without ever seeing their team win the Big Prize, whatever that may be. They content themselves with smaller victories, those joys that are enough to keep them coming back, because in any case they can’t really leave. But in a matter of months and a few phone calls from Drake, suddenly TFC boasted one of the strongest squads in Major League Soccer, albeit only on paper.
The pain and the pleasure is relative. And that’s what brings us back to those Canadian fans who would murder their own for the guaranteed passage Mexico enjoys to every single World Cup. What we fail to grasp are the implications around that being the expectation. Wouldn't Concacaf dominance make the failure to ever do anything beyond the group stages at the World Cup more soul-sucking for the average national team supporter? Mexico hosts one of the most financially successful domestic leagues anywhere in the world. It's a robust, growing country of 120 million football-mad people with all the accompanying resources and yet it is continually overshadowed on the international stage by smaller countries in South America (not to mention these days, even the U.S.). Such indignities can't sit well on the psyche.
The idea of Carlos Vela as some sort of Messi-like saviour is silly, but so is the idea that your best player suddenly decides he doesn’t want to represent your country anymore – not because of split loyalty or the tantalizing opportunity for a trade-up beckons – but for murky, unarticulated motives.
When lamenting the depressing state of the sports team you support, it begs remembering that the pain doesn't necessarily correspond with how horrible your team is on the pitch, or ice or diamond. The pain only exists at different levels, to be experienced through different, unexpected slants that don't make it any easier to suffer.
The image above is by wonker from London, United Kingdom (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonker/2902441481/) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons